Calls for the embrace (or for that matter rejection) of secularism are premised on a putative opposition between secular and…
Islam
A man with a mission
Abdullahi An-Na'im is a man with a mission. As the expatriate Sudanese law professor told The New Yorker writer George…
Varieties of anti-religious imagination
The publication of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has fostered an exceptionally vibrant intellectual debate on secularism and on the…
Islam and authority
In his new book, Abdullahi an-Na`im argues that Muslims need a secular state to live their religious lives. Alongside his…
Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics
Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im's…
Anti-secularist failures
I guess it's to be expected that in today's fashionable anti-secularist perspective an act of secular criticism that calls for…
The headscarf controversy
The analysis of the headscarf controversy cannot simply be based on arguments of liberal politics. Rather, it has to be…
What we talk about when we talk about shari‘a
A few clarifying points are in order regarding an essay of mine in The New York Times Magazine that drew…
Why Shariah?
Noah Feldman prefaces his plea for the Shariah in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine ("Why Shariah?")…
A headscarf affair, a women’s affair?
Women who are proponents of the headscarf distance themselves from secular models of feminist emancipation, but also seek autonomy from…