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- [00:00]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:39]
Chella Ward
Assalamu Alaikum, listeners, and welcome back to a new season of Radio Reorient, the podcast where we explore the Islamosphere and illuminate the post Western. Your hosts this season are Claudia Radovan, Saeed Khan, Aminah Esat Das and me, Chella Ward.
- [01:55]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 1
This season marks the 10th anniversary of Radio Reorient. Of the 10 Octobers since Radio Reorient began, this is the third in which we continue to bear witness to a live stream genocide. Over the past decade, the podcast has opened a space for critical dialogue with a host of voices from all around the world questioning whether the way things are is the way things have to be.
- [02:18]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 2
Season 13 will be no different with a host of guests speaking on matters of resistance, policy, protest and more. We kick off the season with a two part interview speaking with Sherman Jackson, who holds the King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture and professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Oman.
- [02:38]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 1
Sayed and his Amir begin the interview discussing Jackson's work on the Islamic secular and the nature of Islamic studies. So without further ado, let's listen in.
- [02:46]
Salman Syed
Assalamu Alaikum. Dear listeners, welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient Today. Myself and Professor Saeed are delighted to have with us Professor Sherman Jackson, Professor Would you like to introduce yourself for our listeners?
- [03:04]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Yes, I'm Professor Sherman Jackson. I'm the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture at the University of Southern California. I've been here for about 13 years. Before that I spent close to 15 years at the University of Michigan. Before that I spent a short period of time at Wayne State. Before that I was at Indiana University. And before that I was at the University of Texas, Austin.
- [03:28]
Salman Syed
Okay, thank you very much. So I kind of want to kick off the discussion by a question. How did you get to the point of writing a book on the Islamic secular? So what brought you to write on Islam and the secular? Why this topic?
- [03:45]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, I think that, I mean, as I, as I indicated in my. I think it was my acknowledgments, I have. I have been interested in the whole question of the boundaries of Sharia ever since I engaged with the topic of my dissertation way back in the 1990s and 30 years ago with Shihab Ibn Al Qarafi. He was a Maliki scholar in Mamluk, Egypt. He was a very prominent Maliki scholar, and he wrote an important book on the distinction between fact wise judicial rulings and the discretionary policies and edicts of the Caliph or the Imam. And part of what he did in the context of doing so was to try to establish the jurisdictional boundaries between fatwas, judicial rulings and state policies. And so over the course of that, he developed what I characterized as a pure law doctrine. And what that meant was that Sharia, even if it can technically, and not just technically, actually speak to all things, it only speaks to all things in terms of establishing the status of a particular act via particular object. In other words, it's interesting, I was just explaining to some of my undergraduate students in my intro class just yesterday that it's technically not correct to say that pork is haram in Islam. Eating pork is haram. Looking at pork is not. And so the hukam establishes the status of a particular act that is eating vis a vis a particular entity, that is pork. And so even though the hukam may address every issue with a hukam Shari, that is what the status of an actor will be before God and hereafter, that does not exhaust the metrics that need to be brought to bear on issues in order for Muslims to fully instantiate Islam in the world. And so if we say that such and such is permissible, for example, and that is a hukam shari, well, that does not tell us how efficient it's going to be, how early, it's going to be how, how profitable it's going to be. And so although we have a hakam shari that says it is mubah or permissible, that does not exhaust, you know, the battery of metrics that we need to engage with in order to properly instantiate Islam in the world. So I've been interested in this whole, and as you can tell from what I just said, part of this depends on an understanding of, of those boundaries of Sharia. And I think that one of the challenges I will encounter with readers of the book is that it may sound as if I'm saying that Sharia is restricted in the same way that Western proponents of secularism have sought to restrict religion in the West. That's not what I'm doing. I'm not saying that Sharia is limited. I mean that it can only address this body of issues, you know, basic morality and, you know, liturgies and prayers and fasting. But it can't say anything about economics, it can't say anything about politics. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that even when it addresses politics, Sharia is only going to address this is permissible, this is haram. It is not going to tell us how effective a particular political policy, a particular economic policy, or what have you will be for that. We need a different metrics of deliberation. Now, in as much as that alternative metric is not dictated by Sharia or its sources, that's where I locate the secular element in what I'm talking about in terms of the Islamic secular. But secular here is not the same as the Western secular. The Western secular, the whole point of the secular in the west is to separate religion from various aspects of society. And if you're talking about what I would describe in the book as the macro secular, you want to separate religion from all of life. That's not what it is in Islam. When I say secular, all I mean is that it is not a dictate of revelation of Sharia or its sources. It does not mean that this is a category of human endeavor that is outside the jurisdiction of the divine gaze of the God of Islam. And so, on the one hand, I am not operating on the basis of any kind of dictate from Sharia. When I try to figure out, for example, what to buy my wife for her birthday, Sharia will tell me, you can't buy her that, you can't buy her wine, you can't buy her champagne. Right, because that's haram. But Sharia will not tell me what to buy.
