ABSTRACT
Islam is often presented as not just a “religion,” as understood in the “West,” but as a comprehensive and all-encompassing way of life that is static, unchanging, and monolithic; one that has fused the sacred with the profane, the religious with the secular, the temporal with the spiritual, and religion (din) with the state (dawla). Any attempt to demarcate such boundaries in order to privatize religion and prevent the fusion of religion and state, they would argue, would be tantamount to disfiguring Islam's original and pristine teachings, the mandate of which covers the public order as well as personal spirituality and ethics. This monolithic worldview, which conflates “religion” with “state,” has led some pundits, Islamophobes, and Shari'a-phobes to assert the existence of an inherent incompatibility between Islam and liberal democratic norms, values, and institutions; between Islam and human, gender, and minority rights. Ernest Gellner was convinced that Islam was an exception among world civilizations, for it is so tightly insulated from, impervious to, and resistant at all social layers to the influences of secularization that it contains not a glimmer of hope for establishing a civil society. 2 In other words, there is no scope for setting up a vibrant and a creative paradigm of ijtihad to deal with modern challenges and complexities.
