Some Notes on the Secularization in/of the Islamic World(<Special Issue>Islam and Religious Studies)

Abstract

The concept of "secularization" has been critically reconsidered, both empirically and theoretically, in the field of sociology of religion since the 1970s. One of the most crucial events to cast doubt on it was the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. However, few of the scholars who reexamine the secularization theory consider seriously the cases of Islam. In this paper, I attempt to rethink the concept on the basis of materials collected from the Sunni Muslim world, mainly modern Egypt. The first part of this paper is devoted to an empirical analysis of the secularization of the Islamic world. I resolve several aspects of secularization derived mainly from historical experiences of Western Christianity, such as a separation of Church and State, a privatization of religion, a dominance of science over theology, and a triumph of the materialism of this world over the eternity of the hereafter. Then I examine whether these aspects of secularization could be found in the Islamic world. I conclude that we could observe not only some of the secularization process there, but also examples of Islamic resurgence against secularization, such as the reveiling among urban educated women. In the second part, secularization theories advocated by two scholars with Arab and Islamic backgrounds are considered. Elmessiri's idea of "comprehensive secularization" is useful for examining the modern secularization phenomena observed in Christian and Islamic worlds. Asad's paper on a transmutation of Shari'a in modern Egypt and a reconfiguration in the discursive world of religion, law, and ethics is one of the significant starting points to empirically analyze the secularization process in the Islamic world.