Islam and Secular Reason: Between Faith and Nihilism

This book offers an original understanding of the relation between contemporary Islam and Secular Reason. The suspicion of an increasing intrusion of the political into the religious is neither absent in critical readings of contemporary Islam, nor entirely alien to the modernizing logic of secularization. Little is novel in the recognition that in modernity religion becomes vastly more susceptible to politics; that in modernity spaces of the religious progressively begin to show signs of infirmity; or that in modernity the religious increasingly accommodates politics for its self-preservation. Equally salient is the ascendancy of the economic over the religious. The spaces in which religion survives, even thrives, are conditioned by a self-expanding economic logic. However, the universalizing effect of Secular Reason in the Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) as the intensification of religiosity has not received the critical scrutiny it deserves. Often, this effect is eclipsed by the opposing processes of secularization. While secularizing tendencies are irrefutable, this monograph sees the universalizing effect of the colonization of the religious by the political not as secularization, but despiritualization, a process marked by the progressive evacuation of transcendence from faith and the degradation of the moral code attached to that faith. The apparent resurgence of religious sentiment in the ICZs on this view is an integral part of despiritualization. Exploring the workings of Secular Reason on three registers-secularity, nihilism, and sovereignty, this critical inquiry challenges established thinking on political Islam and its religious underpinnings.