Seeking an Islamic Reflective Equilibrium: A Response to Abdullahi A. An-Nac'im’s Complementary, Not Competing, Claims of Law and Religion: An Islamic Perspective

Abstract

Professor An-Nac'im’s paper illustrates the difficulty of theorizing the relationship of law and religion, particularly from the perspective of a revealed religion that has its own legal system like Islam. When faced with this challenge, the temptation is to adopt a strategy of either exclusion, in favor of the “secular,” or assimilation, in favor of the “religious.” Notwithstanding his suggestions that Islamic legal values may have some kind of legitimacy in the secular legal system as he conceives it, it appears that Professor An-Nac im has come down fairly strongly on the exclusionary side of this dilemma, both as evidenced in this paper and in his most recent work, Islam and the Secular State. 

I, too, agree with him that the relationship of law and revealed religion is difficult, if not impossible, to theorize, and so I do not want to be understood as claiming that I have stumbled across the “answer” that has eluded so many prior generations of scholars—Christian, Jewish and Muslim—who have all wrestled with the problem of revealed religion and political authority. What I wish to accomplish in this response is a much more modest goal, one intended to illustrate the internal points of tension in Professor An-Nac'im’s analysis in the hope that by drawing greater attention to these internal tensions, we might be able to think more productively about the relationship between revealed religion and secular law. In particular, I want to challenge the binary structure by which Professor An-Nac'im thinks about the problem of religion and the law, as though we could neatly divide rules or norms into two hermetically sealed categories of religious on the one hand and secular on the other. In challenging this division, I would like to suggest another approach, one that I think is in fact more consistent with Islamic theological, moral, and legal principles, and principles of political liberalism as articulated by John Rawls in his work which bears that name.