Andrew F March
Biographic Data
| ID | 308730 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew F March |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew F |
| FAMILY NAME | March |
| SIGNATURE | MARCH A F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2632-1094 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 189 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Islamic Secular, written by Sherman A. Jackson
What Kind of State for Syria
Following the collapse of the 53-year-old Assad regime in December 2024 and the rise of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) under Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria faces the challenge of constructing a new state rooted in Islamic legitimacy. What kind of state will Syria become under its new regime? This essay explores the ideological and constitutional possibilities emerging from Syria’s transitional 2025 Constitutional Declaration. Drawing on modern Islamic consti…
How Esoteric Was Classical Islamic Political Philosophy
Rasoul Namazi's Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought is a wonderful tour through, well, Leo Strauss's reading of medieval Islamic political philosophy (as well as, or including, the Arabian Nights ) and much of the secondary literature surrounding both the reception of Strauss's ideas and methods and the obstruction of such a reception on the part of mainstream historical and philological scholarship. One of the many great virtues and contri…
After Sovereignty: From a Hegemonic to Agonistic Islamic Political Thought
The phenomenon of “Muslim Democracy” has been analyzed by scholars for a number of years, at least since the mid-1990s. The standard view about Muslim Democracy is that (perhaps like its European counterpart Christian Democracy) it represents a nonideological, or postideological, pragmatic approach to electoral politics. The purpose of this article is to advance two primary arguments. The first is that the turn to Muslim Democracy as an ideology …
Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology: A Critical Re-evaluation
The Invention of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islam: From Political Jurisprudence to Political Theology
Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Ḥanafī Jurisprudence
Samy Ayoub’s Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Ḥanafī Jurisprudence tackles a very salient problem in Islamic legal studies. Briefly, the problem is how to understand the relationship between state power (before modernity, embodied in the office of the “sultan”) and Islamic law. To this point, the field has navigated between two ideal-typical positions. One holds that the “state” did not really exist until sometime …
What Is Political Islam? By Jocelyne Cesari
Jocelyne Cesari’s What Is Political Islam? builds on her years of previous work, especially her 2014 book, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy. The answer to her eponymous question is complex and subtle, but focuses mostly on the centrality of the political context of the modern nation-state rather than contrasting theological or ideological commitments. For Cesari, political Islam is ‘multifaceted religious nationalism’ (p. 2). It refers to the va…
Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft. Edited by Mehrzad Boroujerdi
Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft. Edited by Mehrzad Boroujerdi. Modern Intellectual and Political Theory of the Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 465. $49.95
Islamic Constitutionalism Before Sovereignty: Two Defenses of the Tunisian Constitution of 1861
This article focuses on the Tunisian constitutional moment of 1857-1861. Its goal is to explore an important moment in Islamic modernity for the purposes of drawing a contrast with twentieth-century, post-caliphal Islamist thought. The primary themes visible in nineteenth-century Islamic constitutional thought are a “descending” conception of sovereign constituent power with a strong emphasis on the pre-political existence of a divine law that is…
Islamic Constitutionalism Before Sovereignty: Two Defenses of the Tunisian Constitution of 1861
The 19th-century witnessed the first efforts to draw up constitutions in traditional Muslim monarchies. Far from emerging out of popular pressure, never mind revolution, these documents were largely motivated by the desire of rulers and their chief advisors to rationalize state legal and bureaucratic authority, in order to both strengthen central state control internally and also deal with increasing European pressure, particularly in fiscal and …
The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought
Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought
Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought
The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of "political Islam." Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the…
Is there a Paradox of Learning from the Other? Four Questions and a Proposal
Naturalizing Sharīʿa: Foundationalist Ambiguities in Modern Islamic Apologetics
This essay discusses an important feature of much modern Islamic writing on law, politics and morality. The feature in question is the claim that Islamic law and human nature ( fiṭra ) are in perfect harmony, that Islam is the “natural religion” ( dīn al-fiṭra ), and thus that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. My discussion proceeds through a close reading of the Moroccan independence leader and…
On the Will to Be Disciplined: Response to Jenco
What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity
Review of Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2012
What is important in theorizing tolerance today
Political Islam: Theory
