The Islamic Secular and the Scale of Civilisation
Sherman A. Jackson’s latest book, ‘The Islamic Secular’, provides a new analytical tool with which to (re)scale Islamic civilisation.
Since the publication of Dr Sherman A. Jackson’s book, The Islamic Secular, in 2024, both Islamic scholars and everyday Muslims have responded with a mix of ire and confusion. Much of this reaction stems from a semantic struggle regarding the baggage that a term like “secularism” holds for Muslims. That a prominent academic scholar of Islam would propose the existence of something called the Islamic Secular strikes some as an attempt at making opposites attract: an experiment that seems to defy the laws of physics, and with it, God. Much of the discourse around the Islamic Secular has been consumed by this initial shock and terminological resistance; the substance of The Islamic Secular has remained insufficiently examined, let alone its far-reaching implications for the full spectrum of civilisational activity that the Islamic Secular as a concept seeks to articulate and ultimately unleash.
At the heart of Jackson’s intervention is an effort to move beyond semantic and conceptual impasses. In the Islamic Secular, Jackson makes a novel departure from tired debates on the nature and jurisdiction of Islamic law vis-à-vis Western secularism. Challenging long-standing assumptions about the relationship between religious law and worldly endeavours, Jackson redefines and liberates the term "secular" from its Western anti-religious connotations and instead anchors it firmly within the Islamic tradition.
Building on his reframing of the secular, Jackson’s core argument posits the existence of a distinct yet integral space within Islam: the Islamic Secular. This realm, while differentiated from the concrete dictates of sharia derived from revelatory sources (the Qur’an and Sunnah), nevertheless operates consciously under the divine gaze and possesses inherent religious legitimacy. Although the Islamic Secular is not directly sourced from revelation, it is intrinsically Islamic through its devotional intent. In this way, both Islamic law (sharia) and the Islamic Secular coexist under the general rubric of the Islamic religion (din), each fulfilling complementary roles in the life of the Muslim community and its civilisation.
The idea of an Islamic Secular has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting intervention in contemporary Islamic thought, yet it remains underutilised. One reason is that the discussion of The Islamic Secular has largely remained confined to academia. Subsisting in the realm of theory with little engagement in practice, it lacks the necessary feedback loops with the “outside world,” limiting its development as a load-bearing analytical tool capable of opening a new world of possibilities across the full spectrum of civilisational activity.
Unlocking the full potential of The Islamic Secular requires moving the conversation beyond the academy and into the broader arenas of public, political and institutional life. But first, it must be defined.
Defining the Islamic Secular
In a marked departure from the prevailing view of sharia as a totalising force governing every aspect of Islamic life and civilisation, central to Jackson’s thesis is that the sharia imposes a limit on its own jurisdiction. While God’s gaze encompasses all existence, His concrete communiqué through sharia sources (i.e. the Qur’an and Sunnah) does not dictate every facet of human activity. This creates a conceptual and practical "space" between the jurisdiction of the sharia and the vast expanse of Islam as dīn (a more expansive term than its crude English translation, “religion”).
Jackson terms this space the "Islamic Secular" – the realm of activity whose concrete substance is neither derived from nor adjudicated by sharia’s revelatory sources, yet remains consciously pursued under the divine gaze. To illustrate his point, Jackson highlights figures like the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan’s architectural masterpieces, which, while often devoted to God in the form of grand mosques, required engineering knowledge, not fiqh rulings. Another notable figure, the Timurid Sultan Ulugh Beg, established an astronomical observatory in Samarkand, where he pursued knowledge of mathematics and astronomy.
To ground this distinction within the Islamic tradition, Jackson draws on classical medieval jurists such as Fakhr Al-Din Razi and Shihab Al-Din Al-Qarafi. The latter explicitly acknowledged this distinction, noting that while an act might be permissible under law, its practical benefit or harm required knowledge "beyond the hukm shar’i”. This space of moral, social, and civilisational reasoning, while not legislated, is nonetheless religiously meaningful and, crucially, legitimate.
Jackson introduces two crucial distinctions between Islamic conceptions of the secular and their Western equivalents.
