Siyasah - Islamic Secular

I remain unconvinced thus far about rolling back modernity primarily because of the rapid expansionary phenomena of Technology that was built on the foundations of industrialisation.

Critiques such as this good natured one are ultimately futile and a case of howling in the wind wishing to go back to the things were. The conclusion I have reached is that we have is not necessarily an epistemological or metaphysical rupture. I don't necessarily think epistemic or metaphysical ruptures on their own in isolation necessarily translate into civilizational consequences in the sort of way we have witnessed after the fall of the Islamic Gunpowder Empires. If it were that simple the movements such as the Deobandis, the Ikhwanis would have had much greater success.

Rather, we have a siyasah rupture. Siyasah was a distinct way of articulating statecraft and the formation of political stability in the Islamicate that was an effort of not just ulema but men of letters, members of Islamicate courts, caliphial elites, guild members, military leadership and so on. I suspect sometimes in our fondness of the past we exaggerate and perhaps overplay the role of ulema in the formation of political cultures in the Islamicate. They have a role to play but it is one of many. An Islamic Secular is important because it allows us to think of equally authentic and grounded Islamic means of thinking about perennial concerns. Not all that is important must be mandated by a particular scholar working in 11th century Baghdad. I suspect this train of thought is why a lot of Islamic revivalists had an unreasonable and unhealthy obsession with the concept of Ijtihad. Ijtihad was bandied around as the panacea, the magic pill to cure Islamicate civilizational ills. It was an unjustified expansion of a very restricted, technical instrument of scholastic Islamic jurisprudence into a form of cultural and political technology that naturally collapses upon the slightest scrutiny or turbulence. Ijtihad is not a culture, it cannot be a clarion call or even an aesthetic sensibility.

The Islamic Secular fundamentally differs from other civilizational conceptions of the Secular in so far as we do not posit acting as if God does not exist which is the fundamental reality of Western strains of secularism. Rather the Islamic Secular acts outside of the explicit dictates of Muslim jurists not out of arrogance, out of opposition or disdain but as a means of partnership and exploring alternative routes to ascertain God's commandments.