I've been referencing the Islamic Secular a lot and I haven't been robust enough in defining it and assuming a lot (that the reader is familiar with Sherman Jackson's work). This particular note will be a work in progress with reading and elaboration. I don't use it strictly in the same sense as Jackson. There are also other considerations namely around how much emphasis one places on fiqh as a tool for cultural, social and political formation - I think there are camps with overlap - secularists, minimalists and maximalists. I'll periodically add to this note as time goes on, adding my own thoughts, links and resources. I anticipate this note will continue to "grow" because there is a lot that needs to be considered here.

Originally, the term does come from Jackson's paper^[1] on the matter and there is also a rather helpful video lecture^[2] too. In summary, Jackson I think is fundamentally right when he argues for more:

a more careful reading of Sharia that imputes jurisdictional boundaries to the latter, thereby challenging the notion of it being coterminous with Islam as religion. Ultimately, it is the space between the bounded Sharia as a concrete code of conduct and the unbounded purview of Islam as religion, that is to say, life lived under the conscious presumption of an adjudicative divine gaze, that constitutes the realm of "the Islamic secular"

It is secular as the paper argues in a Weberian sense that exists outside the concrete bounded view of juristic dictate or even explicit Quranic revelation or Prophetic conduct, but remains Islamic because it defies the dictum of etsi Deus non daretur.

There are also further considerations about how much of a legalistic religion Islam actually is and whether there is something distinct from fiqh in terms of an "Islamic Ethics"^[3] or whether fiqh really is just applied Islamic ethics?^[4] Reinhart in particular has a deep admiration as an outsider and wishes to defend it from some of the more uncharitable interlocutors from the Academy:

Islamic law stands as a significant example of a moral and legal theory of human behaviour in which initial moral insights are systematically and self-consciously transformed into enforceable guidelines and attractive ideals for all of human life. As the intellectual realm of the moral life of a great religious civilization, the fiqh-sciences deserve to command our respect and attention. The sophistication, discipline, and moral aspiration of Islamic law may also evoke our admiration

Digressions notwithstanding, Abbasi's work is an important adjunct to Jackson's understanding of the Islamic Secular - a historical case that premodern Muslims did think of particular boundaries that had a passing resemblance to the secular/sacred divide. There is an interesting interview here and his original paper^[5]
Connected to this particular discussion about the Islamic Secular will be the scholarship around the cultural author Shahab Ahmed who I think rather insidiously tries to corrode and dissolve any sense of the Sacred from Islam itself which is an odd project, but it has generated some interesting rebuttals that I will cover in another note. In Abbasi's paper however is buried this brilliant piece of writing that I think strikes at the heart of the issue:

Christoph Kleine’s recent work on medieval Japan and his suggestion that the religious– secular distinction is ‘a potentially universal structural principle by which complex cultures are conceptually organized’. Drawing on the ideas of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, Kleine contends that the concept of religion exists in human societies in order to make the indeterminate features of human existence determinate and to organize this unempirical domain of life so as to make it available and accessible to humans. The transcendent must then necessarily be distinguished from the immanent since it is easy to talk about non-empirical matters inexhaustibly to the point of collapsing its seriousness; hence, religion instinctively draws a boundary between itself and all else. This is precisely what it seems the Muslim authors above were doing.

Complex societies particularly industrial and post-industrial are scaling in dimensions and aspects creating intractable challenges that could not have been posited by our predecessors which is more of a comment on our inability to tread the water rather than the work allocated to them by God, which they shouldered admirably.

Here I would break out and say that binaries in of themselves as a guiding rule are not problematic intrinsically. The fashionable academic retort that one must do away with binaries as a rule is not faithful. It is not faithful to the way our predecessors understood matters. The task for the archaeologist isn't really to say whether binaries intrinsically are problematic or not - that is a mundane and wholly uninteresting waste of time. The question rather is how were these binaries understood and what sorts of political and social energy did they generate? How did they create the requisite technologies to anchor entire civilizations and empires? So there is an Islamic Secular but it is not built on an exclusion of the Divine, or an absence of the Divine Gaze or an atheistic separationism at a deeply epistemic level which is what we see unfolding in other cultural and civilizational zones.

There is another attendant theme which I don't think has yet even been explored by academia and too few if any ulema and that is to move past theoretical engagements around the Islamic Secular and moving into the practical domain particularly when facing the question of Technology. Other pressing domains include industrialization, building Sovereignty - creating the circumstances and conditions that allow for an Islamicate articulation of power. I think the argument for the Islamic Secular is apparent to those Muslims who have a "jack of all trades" approach to their reading and worldly engagement. When one reads more broadly across a wider variety of domains and fields all of which are incredibly pertinent to the notion of re-establishing Islamicate Sovereignty then it becomes apparent on a basic level that the ulema alone cannot shoulder this burden. It also becomes important to understand the placing undue expectations on obscure tools of legal methodology that were only really ever meant to be accessible to a cognitive elite - i.e. ijtihad and maqasid cannot be the basis of cultural, aesthetic and political revival.

Footnotes