This essay focuses on questions that pertain to the ideological, normative, symbolic, and epochal aspects of political Islam. Political theorists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have disagreed on whether political Islam is an exclusively modern political phenomenon or is indebted to long-standing Islamic religious commitments. More specifically, they have also disagreed on whether the shape and ambitions of political Islam are enti…
Striving in the Path of God: Jih D and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought by Asma Afsaruddin
The bulk of scholarship in recent years on jihād in Islam has focused on the legal aspects of warfare and fighting in Islam, the history of war in Islam since the early Islamic conquests, or on the politics of modern Islamic militant movements. Asma Afsaruddin’s remarkable book, Striving in the Path of God: Jihād and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought, constitutes a major contribution insofar as it directs our focus to lesser known sources. Instead of …
Ambivalent Universalism? Jus ad Bellum in Modern Islamic Legal Discourse
In this paper, we discuss the trajectory of modern Islamic legal discourse on jus ad bellum questions, challenging the ideas that the choice is between either a defensive or an aggressive jihad doctrine, and that declaring and waging war is regarded in Islamic law as properly a matter to be monopolized by legitimate state authorities. The dominant modern doctrine of just war in Islamic legal thought is not quite as simple as a bare doctrine of mu…
Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology
The events that hastily came to be called “The Arab Spring” have done much to reopen the question of what it means for a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to force Islamist parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and authority in the public sphere. This paper provides a historical and conceptual background to certain modern attempts to harmonize ideals of divine and popular sovereignty. I pay special attention to the pre-201…
Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification
This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called "religious reasons" ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political comm…
Speech and the Sacred: Does the Defense of Free Speech Rest on a Mistake about Religion
Some scholars have argued that religiously injurious speech poses a serious problem for secular liberal thought. It has been suggested that secular liberal thought and political practice often misrecognize the nature of the injury involved in speech that violates the sacred and that much secular thought about religious injury (and free exercise more generally) is premised on unacknowledged Protestant conceptions of what real religion is. In this …
What Is Comparative Political Theory
This paper examines what is involved in using comparative methods within political theory and whether there should be a comparative political theory subfield. It argues that political theory consists of multiple kinds of activities that are either primarily “scholarly” or “engaged.” It is easy to imagine how scholarly forms of political theory can be, and have been, comparative. The paper critiques (not rejects) existing calls for the creation of…
State ideology and the legitimation of authoritarianism: The case of post-Soviet Uzbekistan 1
This article analyses the rhetorical legitimation strategy of post-Soviet Uzbekistan under Islam Karimov as an authoritarian state. I show that the most important mode of legitimation in this case is neither the consequentialist appeal to stability, order or welfare, nor a direct appeal to guardianship, i.e., special knowledge. Rather, Karimov and his court intellectuals seek to advance a conception of 'ideology' as the comprehensive pre-politica…
Political Islam: Theory
This essay focuses on questions that pertain to the ideological, normative, symbolic, and epochal aspects of political Islam. Political theorists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have disagreed on whether political Islam is an exclusively modern political phenomenon or is indebted to long-standing Islamic religious commitments. More specifically, they have also disagreed on whether the shape and ambitions of political Islam are enti…
From Leninism to Karimovism: Hegemony, Ideology, and Authoritarian Legitimation
I examine the way in which President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has attempted to legitimate authoritarian rule since the transition from communism. A comparison is made between late-Soviet modes of authoritarian legitimation and those of the Karimov regime, and the success of the project at the conceptual level is examined. The article closes with a consideration of the implications of this study for evaluating Juan J. Linz's classical thesis on…
Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification
This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called "religious reasons" ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political comm…
The Use and Abuse of History: ‘National Ideology’ as Transcendental Object in Islam Karimov's ‘Ideology of National Independence’
(2002). The Use and Abuse of History: ‘National Ideology’ as Transcendental Object in Islam Karimov's ‘Ideology of National Independence’. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 371-384
Speech and the Sacred: Does the Defense of Free Speech Rest on a Mistake about Religion
Some scholars have argued that religiously injurious speech poses a serious problem for secular liberal thought. It has been suggested that secular liberal thought and political practice often misrecognize the nature of the injury involved in speech that violates the sacred and that much secular thought about religious injury (and free exercise more generally) is premised on unacknowledged Protestant conceptions of what real religion is. In this …
