Islam and Secularity

The catchy title of this work may echo the panicky mood of the tabloid press, but the content itself offers no comfort to the prophets of doom and the pundits of gloom. The human reality that is under scrutiny here remains defiant of the Clash of Civilizations rationale and endorses no theory of history, whether underpinned by doctrinaire secularism or dogmatic faith, as anything but wishful thinking. Neither the dystopian nightmare of ‘the enlightened’, nor the apocalyptic doom of the ‘rightly-guided’, may thus detract us from envisioning a politics of humanity that unfortunately until now has appeared as an oxymoron in theory and a pipe-dream in practice. The sociological model of politics and the secularist discourse of modernity that have been commissioned, with keenness and alacrity, in the service of a putatively neutral humanism certainly enhance our understanding of current tensions and conflicts. And yet there is no denying that the sociological perspective also contributes to the impoverishment of the true image of man. At any rate, it fails to register the spiritual anguish of those for whom being human entails transcending the immanence of the event – the metaphysical bedrock of sociology – and its attendant discourses.