First, Western secularism seeks the liberation of the state, economy, scientific knowledge, and other facets of public and civilisational life from religion entirely – as Grotius characterised it, etsi Deus non daretur ("to proceed as if God did not exist"). The Islamic Secular assumes precisely the opposite stance. It differentiates between shar’i and non-shar’i realms, but both remain under the sovereignty of God and within the overarching framework of religion. In Jackson’s framing, this is etsi Deus daretur (“to proceed as if God exists”).
Second, the telos of Western secularism versus the Islamic Secular diverges significantly. Western secularism tends towards the progressive privatisation of religion. By contrast, the Islamic Secular emerges organically from the sharia’s internal boundaries, and exists in service of religion, not in opposition to it. It enables flourishing civilisation not by emancipating itself from divine sovereignty, but by channelling that devotional service and authority into forms of activity beyond the worship explicitly commanded by scripture.
Jackson’s reconceptualisation requires both linguistic and intellectual work. Jackson acknowledges that existing Arabic terms like ‘ilmani (secularist) or dunyawi (worldly) are burdened by the baggage of Western secularism’s hostility towards religion and the damage that proponents of secularism have wrought on Muslim societies. As alternatives, he proposes neologisms like islām mā warā’ al-ḥukm al-sharʿī (Islam that lies beyond the juristic ruling), or al-islām khārij al-ḥukm al-sharʿī (Islam external to the juristic ruling). However, Jackson recognises that even these articulations face limitations. Pre-colonial Islamic civilisation lacked a sharp religious/secular dichotomy precisely because of its activities. Activities such as pottery, governance or economic policy were all inherently undertaken under God’s gaze. The colonial encounter violently imposed the Western binary, rendering the Islamic Secular invisible. Reclaiming it today requires naming it, however uncomfortable that may initially feel.
Jackson argues that renaming what was formerly self-evident and taken for granted is a necessary diagnostic tool for addressing civilisational malaise. The term Islamic Secular must be a pragmatic tool, a load-bearing concept to establish a beachhead towards civilisation-building endeavours. To underscore its civilisational importance, Jackson draws on Peter Berger’s sociological concept of “plausibility structure,” the socio-cultural, institutional, and intellectual framework that sustains the credibility, authority, and perceived reality of a religious worldview within a society. Jackson contends that sharia alone cannot sustain Islam’s plausibility structure in the modern world. The Islamic Secular is equally essential. When Muslim professionals excel in their fields with devotional intent, building effective institutions and prosperous, just societies, they demonstrate Islam’s efficacy and relevance. This tangible success reinforces faith’s credibility far more powerfully than abstract legal rulings alone.
By naming and theorising the lost non-shar’i dimension of religion, Jackson provides the conceptual apparatus to challenge sharia maximalism. More importantly, he restores religious legitimacy to the vast range of endeavours that constitute a thriving civilisation. To recognise architecture, medicine, statecraft, or economic policy as authentically Islamic (Secular) is to lay the groundwork for a revitalised plausibility structure for Islam in the 21st century. The adoption of this potentially uncomfortable term is therefore the necessary first step in a long process of reintegrating the severed halves of Islam. In so doing, the hope is that, in time, the term may itself dissolve, its function fulfilled in the seamless integration of sacred and secular within the fabric of a complex and revitalised civilisation.
Sharia Maximalism and a World Lost
The Islamic Secular diagnoses a modern pathology within Muslim intellectual and practical life: the conflation of Islam as a religion with sharia, or what Jackson pithily terms “sharia maximalism” — a reductionist view that equates Islamic legitimacy solely with jurisprudential derivation. In this domain, vast swathes of human activity, including cultural creation, technological innovation, economic development, scientific inquiry, and everyday worldly decision-making, are rendered religiously suspect or irrelevant. Jackson illustrates this mindset with the anecdote of a Philadelphia Imam commenting on the indifferent hostility of local Muslim communities to a significant economic development project by fellow Muslims with the phrase, "Ain’t no dīn (religion) in it."
