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On Tuesday, April 7, 2026, from 12:30–1:30 PM US EST, Professor Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California) gave a talk on his publication The Islamic Secular (Oxford University Press, 2023). The basic point of the secular in the modern West was to “liberate” certain pursuits—the state, the economy, and science—from the authority of religion. This was also assumed to be the goal and meaning of “secular” in Islam. Professor Jackson argued, however, that this assumption was wrong. In Islam, the “secular” was neither outside “religion” nor a rival to it. “Religion” in Islam was not identical to Islam’s “sacred law,” or “sharīʿa,” nor did classical Muslim jurists see sharīʿa as the all-encompassing, exclusive means of determining what was “Islamic.” In fact, while—as religion—Islam’s jurisdiction was unlimited, sharīʿa’s jurisdiction—as a sacred law—was limited. In other words, while everything remained within the purview of the divine gaze of the God of Islam, not everything could be determined by sharīʿa or on the basis of its revelatory sources. Various aspects of state policy, the economy, science, and the like were “differentiated” from sharīʿa and its revelatory sources without becoming non-religious or un-Islamic. Given the asymmetry between the circumference of sharīʿa and that of Islam as religion, not everything that fell outside the former fell outside the latter. In other words, an idea or action could be non-sharʿī (not dictated by sharīʿa) without being non-Islamic, let alone anti-Islam. The ideas and actions that fell into this category were what Jackson termed “the Islamic Secular.” Crucially, the Islamic Secular differed from the Western secular in that, while the whole point of the Western secular was to liberate various pursuits from religion, the Islamic Secular differentiated these disciplines not from religion but simply from sharīʿa. Similarly, while both secularization and secularism played key roles in the Western secular, both of these concepts were alien to the Islamic Secular, as the Islamic Secular sought neither to discipline nor to displace religion, nor to expand its own jurisdiction at religion’s expense. The Islamic Secular was a complement to religion, in effect, a “religious secular.” Nowhere were the practical implications of this more impactful than in Islam’s relationship with the modern state. In his book, Jackson made the case for the Islamic Secular on the basis of Islam’s own pre-modern juristic tradition and showed how the Islamic Secular impacted the relationship between Islam and the modern state, including the Islamic State. Watch the video today!