- [09:09]
His Amir
Could you buy her the wine and champagne as long as she didn't drink.
- [09:13]
Professor Sherman Jackson
It.
- [09:15]
His Amir
To go the example that you use for the pork one, because they're not looking at the fork.
- [09:19]
Professor Sherman Jackson
No, because technically, technically, for a Muslim, wine and champagne are valueless. I cannot pay money for something that has no value.
- [09:27]
His Amir
There you go. Okay.
- [09:30]
Professor Sherman Jackson
But my point being though, that merely knowing that X, Y and Z is halal does not tell me which one to choose in order to realize the interest at stake. All right. And part of my argument is that I think that Muslims have been in some ways rightly so, but in some ways wrongly so, exclusively focused on Sharia as sort of the determinant of everything that is needed to instantiate a properly constituted Islamic life. And I think that where we've. We've neglected those areas that speak to economics, that speak to our political arrangements, that speak to culture, that speak to aesthetics, all of the things that Islam needs in order to sustain itself on the world stage of competing civilizations.
- [10:29]
His Amir
I mean, one of the most interesting things about the book is that in fact, when you read the title and you come to this very quick conclusion that you would be doing exactly the opposite of the argument that you actually make. So the issue that want to ask oneself is that, and you, and you mentioned this at some point, you say, well, why am I using this oxymoronic term? And you also talk about the fact that there's a certain, your own kind of diffidence about using the term Islamic secular for all those reasons, and maybe be just a good too for our listeners to hear the argument that you want to make for why you want to use Islamic secular in the way that you're doing it, which is a reversal of, as you know, the literature that exists which would argue that Islamic secular would be the consignment of, to.
- [11:13]
Professor Sherman Jackson
A very narrow, confined, circumscribed domain what.
- [11:17]
His Amir
Is considered to be religious based on Western Christianity's idea of what is religious.
- [11:23]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, let me try and answer that on two levels. One sort of relevant, but at some remove. It has to do with my own development. One of the things that I've come to realize at this point in my life and in my academic career is the degree to which Islamic studies has been thoroughly infused with interpretive lenses, interpretive presuppositions that come from the history of the West. Some of this may be blatant Orientalism, but I suspect that a fair amount of it is simply a function of the fact that that's the matrix that these Dalits happen to be living in. And they assume that to be the norm. And what I've come to discover is that I, too, and I'm sure many other Muslims early on internalized some of these interpretive presuppositions and they ran their course in my work. And I came over the years, and this is what I try to train my graduate students to do. I came over the years to the point of really understanding how important it is to allow Islam to speak on its own terms and in its own voice. And that means, you know, a really deep dive into, for me, into the Islamic tradition. And since I focus primarily on, you know, law and jurisprudence, I'm going to be talking about the, you know, the legal tradition. But it's really important to try to arrive at a point where you can, you can read those traditions on their own terms and then allow them or enable them to speak on their own terms. And so I began to see a number of things that I got wrong simply because I had internalized and interpreted presupposition that had a long standing status within the field. And so this leads into the second part of my answer. It's important to me to be able to, to challenge the hegemony of Western language, to challenge the power of definition that the west has enjoyed for the last 300 years. And based on that power of definition, when the west defines something, we can either counter it or we can accept it, but we can't ignore it, at least not yet. At some point, however, if we're successful at putting forth our own alternatives, all right, we will be able to speak in the context of our own understanding of ourselves and the world. And so for me, the power of the word secular. I'm not sure that many people realize how powerful this term is. If you're religious, it probably misses you if you're not, because it's just the way that things are. But if you're a religious individual, it is basically telling you that you are being true to yourself when you do X, but you're not being true to yourself when you do Y, because that's supposed to be secular. You're not supposed to have anything to do with that. And I think that to draw on the great Black American intellectual, W.E.B. du Bois, I think that this breeds a very toxic strain of double consciousness where Muslims want to be Muslims on the one hand, because they believe in Islam, but they don't want to be Muslims on the other hand, because to be Muslim circumscribes so many activities that not only do you want to be a part of, but you need to be a part of in order to craft a dignified existence on the ground. So to make a long story short, I wanted to take the word secular away from the west. And certainly I wanted to challenge the West's monopoly over the definition of secular. Because as long as Muslims believe that there are certain activities that cannot be engaged in religiously, then there are going to be activities that are simply off limits for us. And if those activities happen to be activities that are critical to the development of Muslim community, then we're going to be left at a deficit. And so the point that I make in the book is that to abandon the term secular simply because the west has defined it in a certain way would imply that the Western understanding is the only understanding of secular that we can have. And here we have a 1400 year old civilization, one of the most accomplished in human history, cannot have its own definition of secular. Particularly given the fact that. And again, I mean, my thesis comes out of my reading of the classical and post formative Islamic juristic tradition. It doesn't, you know, it's not mine, essentially, it's my sin synthesis of what they're saying. And I say that to say that we have these ideas that come out of the Muslim's own experience, their own tradition, their own history. And it's not to say that other histories are wrong. But I think that if Islam is going to speak on its own terms, then it has to do that. And that's what I'm trying to do with this book.