This attitude is symptomatic of a deeper civilisational malaise caused by the atrophying of the Islamic Secular. In the pre-modern Islamic world, a complex civilisation thrived on institutional complexity supported by both the sharia and Islamic Secular. Institutions such as the Nizamiya madrasa system, hospitals, observatories, printing houses, and courts not only taught and nurtured religious sciences but also patronised polymaths, artists, and scientists. Today, by contrast, Islamic intellectual life often appears lamentably "flat”, narrowly focused on worship and scripture. At the same time, broader knowledge production is viewed as secular and thus perceived as either religiously neutral or even problematic. A debilitating gap compounds this flattening. On one side are Muslim professionals, engineers, economists, and technocrats, who feel their work lacks religious legitimacy. On the other hand are jurists and religious scholars who lack the tools or experience to engage meaningfully with the complexity of modern professions and public life. The result is a double loss: the Islamic Secular is either abandoned to the hegemony of Western secular frameworks, which often actively militate against religious consciousness, or stigmatised within Muslim communities as religiously insignificant.
Jackson warns that this double loss has created a vacuum that has actively accelerated secularisation in the Western sense. With Islam increasingly confined to ritual and personal piety, everyday life, institutional and civilisational endeavours are drained of spiritual meaning. Consequently, the ecosystem of knowledge production necessary for civilisational complexity has withered, leaving jurisprudence isolated and struggling to address the totality of modern Muslim existence.
A consequential example of the primacy of sharia maximalism is the work of Dr. Wael Hallaq. In The Impossible State, Hallaq claims that modernity and the modern state are inherently secular and secularising, and therefore, ultimately irreconcilable with Islam if Islam is equated entirely with sharia. For Hallaq, that there could be any overlap or extra-shar’i appeals to sovereignty and legitimacy dethrones the sharia as the ‘central domain’ of Islam as a faith and worldview, and therefore means the victory of secularism.
Yet, because of the constant occurrence of novel situations to which Muslim rulers must devise responses to, statecraft, by necessity, requires a host of extra-shar’i methodologies and rulings. Over the past few centuries, the nature of these challenges and the tools available to address them have undergone significant changes. Revolutions in transport and communication, coupled with advancements in logistics and modern weaponry, have enabled states to govern at unprecedented scales and with an intensity of administrative reach and coercive power previously unseen in human history. Hallaq’s conceptualisation of sharia, modernity, and the state leaves no room for engaging with contemporary statecraft on ethical terms. In his view, any political projection of the modern age is rendered invalid unless it fully returns to a pre-modern model of ethics and statecraft as codified in the sharia. Yet, as Jackson argues, Hallaq does not contend with the concept of an Islamic Secular realm in which new, extra-shar’i conceptualisations of statecraft may arise through the everyday cut and thrust of policymaking, economic development, security interests, and bureaucratic machinery. These are not optional arenas, but necessary ones that Muslims must engage in to govern the believers.
Here, both Hallaq and Jackson demonstrate the same apathy towards “early modernity”, or the centuries that proceed after 1500 AD to the early 20th century, when Islamic civilisation reached the apex of its civilisational extent and complexity, and when it faced its most serious challenge from Europe’s combination of industrial might and conceptions of secularism. While both authors, arguing in opposing directions, rely on the works of jurists and intellectuals from the medieval period (usually before the 15th century) to justify their positions, their omission of the early modern period fails to present a truly holistic understanding of Islam, sharia, and the Islamic Secular.
The shared omission leaves both Hallaq and Jackson’s narratives unable to fully account for the historical of the Islamic Secular and its consequences for Islamic civilisation. What was lost was not an abstract affair, but an entire civilisational infrastructure. While Islam as a religion has persisted, mainly in the form of the sharia, its counterpart, the realm of the Islamic Secular, was nearly annihilated through the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Balkans to the Bengal, colonial and post-colonial interventions systematically dismantled the political institutions, elite networks of patronage, and knowledge ecosystems that sustained Islamic civilisational complexity.
In India, the East India Company's conquest of Bengal severed centuries-old systems of Islamic governance, replacing indigenous administrative structures with extractive colonial bureaucracy. The 1857 abolition of the Mughal sultanate not only eradicated a political office but also the institutional anchor for Islamic scholarly networks, artistic production, and ethical statecraft across the subcontinent. Its last expression, in the form of a joint Hyderabadi-Ottoman plot to save the caliphate, ended in 1947 with the retreat of the British Empire and Partition. Similarly, in the Balkans – exemplified by Albania’s experience under communist rule – saw the erosion of waqf endowments, suppression of Sufi orders, and displacement of Muslim elites, dismantling the social and cultural machinery that had organically integrated shar’i and non-shar’i knowledge, i.e. their local permutation of the Islamic Secular.
