ABSTRACT
By the early eighties, however, those whom we call the Islamic liberals had already begun to take the fundamentalists to task, especially with regard to their concepts of jahiliyya and hakimiyya and their emphasis on the ‘politicality’ of Islam. 1 Writers who are representative of this liberal Islamic trend are so far mainly, though not exclusively, Egyptian; but whatever is written in Egypt is, of course, read all over the Arab world. This is understandable as Egypt not only hosts the largest and most varied Islamic movement in the Arab world, but is also one of the countries with the longest secular ‘tradition’ in the region. It should perhaps also be mentioned in passing that the ‘Christian liberals’ have also started to answer back, both to the proponents of ‘political Islam’ and, sometimes, to the proponents of ‘political Christianity’. 2
The debate was revived in several explicit and implicit ways over a reconsideration of Shaikh ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq’s thesis of the mid twenties (‘Abd al-Raziq, 1966) that Islam was a religion (din) and not a State (dawla). Interestingly enough, another al-Azhar shaikh, Khalid Muhammad Khalid, had in the late forties arrived at a similar conclusion without having read ‘Abd al-Raziq’s book (K. Khalid, 1950). Both writers had argued that there is very little of a purely political nature stipulated in the Quran, that the political formulas adopted by the Muslims later on, such as the khilafa, were human improvisations, and that the insistence on merging religion with politics would threaten to harm both.