- [17:22]
Salman Syed
So there's no.
- [17:23]
Professor Sherman Jackson
I don't know if I answered your question, Salman. If not, you know, you can press me.
- [17:26]
His Amir
No, I know, it's very fascinating. I want Hiza to be able to have some questions and go back to this because it really, as I said, there's so many pregnant things to go off with a different direction. Yeah, so many. It's always a good thing about a book which actually generates questions. And even though, you know, you broadly share the same conclusions as a book, you want to know the arguments that you got there.
- [17:50]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 1
While.
- [17:50]
His Amir
Yes, that route rather than the other route which you would have taken, you know, so I think it's. So that's why I would put it down to. And I think we'll come back to some of the points.
- [17:58]
Salman Syed
Yeah. I have two questions I would ask and I'm not sure which one to go for first because they both, they relate to your response to my first question. Then your Response to professor say, but I'll go with the more specific one first, which is a response to. In your response to my first, like, introductory question, you mentioned about, you know, just because something is halal doesn't necessarily mean it's efficient or, you know, good quote, unquote, profitable. Yeah. And you use this, if I remember correctly, I think it's in the second chapter. You use the example of Al Maqrizi and his objection to the Mamluk usage of copper coinage. And you state that. And I have the quote here, that this matter is neither an exclusively moral nor an exclusively Shari affair. And at the time I remember read, reading this and thinking, you know, what would be really good here is if you use the hadith about the. Where the Prophet went to the people and said, you know, about the date palms, you're grow. You should grow them this way. And then I saw in the footnote that you do use it, but you don't actually expand on the connection between these. So if you could expand on the connection between those about the hadith and then this part of the Islamic secular. How do they connect?
- [19:12]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, again, I mean, they are connected, and that's why there's a footnote there. The reason that I focused on Al Maqrizi, because Al Maqrizi is talking in the context of his engagement with the Islamic legal tradition. In other words, he's dealing with a legal tradition that has established its own internal discourse. It is the discourse by which Muslim society seeks to negotiate its prevailing order. I mean, it's sort of like American law, if I may be permitted to diverge in that way. Right now, it's the exception rather than the rule that the Supreme Court is actually gonna go back to the Constitution. They're gonna go to the precedents that previous Supreme Courts have established, and that becomes the basis of legal deliberation as we speak right now. And so what the Prophet did in terms of the whole issue of pollinating the day palms, that may be the basis of how the jurists arrive at this distinction between law and fact. And that's all relevant. All right. But I was more interested in what the jurists actually did with that as a part of a living legal tradition and how those kinds of conversations were negotiated as an engagement with Islamic law. So they're related. But I was looking at how the legal tradition itself goes about, a fully developed, mature legal tradition goes about negotiating these issues, because that's what we are now.
- [21:00]
His Amir
So I think one of the things that comes across with this and it goes to another major proposal you make, and it's to talk about Islamic Studies 2.0, and again, this. And you discuss also Hodgson and Shabbat Ahmed and things like that and differentiating your position around that. So maybe again, for our listeners, let's start off by just saying something about why you want Islamic Studies, because my argument would be this, that the entire project of Islamic Studies is itself not a. It is a colonial project. But what I mean is this, that Muslims didn't do Islamic studies, they just did studies, in a way. And the fact that we have Islamic studies and its particular formation and canonization, it produces some of the dichotomies that I think your work is trying to jump over and get rid of, partly because those dichotomies are disabling of our possibilities for marking out a new future or better alternatives. So maybe could you talk a little bit about Islamic studies and flavor 2.0 rather than abandoning the project with Islamic Studies?