Islamic Foundations for a Social Contract in non-Muslim Liberal Democracies
In this article I take up John Rawls's invitation to investigate the capacity of a given comprehensive ethical doctrine to endorse on principled grounds the liberal terms of social cooperation. In the case of Islamic political ethics, however, far more is at stake in affirming citizenship in a (non-Muslim) liberal democracy than state neutrality and individual autonomy. Islamic legal and political traditions have traditionally held that submissio…
Liberal Citizenship and the Search for an Overlapping Consensus: The Case of Muslim Minorities
Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims
This paper critiques some contemporary accounts of which forms of Muslim religiosity are at stake in conflicts over blasphemy, and asks whether the problem of offensive and injurious speech contributes to a critique of secularism
Taking People As They Are: Islam As a "Realistic Utopia" in the Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb
This article presents an interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's political theory based on a prominent feature of his thought: the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fitra) are in perfect harmony, and that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. I argue that Qutb is not only defending Islamic law as true and obligatory, but also as a coherent "realistic utopia"-a normative theory that also contains a ps…
Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims in the "Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities" (Fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) Discourse
This article surveys four approaches towards moral obligation to non-Muslims found in Islamic legal thought. I refer to the first three approaches as the "revelatory-deontological," the "contractualist-constructivist" and the "consequentialist-utilitarian." The main argument is that present in many contemporary works on the "jurisprudence of Muslim minorities" (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) is an attempt to provide an Islamic foundation for a relatively th…
What is important in theorizing tolerance today
After Sovereignty: From a Hegemonic to Agonistic Islamic Political Thought
The phenomenon of “Muslim Democracy” has been analyzed by scholars for a number of years, at least since the mid-1990s. The standard view about Muslim Democracy is that (perhaps like its European counterpart Christian Democracy) it represents a nonideological, or postideological, pragmatic approach to electoral politics. The purpose of this article is to advance two primary arguments. The first is that the turn to Muslim Democracy as an ideology …
Ambivalent Universalism? Jus ad Bellum in Modern Islamic Legal Discourse
In this paper, we discuss the trajectory of modern Islamic legal discourse on jus ad bellum questions, challenging the ideas that the choice is between either a defensive or an aggressive jihad doctrine, and that declaring and waging war is regarded in Islamic law as properly a matter to be monopolized by legitimate state authorities. The dominant modern doctrine of just war in Islamic legal thought is not quite as simple as a bare doctrine of mu…
Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology
The events that hastily came to be called “The Arab Spring” have done much to reopen the question of what it means for a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to force Islamist parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and authority in the public sphere. This paper provides a historical and conceptual background to certain modern attempts to harmonize ideals of divine and popular sovereignty. I pay special attention to the pre-201…
Theocrats Living under Secular Law: An External Engagement with Islamic Legal Theory
THE idea of a divinely-revealed Law1 has long been central to Muslim identity. As Islam developed and flourished for the vast majority of its history as the public religion of state power, doctrines of public law and political obligation, no less than matters of worship and ritual, have always been objects of intense practical concern. On this conception of religious morality, a political order is legitimate to the extent that it approximates an …
Reading Tariq Ramadan: Political Liberalism, Islam, and “Overlapping Consensus”
In this paper I discuss the controversy over the career and thought of Tariq Ramadan. I offer an account of what Western liberals ought to hope for from the thought of such a figure and then show, pace Ramadan's critiques, that his views on European citizenship and social cooperation are largely reasonable from the standpoint of political liberalism. I also situate Ramadan's views in the context of Islamic law and contemporary Islamist thought on…
What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity
Review of Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2012
Islamic Constitutionalism Before Sovereignty: Two Defenses of the Tunisian Constitution of 1861
The 19th-century witnessed the first efforts to draw up constitutions in traditional Muslim monarchies. Far from emerging out of popular pressure, never mind revolution, these documents were largely motivated by the desire of rulers and their chief advisors to rationalize state legal and bureaucratic authority, in order to both strengthen central state control internally and also deal with increasing European pressure, particularly in fiscal and …
Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan
Tariq Ramadan’s recent book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, boldly proclaims the need for Muslims to completely rethink the very meaning of Islamic law, traditionally the preeminent Islamic normative discourse and a primary distinguishing feature of Islam from other religions, replacing it with a more ecumenical applied ethics. He begins the book by rejecting the moderate reformist methods adopted in his previous books as insuffic…
