ABSTRACT
The compatibility of shari’ah and secular, national law as part of modernization has been a long-standing debate within the Islamic world. Meanwhile, dependency theory often mixes with explanations of specifically Islamic approaches to development as result of a perception that the Islamic world has lagged behind the West. This matters for the modernization concept itself, because it has led to a fractured response within the Islamic world under which, at one extreme, some abandoned religion as cultural hindrance to development (for example, Kemal Attaturk as aggressive secularist in Turkey), while at another extreme others have rejected all things Western, seeing heightened attention to Islam and concepts like specifically Islamic sciences as the answer, which folds back on itself as an entire debate within Islam about authenticity and interpretation (bin Muhammad 1996; El-Ansary and Linnan 2010). So the whole concept of modernization itself has a special significance in the Islamic world in political and legal terms.
