Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Pluralistic Frameworks of Ibn Rushd and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
  • Ayesha Omar, University of the Witwatersrand and SOAS, University of London
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2025
Print publication year:
2025
Online ISBN:
9781009386333
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009386333
Subjects:
Political Theory, Politics and International Relations, Comparative Politics
Series:
Elements in Comparative Political Theory
Information

Book description

The purpose of this Element is to analyse the assiduous attempts of two Islamic political thinkers-the 12th century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and the contemporary Sudanese reformist Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im-to theorise Islamic politics through an approach the author refers to as 'pluralistic frameworks'. A pluralistic framework, is a systematic mediation of Islamic ethics and politics that incorporates extra-Islamic traditions of thought from diverse sources. Pluralistic frameworks selectively and self-consciously enable dialogue, synthesis, and hybridity and seek to maintain a distinct conception of Islamic ethics that concords with a preferred set of political arguments. They enable reflexivity within the ethical purview of Islam and with an awareness of the normativity of sharī'a.Both Ibn Rushd and An-Na'im reconcile sharī'a in two very different ways, but to a common end; Ibn Rushd lays out a method of harmonisation with Greek thought, while An-Na'im resorts to the radical subversion of sharia under liberal thought.

References

Bibliography

Abou El Fadl, K. (2013). ‘The sharīʿa’. In Esposito, J. & Shahin, E. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (pp. 7–26). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Adamson, P. & Di Giovanni, M. (eds.). (2018). Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anjum, O. (2007). Islam as a discursive tradition: Talal Asad and his interlocutors. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27(3), pp. 656–672.
Anjum, O. (2012). Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
An-Na’im, A. A. (1986). The Islamic law of apostasy and its modern applicability: A case from the Sudan. Religion, 16(3), 197–224.
An-Na’im, A. A. (1990). Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
An-Na’im, A. A. (ed.) (1992). Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
An-Na’im, A. A. (1998). Shari’a and positive legislation: Is an Islamic state possible or viable? Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, 5(1), pp. 29–41.
An-Na’im, A. A. (2008). Islam and the Secular State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
An-Na’im, A. A. (2014). Islamic politics and the neutral state: A friendly amendment to Rawls? In Bailey, T. & Gentile, V. (eds.), Rawls and Religion (pp. 242–265). New York: Columbia University Press.
Aristotle, (1996). The Politics and Constitution of Athens, ed. Everson, S., trans. B. Jowett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle, (2000). Nicomachean Ethics, trans. R. Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arkoun, M. (1994). Rethinking Islam today. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 588(1), pp. 18–39.
Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad, T. (1999). Religion, nation-state, secularism. In van der Veer, P. & Hartmut, L. (eds.), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (pp. 178–196). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Asad, T. (2009). The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Qui parle, 17(2), pp. 1–30.
Auda, J. (2008). Maqasid Al-Shari’ah as Philosophy of Islamic Law. London: International Institute of Islamic Thought.
Bauer, T. (2021). A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam. New York: Columbia University Press.
Belo, C. (2022). Averroes on family and property in the Commentary on Plato’s ‘Republic’. In Orwin, A. (ed.), Plato’s Republic in the Islamic Context: New Perspectives on Averroes’s Commentary (pp. 113–132). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
Berman, L. V. (1967). Excerpts from the lost Arabic original of Ibn Rushd’s ‘Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics’. Oriens, 20, pp. 31–59.
Bilgrami, A. (2012). Secularism: Its content and context. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(4), pp. 89–100.
Black, A. (2001). The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bouhafa, F. (2019). Averroes’ corrective philosophy of law. In Adamson, P. & Giovanni, Matteo Di (eds.), Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays (pp. 64–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butterworth, C. (2004). Ethical and political philosophy. In Adamson, P. & Taylor, R. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (pp. 266–286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connolly, W. E. (1999). Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dallmayr, F. (2004). Beyond monologue: For a comparative political theory. Perspectives on Politics, 2(2), pp. 249–257.
Devji, F. & Kazmi, Z. (eds.). (2017). Islam after Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Di Giovanni, M. (2018). Averroes, philosopher of Islam. In Adamson, P. & Giovanni, Matteo Di (eds.), Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays. (pp. 9–26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eickelman, D. & Piscatori, J. (1996). Muslim Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
El Amine, L. (2016). Beyond East and West: Reorienting political theory through the prism of modernity. Perspectives on Politics, 14(1), pp. 102–120.