- [22:09]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Yeah, well, I mean, If I might, Dr. Syed, I don't think. I don't think. I mean, they didn't. They didn't develop the Muslims. I'm talking about Islamic Studies in the form that the Western Academy has Islamic studies today. All right. But there was a metacognitive engagement with their own tradition. So they did write about what are we doing when we do theology. Right? You have maqalat al Islamiin and all these kinds of things. They did the same thing. All these tabaqat work include a lot of that. You have the same thing in legal compendia. So there was a discourse about the discourse, as it were. All right, but you're right, Islamic studies, as it arises in the Western Academy is in part, it's a colonial project, and I get that, but I think that. And there'll be many people who disagree with me in this regard, but I think that that discourse has had its impact. No doubt about it.
- [23:21]
His Amir
Yeah, of course.
- [23:22]
Professor Sherman Jackson
That the imprimatur of the west has been so powerful that it has even convinced Muslims to basically see themselves through the lens of the west to abandon that project, me as a Western Muslim in the Western Academy, to abandon that project, in my view, simply abandons the project to those who would perpetuate what was going on in the early 20th, late 20th, 19th century. It's not going to end that enterprise. And so for me, what becomes important is to make interventions into that enterprise. All right? That would, as I said, make some contribution to affording Islam the ability both to be seen on its own terms and to be heard on its own terms. I think about right now, you know, all the Muslims leave Islamic studies then, who are the experts on Islam in the Western world and what is the impact of that on Muslims globally? Right. So I think, though, that part of the problem with Islamic studies early on was that Islamic studies sort of presented itself as, okay, this is what these believing, practicing Muslims say, all right? And what they say is a product of the fact that they happen to believe in this stuff. And the fact that they happen to believe in this stuff means that they cannot approach it critically as we can, all right? So they don't really even know the truth about their own tradition. Let us tell you that. All right? Now, all of this was underwritten by sort of this 19th century notion of objectivity that nobody no longer believes in. But they presented Islamic studies as if this were an unbiased sort of transcendent discourse. It transcended culture, it transcended race, it transcended a political interest. It was an objective approach to Islam. In point of fact, it included many biases. And again, some of these, you know, perhaps just grounded on some level of prejudice or bigotry. Some of these, however, simply being a function of the fact that this is the cultural epistemological matrix out of which these scholars happen to be operating. At any rate, what I wanted to say was that, well, you guys have a perspective as well. The Western academy has a perspective as well, and it is the perspective of, quote, unquote, Western civilization. And that's a problematic category, and I'll acknowledge that. But you have a perspective as well, and that perspective often informs what you claim to be objective study of Islam. All right? At the same time, you say that if I start talking about a normative understanding of Islam, that that's not. That's not permissible because it's not objective enough. All right? But your approach includes an interpretive presupposition that is a product of a normative understanding of Western civilization. And so you're bringing a narrative to the study no less than I am. And so we should knock off this business that you're being objective and I'm being subjective. And find criteria, all right, for distinguishing. One, are we talking about did this historical event occur? And two, what are we then saying is the meaning of this historical event as we go about dealing with contemporaneous issues that that historical event might bear on, so determining whether the event happened? I mean, that's what I call Islamic Studies 1.0. It is just the bare bones, the bare facts. You know, did Arazi say this, is this what Arazi meant, etc. Islamic Studies 2, 2.0 is, well, what do I want to do with that now? How do I bring that to bear on some contemporaneous issue that I want to excavate for the purpose of highlighting some or another perspective of Islam? And so I think that with regard to Islamic Studies 1.0, I can see Muslim and non Muslim scholars to an appreciable degree as playing on a level playing field when it comes to 2.0.
- [28:19]
Marshall Po
However.
- [28:21]
Professor Sherman Jackson
I want to promote certain interests and I'm not going to be shy about acknowledging that. All right? But I have to do so on the basis of sound criteria of scholarship in terms of My Islamic Studies 1.0.
- [28:36]
His Amir
No, I mean I think that's very, very clear that it seems to me that for example, the interpretation of the Quran that really matters is the Muslim interpretation of the Quran simply because we are stakeholders. If you're talking about Islam, yeah, you know, it is us, it is, it matters to us because we are stakeholders in it. So I think that's quite clear. And it's kind of interesting that in both of these questions you're making a judgment around how to get to this alternative reading where we have autonomous or almost kind of a liberatory reading of both the traditions that we're enmeshed in and the contemporary world that we're enmeshed in. So it's really about, I mean I want to make clear to the arc of the book for our listeners is that really this is a project if buddy kind of over off, certainly a liberatory readings of putting something together which opens up different kinds of future which has often been curtailed around for example, conventional accounts either through Islamic studies or conventional accounts of the secular, et cetera. And I think that's where perhaps some of the will be interesting for our readers to read that book. And I would imagine.
