become modern enough. Muslims waited quite patiently—from the end of the colonial era until roughly the late 1970s—before returning to Islam. There was nothing natural or eternal about the appeal of Islam as a total way of life, and Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Mawdudi alone could not have changed many minds if the conditions were not suitable for that. Indeed, during their own lifetimes, both had little effect on the political systems of their national societies. The fact that so much political energy is credited to their legacy now belies the fact that, given a different set of conditions (see above for a short list of tasks), history could have taken a different turn, and Islam, while remaining important as a reference point for most Muslims, would not have required being “tamed.” What an-Na’im advocates now would in all likelihood have been accepted without needing a book to be written about it.
The arguments of the book are of course very sound. Yet, as tremendously learned, wide ranging and probing as they are, I am afraid they do not address the real problem. The problem, for me, has less to do with arguments about how we should understand Islam, and more with the nature of social and political developments befuddling Muslim societies. A liberal interpretation of Islam, or at least an interpretation that accommodates (or, as in this case, demands) a secular state, can indeed be based on the Islamic heritage itself. So can an authoritarian, dogmatic and intolerant interpretation mandating a state that applies the shari’a as law, and then really only one version of such shari’a.
The question therefore is not which Islam is “true,” or even what kind of arguments are needed in order to prove one approach to Islam to be more valid than another. If we are speaking of a living, interactive human enterprise, then sociologically speaking, Islam is what Muslims make of it. And in making it fit various needs—political, social, cultural, economic, spiritual—Muslims assert the status of Islam as a living and rich repertoire of ideas. If they continue to see the political, even state-oriented, aspects of it to be virtuous, it is perhaps less so because anyone has persuaded them of the point. It is just that the comparative virtues of the alternative are less obvious than its corruption and subservience to unaccountable foreign patrons. I am speaking of course of the secular state, which ruled most of the Muslim world in the 20th century. Obviously that state was far from the ideal that an-Na’im has in mind. Still, that is what many Muslims have experienced as secular rule. As such, it remains for the secular state to prove its virtues before its “citizens,” whether committed Muslims or not, may finally recognize it as theirs.