The consequences were catastrophic. Islamic civilisation was flattened as political courts, scholarly assemblies, hospitals, and observatories were destroyed or subsumed into colonial frameworks. The rich tapestry of Islamic knowledge production, where jurists, physicians, astronomers, and administrators collaborated, unravelled. What remained, often by default or as a reactive defence mechanism, was a reduced Islam equated almost exclusively with sharia. Islam as a faith survived, bloodied by unbroken, but it did so in a landscape stripped of institutional complexity, resulting in a prolonged and disorienting stasis.
The alternative is that if civilisations require knowledge processing at scale, then the loss of the Islamic Secular rendered any meaningful civilisational renewal impossible. Malik Bennabi’s lament was rooted in this deeper structural problem: the disappearance of institutional complexity required for sustained knowledge production. Muslims became increasingly unmoored from their own indigenous intellectual and knowledge production traditions, particularly in the realm of the Islamic Secular. At the same time, the institutions of sharia persisted in a diminished state.
Much ink has been spilled on the supposed limiting role of sharia and its scholarly class in contributing to the defeat of Islamic civilisation, and the stagnation that proceeded thereafter. Yet it was not the sharia that was responsible for the arts and sciences that govern life and civilisation; the Islamic Secular, in which statesmen and generals and merchants operated, could not muster the political or economic response to contend with Europe. It is the Islamic Secular, not the sharia, which disappeared as a vital realm of Islam as religion. And it is in the Islamic Secular where the knowledge necessary to protect and nurture civilisation will be found again.
This historical rupture also presents us with an ultimatum: What failed to survive the 19th century will not suffice for the 21st. The mere preservation of isolated jurisdictional rulings within a (Western) secular global order is a guarantee of continued civilisational irrelevance. Nor can we merely restore the customs, laws, or institutions of the past. The imperative, therefore, is not restoration, but reimagining. We must think bigger: how do we initiate the rebuilding of civilisational complexity? How can we begin to reconstruct the institutional, intellectual, and spiritual complexity that once sustained Islamic civilisation?
Complexity at the Scale of Civilisation
By one metric, the sophistication of a civilisation is measured in its complexity, which is scaled through knowledge. Institutions that produce, verify, and disseminate knowledge are the foundations of a complex civilisation. The level of coordination within and between knowledge-producing institutions determines how advanced a civilisation becomes.
In this regard, Jackson’s formulation of the Islamic Secular serves as the essential, load-bearing tool for any serious project of civilisational renewal. Rebuilding complexity at scale requires constructing vibrant ecosystems capable of producing, verifying, and disseminating diverse forms of knowledge. The Islamic Secular provides the theological and conceptual foundation for this reconstruction by fundamentally legitimising the role of Muslim professionals and intellectuals as active creators of Islamic knowledge.
Doctors developing ethical treatment protocols, economists designing equitable but sustainable and resilient models, architects and urban planners designing communities responsive to people’s practical needs, people creating timeless but emotionally resonant art, and policymakers crafting just and effective governance – all these endeavours, when pursued competently and consciously "as if God exists," constitute the very substance of the Islamic Secular. This knowledge is Islamic not because it derives from jurisprudential hermeneutics, but because it is undertaken by God-conscious agents striving for excellence (ihsan) and benefit (maslaha) within their respective fields, weaving moral understanding into the fabric of their practice.
Crucially, for these individual efforts to scale into a complex civilisation, they must be institutionally codified. Professional associations, research centres, and ethical review boards must develop standards, customs, and governing principles that embed God-conscious competence into the structures of knowledge itself. Only through this institutionalisation can acts of virtue become shared, verified, and transmitted, reducing cognitive burden, enabling replication, and allowing for cumulative advancement.