- [29:50]
Professor Sherman Jackson
I think Dr. Said, I mean on some level I agree with you, but to be honest about it, I understand the value and the inflection of the liberatory understanding that you just articulated. On some level, however, on some level that gives too much importance to the west because it's not that I'm trying to liberate myself so much from the west as that I'm trying to position myself and position Muslims to be able to indulge their own tradition more spontaneously.
- [30:36]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 2
Absolutely.
- [30:39]
Professor Sherman Jackson
It's about the liberatory moment. There's something like that, but that's not the whole, the whole point in other words, part of my critique is to be liberated from the west does not necessarily equal Islam. Right? So how are we going to understand Islam? How are we going to re immerse ourselves in our own tradition to the point that we can rebuild those missing parts of the bridge, all right, that make it difficult for us to continue a conversation that was started, you know, some centuries ago, got interrupted, all right? And now we're sort of in this house of mirrors trying to figure out, you know, what was really said, what it meant, et cetera. How do we rebuild that bridge so that that conversation can continue.
- [31:38]
Salman Syed
So I want to kind of. Right, this is really because it's coming into this question quite well. I actually want to kind of propose to you that as well as proposing Islamic Studies 2.0, you actually propose the Islamic Scholar 2.0 as well, or the idea of what an Islamic scholar is. So, and you do this in the third chapter where you state that the Islamic secular, and this is a quote, entails a more explicit recognition not only of the limits of the jurist's authority, but but also of the potentially religious Islamic value of the non jurist. And then when I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was, well, we then need to rethink what an Islamic scholar is, do we not? Or does that cover so many people that it just now loses all meaning? It's just have scholars.
- [32:25]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, I mean, what I was trying to say there, and I think that, you know, the cumulative thrust of the book makes this clearer is this, if Sharia is bounded in terms of what it can speak to authoritatively, all right, then the jurists as the explicators of Sharia must also be limited in what they can speak to authoritatively. All right? That means that Islam, and one of the points that I make in the book is that Islam is not coterminous with Sharia or Sharia is not coterminous with Islam, Islam is broader than Sharia. And so for the instantiation of Islam, we need more than the Sharia and those persons who are involved in those activities beyond Sharia, all right? But that service Islam are also involved in Islamic activity and their authority and the value of, of their work needs to be acknowledged as Islamic work.
- [33:32]
Salman Syed
So then this comes back, so then this comes back to my question. Are we now then, are we now then going to consider a political scientist, for example, who has no training in fiqh, no training in any sort of kalam or anything like this? Is that now an Islamic scholar? Because at the moment the vast Majority of people would say, no, he's not.
- [33:53]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, I mean, I think that titles have connotations beyond their denotations. And I think that the connotation of Islamic scholar is still tied to some measure, what I tend to call the Islamic hard sciences, law, theology, legal theory, et cetera. All right, so I think that in terms of the connotation of Islamic scholar, it might not work to call a political scientist an Islamic scholar, but to refer to their work as Islamic work, I think that that would be something that many people could not only accept, but understand in terms of what is intended. And that is to say that this is a political theory, all right, that is informed by the ethos, the values, the principles of Islam and in the seeking to bring all that to bear to the political challenges that Muslims face in the modern world. All right. In a responsible, conscientious way. All right. And in so doing, it's an Islamic approach to these issues. So their work is Islamic. Now, technically you could say, yes, he's an Islamic scholar. I just think that in terms of the connotations of Islamic scholar, that probably won't work.
- [35:11]
His Amir
But Professor Jack, this actually been some really interesting conversation you have or critique you have about Shaba, Ahmed and Hodgson's work, because one of the things that would be one response.
- [35:22]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Was that a critique? I thought it was just a reportage.
- [35:25]
His Amir
But anyway, I think given the way that he is praised in many ways, I think even that sounds like it's a disagreement with some of the arguments. And I think what I read through it was perhaps, maybe it was my reading more than you wanted to put in there.
- [35:39]
Professor Sherman Jackson
But no, it was, you know, I didn't agree. I don't agree with him.
