Naser Ghobadzadeh, Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State

This book is an important - though controversial - addition to the discourse surrounding Islamic political thought. It traces its lineage to the debate advocating a separation of religion and politics. By putting this politico-religious discourse into a new oxymoronic term, ‘religious secularity’, the author attempts to construct another theological challenge to the concept of an Islamic state. Hailing from Iran, Dr. Naser Ghobadzadeh (currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, the Australian Catholic University), examines Islamic politico-religious discourse in the context of his homeland. Briefly reviewing the political struggles Muslims have faced during the second half of the twentieth century while trying to fulfil their aspirations of establishing an Islamic state, he attempts to describe the parallel Iranian quest for a democratic secular state. Being aware of the varied definitions and understandings of the term ‘secularism’, he intentionally uses the term ‘secularity’ to clarify the distinction between the emerging discourse in Iran and the conventional understanding of secularism as a global paradigm. This discourse, according to the author, was first developed following a series of articles written by Abdulkarim Soroush in 1989, in which the latter emphasized a separation of religion from religious knowledge (p.25). The author ignores, however, the Sunni scholar, Shaykh Ali Abdul Raziq, who, in his book entitled al-Islam wa usul al-Hukm (1925), held the same view. This might be because of the author’s focus on Shi'ite political thought.