However, a thriving civilisational ecosystem demands dialogue between the spheres of the Islamic Secular and the sharia. This is no easy task. The two domains operate with distinct vocabularies, methodologies, and epistemologies. Direct engagement between jurists and professionals is often impractical or ineffective. What is needed are specialised intermediary institutions, conceptual “translation houses.”
These institutions would comprise scholars possessing sharia literacy, alongside a substantial understanding of specific secular fields (e.g., medicine, finance, and technology), as well as professionals equipped with core religious literacy. Their critical function would be bidirectional translation: First, to interpret and convey the concrete challenges, innovations and ethical dilemmas emerging from within the Islamic Secular, whether in medicine, finance, technology or governance, in conceptual terms that jurists can meaningfully engage with, both theologically and legally; and second, to render the normative insights, constraints and ethical sensibilities derived from sharia into actionable guidance and ethical parameters understandable and applicable within secular professions.
This translation is not a one-way imposition but forms the foundation of a mutual, evolving discourse, ensuring that sharia principles inform and guide the Islamic Secular without dominating its concrete substance. At the same time, the dynamic realities and advancements within the Islamic Secular continuously inform the context and development of sharia discourse, challenging it to grow in relevance, scope and sophistication.
The building of such a system requires God-conscious agency on the part of those operating in the realm of the Islamic Secular. Muslim professionals and practitioners across all walks of life must have the courage and conviction to wade into the “grey areas” where there are no established norms, and out of that wilderness cultivate order through the weaving of Islam’s moral laws into new systems, norms, laws, and customs. But this effort cannot exist without the support of their counterparts operating in the realm of the sharia, who impose boundaries on themselves to ensure that the Islamic Secular can flourish and provide the benefits of civilisation to all. Over time, the naming and ordering of things, systemised through institutions, will contribute to a burgeoning, (re)complexified ecosystem of knowledge that lies at the heart of a new civilisational force.
Applying the Islamic Secular
Dr. Sherman A. Jackson’s The Islamic Secular is, in short, a call for civilisational renewal. By redefining a vital dimension of the Islamic tradition that has lain dormant for at least a century, Jackson discards the stifling narrative of "sharia maximalism" and restores the religious legitimacy of the ever-expanding non-shar’i realm of human endeavour. In doing so, he opens an entirely new field of engagement, one in which Muslim intellectuals and professionals may reclaim their rightful place as creators of Islamic knowledge within their diverse fields. The path forward demands courageous agency: professionals must confidently build the Islamic Secular through God-conscious, competent practice; institutions must emerge to codify this knowledge and establish ethical norms; and crucially, intermediary bodies must be forged to translate between jurisprudential theory and worldly practice.
Sharia remains indispensable for defining the boundaries of what is forbidden (haram) and permissible (halal), as well as for governing core acts of worship (ibadat). Beyond that, the Islamic Secular and sharia must function as equal partners within the greater whole of Islam as a truly universal religion. Only then can we begin the long and necessary journey toward igniting a "Cambrian explosion" of creativity: building institutions, fostering feedback loops, and (re)scaling Islamic civilisation through an ever more complex ecosystem of knowledge-producing institutions.
Jackson has provided a powerful conceptual foundation. The task now is to build upon it, to weave our deepest moral and spiritual commitments into the very fabric of our worldly existence, profession by profession, institution by institution, intention by intention. This mission is a ‘world-building enterprise’ to reconstruct the plausibility structure of Islamic civilisation in the 21st century.
Yet our efforts must transcend our moment. Although grounded in our contemporary context, our work should not be bound by it; our plans should be measured in generations. The work of the 21st century should lay the foundations for even greater possibilities that our children, and theirs, may enjoy in the 22nd century and beyond. This is what it means to operate at the scale of civilisation.
Our task then, as T.S. Eliot describes, is a raid on the inarticulate, to conquer what has already been discovered and recover what has been lost and found again, even if our conditions may be unpropitious. And we do so by proceeding under God’s gaze.
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine focused on history, culture, and civilisation, and Vizier, a journal for political economy in the MENA region. You can follow him on Twitter/X at @pashadelics.
All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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Further Reading
Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought by Yücesoy is also good supplementary reading where the author argues that there was a secular political environment in the 8th Century.