- [35:43]
His Amir
Well, this is. No, I don't agree with him either. But as you know, he's very well, his arguments are considered to be very well. But one of the issues is this, that. Okay, so one argument would be that in a way what we are describing and many of the question answers you've described is why not use a kind of the term, the distinction between the Islamic and the Islamicate, where we could talk about Islamicate scholarship, which would be not part of the hard, what you call the hard science of Islamic studies or the fake, et cetera, and it would be Islamicate because it's informed by the Islamic but not reducible to it. Like, for example, you may want to say there's Islamicate mathematics, but not Islamic mathematics. Or they may be Islamic hate surgery or medicine, but not Islamic medicine. So I was just Wondering whether you'd want to say something about that, the refusal to use those terms and bringing into that, I think Ahmed's critique of that is pretty poor, to be honest with you, the difference between what's there. But maybe say something about that and just see how that turns into your broader project between negotiating between Islam Islamic and Islamic hate.
- [36:52]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, I think that the main issue I had with Hudson's Islamic hate, and I think I do recognize a certain utility in the distinctions that Hutchin is making. Where I fundamentally disagree with him, however, is where he basically implies that Islamic hate is secular in the modern Western sense. That's where our difference comes in. Because I don't see the Islamicate as non religious.
- [37:29]
His Amir
No, but in a way, the way that you have talked about the Islamic secular, it could be recuperated into not a post Hodgson understanding of the Islamicate in a way that as well you are doing similar things that you're not talking about the secular in a Western sense, saying that, for example, if you are making a decision about, let's say, political public policy, what policy you should follow, there are many parts of it. You could say, yes, there is what you've explained before, the halal haram al Asaddisheri, but there's also then the question about efficacy. And you may at some point have to balance those kinds.
- [38:09]
Professor Sherman Jackson
You will likely have to balance them.
- [38:11]
His Amir
So take for example, order.
- [38:13]
Professor Sherman Jackson
So my point, Dr. Salman, is Anglo. If someone wants to rehabilitate Hudson's Islamicate while making it clear that they're using it not in the sense of secular activity, I would not have a problem with that. But that would be a new articulation of Hansen, because Hansim himself implies that that activity is secular.
- [38:35]
His Amir
Yeah, no, that's absolutely clear. But I think what is more interesting and away for me at least is the reading is your critique that goes on to then do away with the notions of pretext, context, et cetera, with Ahmed and your declaration of yourself as a nominalist, which I think is particularly another way of saying. And I thought it was a very powerful by the way, critique. So I think it'd be good for our listeners to hear that argument in relation to what you think the notion of pretext particularly actually smuggles in.
- [39:09]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Yeah, this is a huge issue and I hope that I did not come off as being more dogmatic than I actually am, because I think that the argument between realism and anomalism is one in which one could hold reasonable disagreements. All right, that's to begin with. But in terms of the thrust of what Ahmad is saying, he seems to want to impute a sort of Hellenistic realist cosmology to Islam. I don't see that and I disagree with that. And that's where, when I say nominalist, I mean that God retains the right to define on his own terms and that he is not dictated to by a pre existing cosmic order that has some kind of unimpeachable authority because it happens to be being. For example. That's where I fundamentally disagree with Ahmed. And I would say that the very ability to say, no, this is haram, this is good, this is bad, because I said it is. That is a nominalist approach that's absolutely above and beyond all the other philosophical problems that might come along with the whole nominalist realist debate. But that's what I'm talking about. God is not bound by any pre existing cosmic or any other kind of order in terms of what God does.
- [40:50]
His Amir
And that is actually one of the things that the positivists miss out when they try and lead to a scientific rationalization of prohibitions that, for example, you should not talk because it is bad for your health.
- [41:03]
Professor Sherman Jackson
That's right. These enzymes. Those enzymes. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, if you want to talk about realism, is pork really negus ontologically? No, no, I mean, that's what I'm saying. That's what I mean by nominalist, right? Now I know that nominalism has lots of other meanings and you know, people taking in all kinds of different directions, but that's what I'm talking about. And I do think that, you know, I mean, Ahmed tends to. I think he invokes a very quite explicitly realist ontology. And that's where, you know, he and the Islamic sacrament. We fundamentally disagree in that regard.
- [41:49]
His Amir
Yeah, no, and I think it's, it's interesting because like you said, the beyond this notion of his kind of attempt to try and make Islam or Muslim, everything that anyone ever does as Muslim again is highly problematic, both in the level of experience, but also in the grounds that you lay out theoretically that it really. You cannot say that everything everyone, every Muslim ever did, it goes back to this kind of anthropologization.
- [42:16]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Right.
- [42:17]
His Amir
One problem with that, and it makes no sense in the end.
- [42:20]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Well, you see, but see, this is part of my project though. I think that if we had a thicker reading of what jurists and theologians were actually, actually saying, as opposed to stereotypical adumbrations that, you know, we, we imbibe in all these Secondary works. All right. I don't think that many of these ideas would be very appealing to us.