The Post-Legal Ethics of Tariq Ramadan: Persuasion and Performance in Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation
Who is the real Tariq Ramadan? Whenever a question like this is posed of anyone, it is very hard to remain on the safe side of inanity. Does any minimally interesting person have a single core identity or single perfectly transparent and consistent motivational set—in short a single “self ”? Nonetheless, this has been a very popular parlor game for some Western intellectuals, with a set of alarmists claiming that a close, or even “esoteric,” read…
The demands of citizenship: Translating political liberalism into the language of Islam
Political liberalism is presently the dominant philosophical theory of liberalism. Its main features are the beliefs that the state should remain neutral between the various conceptions of the good existing in society, which requires that the state not intentionally seeks to advantage any particular ethical or religious doctrine, but rather protect individual citizens' rights to freedom and equality in their choosing of their conceptions of the g…
The Use and Abuse of History: ‘National Ideology’ as Transcendental Object in Islam Karimov's ‘Ideology of National Independence’
(2002). The Use and Abuse of History: ‘National Ideology’ as Transcendental Object in Islam Karimov's ‘Ideology of National Independence’. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 371-384
Citizen Genghis? On explaining Mongolian democracy through 'political culture
(2003). Citizen Genghis? On explaining Mongolian democracy through 'political culture' Central Asian Survey: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 61-66
From Leninism to Karimovism: Hegemony, Ideology, and Authoritarian Legitimation
I examine the way in which President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has attempted to legitimate authoritarian rule since the transition from communism. A comparison is made between late-Soviet modes of authoritarian legitimation and those of the Karimov regime, and the success of the project at the conceptual level is examined. The article closes with a consideration of the implications of this study for evaluating Juan J. Linz's classical thesis on…
State ideology and the legitimation of authoritarianism: The case of post-Soviet Uzbekistan 1
This article analyses the rhetorical legitimation strategy of post-Soviet Uzbekistan under Islam Karimov as an authoritarian state. I show that the most important mode of legitimation in this case is neither the consequentialist appeal to stability, order or welfare, nor a direct appeal to guardianship, i.e., special knowledge. Rather, Karimov and his court intellectuals seek to advance a conception of 'ideology' as the comprehensive pre-politica…
The demands of citizenship: Translating political liberalism into the language of Islam
Political liberalism is presently the dominant philosophical theory of liberalism. Its main features are the beliefs that the state should remain neutral between the various conceptions of the good existing in society, which requires that the state not intentionally seeks to advantage any particular ethical or religious doctrine, but rather protect individual citizens' rights to freedom and equality in their choosing of their conceptions of the g…
Liberal Citizenship and the Search for an Overlapping Consensus: The Case of Muslim Minorities
Reading Tariq Ramadan: Political Liberalism, Islam, and “Overlapping Consensus”
In this paper I discuss the controversy over the career and thought of Tariq Ramadan. I offer an account of what Western liberals ought to hope for from the thought of such a figure and then show, pace Ramadan's critiques, that his views on European citizenship and social cooperation are largely reasonable from the standpoint of political liberalism. I also situate Ramadan's views in the context of Islamic law and contemporary Islamist thought on…
Islamic Foundations for a Social Contract in non-Muslim Liberal Democracies
In this article I take up John Rawls's invitation to investigate the capacity of a given comprehensive ethical doctrine to endorse on principled grounds the liberal terms of social cooperation. In the case of Islamic political ethics, however, far more is at stake in affirming citizenship in a (non-Muslim) liberal democracy than state neutrality and individual autonomy. Islamic legal and political traditions have traditionally held that submissio…
Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims in the "Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities" (Fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) Discourse
This article surveys four approaches towards moral obligation to non-Muslims found in Islamic legal thought. I refer to the first three approaches as the "revelatory-deontological," the "contractualist-constructivist" and the "consequentialist-utilitarian." The main argument is that present in many contemporary works on the "jurisprudence of Muslim minorities" (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) is an attempt to provide an Islamic foundation for a relatively th…
Islam and liberal citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
What Is Comparative Political Theory
This paper examines what is involved in using comparative methods within political theory and whether there should be a comparative political theory subfield. It argues that political theory consists of multiple kinds of activities that are either primarily “scholarly” or “engaged.” It is easy to imagine how scholarly forms of political theory can be, and have been, comparative. The paper critiques (not rejects) existing calls for the creation of…