El Shamsy, A. (2013). The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emon, A. M. (2010). Islamic Natural Law Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.
Euben, R. L. (1997). Comparative political theory: An Islamic fundamentalist critique of rationalism. Journal of Politics, 59(1), pp. 28–55.
Euben, R. L. (1999). Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fadel, M. (2008). The true, the good and the reasonable: The theological and ethical roots of public reason in Islamic law. Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, 21(1), pp. 5–69.
Fadl, K. A. (2014). Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Fadl, K. A. (2017). Qur’anic ethics and Islamic law. Journal of Islamic Ethics, 1(1/2), pp. 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1163/24685542-12340002.
Fakhry, M. (1991). Ethical Theories in Islam. Leiden: Brill.
Fakhry, M. (2001). Averroës: His Life, Works and Influence. Oxford: Oneworld.
Gellner, E. (1991). Islam and Marxism: Some comparisons. International Affairs, 67(1), pp. 1–6.
Ghannouchi, R. (2022). Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, trans. D. Johnston. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ghannouchi, R. & March, A. F. (2023). On Muslim Democracy: Essays and Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gutas, D. (2002). The study of Arabic philosophy in the twentieth century: An essay on the historiography of Arabic philosophy. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29(1), pp. 5–25.
Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1995). Reconciliation through the public use of reason: Remarks on John Rawls’ political liberalism. Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), pp. 109–131.
Habermas, J. (2006). Religion in the public sphere. European Journal of Philosophy, 14, pp. 1–25.
Habermas, J. (2008). Notes on post‐secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), pp. 17–29.
Haidar, H. H. (2006). Rawls and religion: Between the decency and justice of reasonable religious regimes. Politics and Ethics Review, 2(1), pp. 62–78.
Hallaq, W. B. (1984). Was the gate of ijtihad closed? International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16(1), pp. 3–41.
Hallaq, W. B. (2002). The quest for origins or doctrine: Islamic legal studies as colonialist discourse. UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law, 2(1), pp. 1–32.
Hallaq, W. B. (2011). Maqasid and the challenges of modernity. Al-Jami’ah: Journal of Islamic Studies, 49(1), pp. 1–31.
Hallaq, W. B. (2013) . The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament. New York: Columbia University Press.
Harvey, R. (2023). Whose justice? When Maturidi meets MacIntyre. Justice in Islam: New Ethical Perspectives. London: International Institute of Islamic Thought.
Hashemi, N. (2009). Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hefner, R. W. (2020). Islam and covenantal pluralism in Indonesia: A critical juncture analysis. Review of Faith & International Affairs, 18(2), pp. 1–17.
Hobbes, T. ([1651] 2008). Leviathan (Gaskin, J.C.A Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hoover, J. (2007). Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism. Leiden: Brill.
Hourani, A. (1983). Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hourani, G. H. (1961). Introduction and notes. In Hourani, G. H. (ed.), Averroës: On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (pp. 1–43). London: Luzac.
Hourani, G. F. (1985). Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, W. S. (2001). Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and the Republican Brotherhood: Transforming Islamic society. Journal for Islamic Studies, 21, pp. 71–84.
Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), pp. 22–28.
Rushd, Ibn. (1954). The Incoherence of the Incoherence, trans. S. van den Bergh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rushd, Ibn. (1961). On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. G. H. Hourani. London: Luzac.
Rushd, Ibn. (1974). Averroes Commentary on Plato’s Republic, trans. R. Lerner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Rushd, Ibn. (2000). The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer (2 vols.), trans. Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee. Reading: Garnet.
Rushd, Ibn (2001). Exposition on Religious Arguments, trans. E. Najjar. Oxford: Oneworld.
Idris, M. (2018). War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Idris, M. (2021a). Islam, Rawls, and the disciplinary limits of late twentieth-century liberal philosophy. Modern Intellectual History, 18(4), pp. 1034–1057.
Idris, M. (2021b). The Kazanistan Papers: Reading the Muslim Question in the John Rawls Archives. Perspectives on Politics, 19(1), pp. 110–130.
Iqtidar, H. (2011). Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Iqtidar, H. (2016). Redefining ‘tradition’ in political thought. European Journal of Political Theory, 15(4), pp. 424–444.
Iqtidar, H. (2017). Introduction: Tolerance in modern Islamic thought. ReOrient, 2(1), pp. 5–11.
Iqtidar, H. (2020). Theorizing popular sovereignty in the colony: Abul Aʿla Maududi’s ‘Theodemocracy’. Review of Politics, 82(4), pp. 595–617.
Iqtidar, H. (2021). Jizya against nationalism: Abul a‘la Maududi’s attempt at decolonizing political theory. Journal of Politics, 83(3), pp. 1145–1157.
Iqtidar, H. & Scharbordt, O. (2022). Divine sovereignty, morality and the state: Maududi and his influence. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 32(2), pp. 277–293.
Jackson, S. A. (2002). On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abmid Al-Ghazâlî’s Fay al Al-Tafriqa Bayna Al-Islâm Wa Al-Zandaqa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jenco, L. K. (2011). Recentering political theory: The promise of mobile locality. Cultural Critique, 79, pp. 27–59.