- [42:41]
His Amir
I agree.
- [42:42]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Because, because, because, because the sources just don't, they just don't sustain them. I mean, you know, if, I mean, I said these will tell you, even traditionalists who are willing to indulge with the Martuzilites on the idea that human actions may have some kind of inherent quality, all right. On the basis of which we can know whether they're good or bad. Even traditionalists dare say, however, that even that does not bind God, period. And I think that, see, this is one of the presuppositions that I'm talking about, because ultimately if you're not talking about Ibadah, you're not talking about Islam. And that concept is very often completely eliminated from all discussions of Islam. And that's where I think that.
- [43:37]
His Amir
Your.
- [43:37]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Subtle critique, or maybe not so subtle, of Islamic studies, it hits a nail on the head.
- [43:45]
Salman Syed
Okay, we could carry on this conversation for quite a while. We've got quite a few more questions listed, but I think we'll have to stop it there. So thank you very much, Professor Jackson, for your time and for this discussion and inshallah, we will carry it on soon. So thank you very much.
- [44:04]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.
- [44:07]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 2
Well, here we see a real deep dive into yet another intellectual exploration by Professor Jackson, who now has quite an esteemed track record of delving into topics that really are beyond just the abstract, but have so much practical consideration and consequence for us. And here in taking a look at the Islamic secular, and by his own admission, it's a, it's a provocative title and, and one that I'm sure will leave a lot of people perhaps disturbed, which is just simply another way of I suppose, saying pro being provoked. But I think it's something that we can all relate to and particularly for Muslims living in the so called West. But I don't think geography is any limitation. And that is what does the secular mean to us? Because I think it's a word that by its, its very utterance creates reaction. For some people, it's very triggering. For some it is considered to be a nemesis, maybe even antagonistic to religion or religious sensitivities. For us it's seen as a welcoming word, a word for the idea of liberation or being moved away from religion. And so I just wanted to go ahead and open it up to see what do you think about when you hear the word secular?
- [45:36]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 1
So, I mean, I'm not going to profess to have sort of the same depth and eloquence on secular aspects as Jackson does here. I suppose, in line with some of the other conversations that we. We've had over this season when we, when we talk about secular sort of. I think that that sort of, that ready understanding is the removal of religion from particular areas of life, like from politics or education. And you know, one of the. For example, we have this perception in the UK that education, unless you go specifically to a religious school, is secular, which isn't strictly true. You know, in all schools in the UK there is an expectation of some form of religious devotion, education, et cetera. It's legislated for. So even in areas that we think are secular in a Western context in particular, we're in fact not. So I think it's very interesting to think about those kinds of literal definitions, what that means in terms of how religion is legislated for or not, and how we perceive it in other ways.
- [46:56]
Chella Ward
I think that's a really interesting framework to think about this question through because as I was listening, I was also thinking about the kind of primary British primary school context where it's considered to be perfectly normal to have, you know, multi ethnic, multi religious groups of school children, you know, singing All Things Bright and Beautiful or whatever other hymn you want to insert. It would not be seen as perfectly legitimate and perfectly normal to have those children say Allahu Akbar, for example, right? That Allahu Akbar is not seen as having universal relevance to the lives of primary school children, no matter their, their, you know, their religious beliefs, whereas singing Christian hymns, because those hymns are sort of de. Christianized in that process, are seen in that way. And I think for me, the, the important conceptualization here is the way that the post Christian, you know, just as. As Talal Assad and many others have described the post Christian comes to stand as the universal and in that sense, you know, comes to be understood as secular when it's in fact not. Not secular at all. And that I think is, is, or seems to me that Jackson is making is that, you know, we need to think about the way that the secular becomes seen through this kind of Westernizing or West toxicated lens. Right. And the other provocation that I was really interested in in this episode was the suggestion of the need for an Islamic Studies 2.0. And I found that really interesting that that seems to me to be kind of core to Reorient as a project. I remember when I was first involved with Reorient, somebody explaining to the whole idea of Islamic Studies itself is, is in a sense, you know, the product of, of a Western centric colonial order. Because if you think about various moments in the history of the Muslim world, those things that are studied under the heading Islamic Studies in the Western and West toxicated University, for example, are just in fact studies, you know, for the vast majority of the Muslim world at various points in its history where it was hegemonic. So the whole idea of a category that we think about of Islam as Islamic Studies is a way of particularizing Muslimness and, and kind of removing it from this experience which is universalized, which is this kind of post Christian secular experience. So I think that that provocation, I'm going to use your term again, Saeed, that that provocation that we need in Islamic Studies 2.0 is in a sense also a provocation about the whole order of knowledge making, right? It's a provocation that says actually this entire order of knowled in education and outside is actually a colonial order. And it's maybe in that sense that it's useful to think about the secular as a concept that on the one hand, you know, seems to be created by Western modernity. And it seems to me that we're sort of in this episode asking the question, well, how else can that idea of the secular be thought? In a way that's really helpful, Chella.
