خلاصه ماشینی:
It is only fitting, therefore, that an academic journal on Islam and Muslims should embrace both defenders and critics of any given tradition, genealogists and systematic defenders of Islamic tradition(s), those who work within and without an Islamic (or any other) tradition, and, finally, those who write within the secular disciplinary traditions comprising the humanities and social sci ences as well as those who investigate Islam from within a normative tradition.
This is what Professor Sherman Jackson means by “the Islamic secular,” and it is in this sense that the Qur’an calls upon Muslims to seek the good of both worlds: “Our Lord, grant us in this [secular] life what is good and in the afterlife what is good, and save us from the Fire” (Q.
Secularism’s (insider) observers often suggest that, like all human projects that have risen to the level of epochal presences or self-evident truths, it is both a thing to be understood and critiqued yet also a condition of modern life, an inevitability that one can neither fully understand nor opt out of.
For Muslim scholars and intellectuals, understanding secularism qua Muslimsthrough the lens of a coherent Islamic tradition is a task of the high est priority, one that requires understanding secularism not merely as an ide ology or a competing religion, which is how many have construed it, but also as a background framing modern institutions, scientific knowledge, and epis temology.
Despite secularism’s history and reputation, political or institutional sec ularism, which postulates the state’s neutrality with respect to religion, has appeared seductive to even religious thinkers, Muslims included, for its prom ise of social peace.