Theocrats Living under Secular Law: An External Engagement with Islamic Legal Theory
THE idea of a divinely-revealed Law1 has long been central to Muslim identity. As Islam developed and flourished for the vast majority of its history as the public religion of state power, doctrines of public law and political obligation, no less than matters of worship and ritual, have always been objects of intense practical concern. On this conception of religious morality, a political order is legitimate to the extent that it approximates an …
The Post-Legal Ethics of Tariq Ramadan: Persuasion and Performance in Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation
Who is the real Tariq Ramadan? Whenever a question like this is posed of anyone, it is very hard to remain on the safe side of inanity. Does any minimally interesting person have a single core identity or single perfectly transparent and consistent motivational set—in short a single “self ”? Nonetheless, this has been a very popular parlor game for some Western intellectuals, with a set of alarmists claiming that a close, or even “esoteric,” read…
Taking People As They Are: Islam As a "Realistic Utopia" in the Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb
This article presents an interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's political theory based on a prominent feature of his thought: the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fitra) are in perfect harmony, and that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. I argue that Qutb is not only defending Islamic law as true and obligatory, but also as a coherent "realistic utopia"-a normative theory that also contains a ps…
Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan
Tariq Ramadan’s recent book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, boldly proclaims the need for Muslims to completely rethink the very meaning of Islamic law, traditionally the preeminent Islamic normative discourse and a primary distinguishing feature of Islam from other religions, replacing it with a more ecumenical applied ethics. He begins the book by rejecting the moderate reformist methods adopted in his previous books as insuffic…
Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims
This paper critiques some contemporary accounts of which forms of Muslim religiosity are at stake in conflicts over blasphemy, and asks whether the problem of offensive and injurious speech contributes to a critique of secularism
Speech and the Sacred: Does the Defense of Free Speech Rest on a Mistake about Religion
Some scholars have argued that religiously injurious speech poses a serious problem for secular liberal thought. It has been suggested that secular liberal thought and political practice often misrecognize the nature of the injury involved in speech that violates the sacred and that much secular thought about religious injury (and free exercise more generally) is premised on unacknowledged Protestant conceptions of what real religion is. In this …
Ambivalent Universalism? Jus ad Bellum in Modern Islamic Legal Discourse
In this paper, we discuss the trajectory of modern Islamic legal discourse on jus ad bellum questions, challenging the ideas that the choice is between either a defensive or an aggressive jihad doctrine, and that declaring and waging war is regarded in Islamic law as properly a matter to be monopolized by legitimate state authorities. The dominant modern doctrine of just war in Islamic legal thought is not quite as simple as a bare doctrine of mu…
Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology
The events that hastily came to be called “The Arab Spring” have done much to reopen the question of what it means for a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to force Islamist parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and authority in the public sphere. This paper provides a historical and conceptual background to certain modern attempts to harmonize ideals of divine and popular sovereignty. I pay special attention to the pre-201…
Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification
This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called "religious reasons" ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political comm…
Striving in the Path of God: Jih D and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought by Asma Afsaruddin
The bulk of scholarship in recent years on jihād in Islam has focused on the legal aspects of warfare and fighting in Islam, the history of war in Islam since the early Islamic conquests, or on the politics of modern Islamic militant movements. Asma Afsaruddin’s remarkable book, Striving in the Path of God: Jihād and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought, constitutes a major contribution insofar as it directs our focus to lesser known sources. Instead of …
Naturalizing Sharīʿa: Foundationalist Ambiguities in Modern Islamic Apologetics
This essay discusses an important feature of much modern Islamic writing on law, politics and morality. The feature in question is the claim that Islamic law and human nature ( fiṭra ) are in perfect harmony, that Islam is the “natural religion” ( dīn al-fiṭra ), and thus that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. My discussion proceeds through a close reading of the Moroccan independence leader and…
On the Will to Be Disciplined: Response to Jenco
What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity
Review of Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2012
What is important in theorizing tolerance today
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (29 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Islam (26 works) · Islamic Studies and History (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Theology (20 works)