- [49:57]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 1
I was thinking about sort of, you mentioned the UK school context and I was thinking across contexts and the sort of the work that the word secular is doing. And I think you're quite right in that it's normalizing perhaps a sort of Western post Christian framework. And we could argue potentially now some of the work that's doing, particularly if we think about things like laicite in the French context, is it doing the invisibilization of Muslimness in the public sphere? Has it become more of a, a political tool rather than a tool to move beyond sort of the role of the church in state, etc. And really is it part of the broader anti Muslim or Islamophobic infrastructure in the West?
- [50:46]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 2
I was really struck by, in both reading the book the Islamic Secular and also listening to the conversation that Jackson had in the interview that it demonstrates how the west sees the secular and the way it does is really as an evolutionary stage in its own history. And of course then we see the hostility that the west imposes on, on the Muslim world, so to speak, that if the secular is an evolutionary stage and if there is resistance to evolving, then that means that, that those who resisted or have not evolved and therefore are. Are not progressing, and therefore somehow the other, more primitive. And within Jackson's conceptualization of the secular, he doesn't locate it within that kind of evolutionary stage conceptualization. And I think that that's very important to. Especially for Muslims to recognize that the secular was always there, not necessarily as a temporal phenomenon, but as a spatial phenomenon, to work as a complement to what is then seen as the sacred.
- [52:06]
Chella Ward
I think that is an important way of thinking about that kind of reorientation of the idea of the secular. It's a really important way of thinking about it, especially in this season of podcast episodes where we keep returning to ideas around resistance, you know, around protest. And I'm thinking about. Or the question that was sort of running through my head as I was listening to this episode was, how do we do counter thinking? Right. To what extent is it possible? And, you know, I suppose it has to be possible, or any decolonial project would need to say it has to be possible. But to what extent is it possible to unthink the imposition of the secular through this kind of Western centric lens that. Saeed, you're explaining how Jackson is. Is trying to counter that. That Western centric lens on the secular. But at the same time, you know, we're doing that, or at least most of us are doing that from within a kind of higher education or university framework where the secular is absolutely still, or the secular in that kind of Western centric sense is absolutely still an organizing feature of how knowledge, you know, comes to be seen as robust or rigorous. And you see that in the prioritizing of certain types of sources, certain kinds of knowledge systems, you know, those Eurocentric knowledge systems that are perceived as, you know, being rational precisely because they're seen as untainted, you know, by. By any notion of divinity or, you know, or any kind of thought that is not secular in its conception. So there's a sense in which, you know, this reorienting work is taking place in a space that is itself dominated by the idea that the secular is what contributes to the robustness of academic thought and. And the persecution, really, of those types of thinking, you know, whether they're Muslim thought or other forms of thought that are. That are not secular, that, you know, that the. The hierarchization, I suppose, of those different types of thought on which the university relies. Because, as I find myself saying almost every day at the moment, the notion of higher education presupposes that there's something called lower education, right? So there's already a hierarchy built into the idea of higher education. But the hierarchy is also in itself dependent on the notion of the secular.
- [54:24]
Unnamed Radio Reorient Host 2
I would say that what Jackson is actually doing is more than just countering the Western secular. I think he's expanding the scope of the secular, which in itself, in and of itself, it deessentializes the Western secular as being a universal. Just as he talks about how there are multiple modernities, so too then he's exploring the idea of the multiple secular. And that, I would argue, is actually a form of resistance, resisting this tendency that the west has to reduce not only the scope of the secular, but also in many ways reducing the scope of Islam and and the Muslim world into a very confined space.
- [55:08]
Chella Ward
Well, maybe that's a good space for us to finish, since we do have another episode coming up with Sherman Jackson. The conversation was so rich that we decided in the end to divide it into two episodes. So no doubt we'll pick up Into Allah some of these threads. Then. Let me close by saying a huge thank you to Sherman Jackson, to the interviewers, Salman Syed and his Amir, and thank you to all of the listeners as well for joining us on another episode. This has been an episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts for this episode have been Said Khan Amina, ESAT Das, Claudia Radovan and Chella Ward. We hope, inshallah, to see you next time. Assalamu Alaikum.
- [55:54]
Professor Sherman Jackson
Sam.