Jenco, L. K., Idris, M., & Thomas, M. C. (2020). Introduction. In Comparison, Connectivity, and Disconnection (pp. 1–40). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kaminski, J. J. (2017). The Contemporary Islamic Governed State: A Reconceptualization. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.
Kant, I. (1998). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. ([1785] 2012). Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khan, S. (2017). Fallacies of foundational principles: Rawls’s political liberalism and Islamophobia. ReOrient, 3(1), pp. 50–64.
Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leaman, O. (1980). Ibn Rushd on happiness and philosophy. Studia Islamica, 52(1), pp. 167–181.
Leaman, O. (1988). Averroës and His Philosophy. Surrey: Curzon.
Leaman, O. (2014). Controversies in Contemporary Islam. New York: Routledge.
Lerner, R. (1974). Introduction and notes. In Lerner, R. (ed.), Averroës on Plato’s Republic (pp. xiii–xxviii). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lewis, B. (2002). What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press.
Locke, J. ([1689] 1980). Second Treatise of Eovernment, ed. Macpherson, C. B.. Cambridge: Hackett.
MacIntyre, A. ([1981] 2007). After Virtue. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Makdisi, G. (1991). Religion, Law and Learning in Classical Islam. New York: Routledge.
March, A. F. (2008). Islamic Legal Theory, Secularism and Religious Pluralism: Is Modern Religious Freedom Sufficient for the Shariʿa ‘Purpose [Maqsid]’ of ‘Preserving Religion [Hifz Al-Din]?’ Islamic Law and Law of the Muslim World Paper No. 09–78, Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 208.
March, A. F. (2009). What is comparative political theory? Review of Politics, 71(4), pp. 531–565.
March, A. F. (2011). Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
March, A. F. (2012). Islamic political thought. In Gaus, G., D’Agostino, F., & Muldoon, R. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy (pp. 204–214). New York: Routledge.
March, A. F. (2015). Political Islam: Theory. Annual Review of Political Science, 18(1), pp. 103–123.
March, A. F. (2019). The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
March, A. F. (2023). After sovereignty: From a hegemonic to agonistic Islamic political thought. Political Theory, 52(2), pp. 259–288.
Marenbon, J. (2007). Latin Averroism. In Akasoy, A., Montgomery, J. E., & Pormann, P. E. (eds.), Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East (pp. 135–147). Exeter: Short Run Press.
Maududi, A. A. (1960). The Islamic Law and Constitution, ed. and trans. Ahmed, K.. Lahore: Islamic Publications.
Nanji, A. (1991). Islamic ethics. In Singer, P. (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (pp. 106–118). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Sullivan, D. P. (2003). Punishing apostasy: The case of Islam and Shari’a law re-considered (Doctoral dissertation, Durham University).
Omar, A. (2019). Ibn Rushd’s The Decisive Treatise: A text for political reform. Medieval History Journal, 22(1), pp. 131–155.
Philpott, D. (2008). Arguing with An- Na’im. Immanent Frame. 14 July. Accessed 2 June 2023. http://blogs.ssrc.org/ tif/ 2008/07/14/ arguing-with-annaim.
Qutb, S. (1996). Social Justice in Islam, trans. W. E. Shepard. Leiden: Brill.
Qutb, S. (2006). Milestones, ed. al-Mehri, A. B.. Birmingham: Maktabah.
Rahman, F. (1982). Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rawls, J. (1993a). The law of peoples. Critical Inquiry, 20(1), pp. 36–68.
Rawls, J. (1993b). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, J. (1997). The idea of public reason revisited. University of Chicago Law Review, 64(3), pp. 765–807.
Razek, A. A. (2012). Islam and the Foundations of Political Power, trans. M. Loutfi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rosenthal, E. I. J. (1953). The place of politics in the philosophy of Ibn Rushd. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 15(2), pp. 246–278.
Rosenthal, E. I. J. (1956). Introduction and notes. In Rosenthal, E. I. J. (ed.), Averroës Commentary on Plato’s Republic (pp. 1–18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roy, O. (1994). The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.
Schacht, J. (1964). An Introduction to Islamic Law. Oxford: Clarendon.
Soroush, A. (1998). The evolution and devolution of religious knowledge. In Kurzman, C. (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (pp. 244–251). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stewart, D. J. (2015). Shari’a. In Bowering, G. (ed.), Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction (pp. 219–237). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Strauss, L. (1988). Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Taha, M. M. (1987). The Second Message of Islam. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Taliaferro, K. (2017). Ibn Rushd and natural law: Mediating human and divine law. Journal of Islamic Studies, 28(1), pp. 1–27.
Tampio, N. (2014). Islamic political thought. In Gibbons, T. (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (pp. 1–10). Oxford: Blackwell.
Urvoy, D. (1991). Ibn Rushd (Averroes). London: Routledge.
Von Kügelgen, A., A Call for Rationalism: “Arab Averroists” in the Twentieth Century, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 16, 97–132.
Wilson, M. B. (2008). The failure of nomenclature: The concept of ‘orthodoxy’ in the study of Islam. Comparative Islamic Studies, 3(2), p. 169.
Zaman, M. Q. (2012). Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.