Abbasi, Rushain 2020 - Did Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish The Religious and Secular? The Din-Dunya Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought

Journal of Islamic Studies 0:0 (2020) pp. 1–42 doi:10.
1093/jis/etz048
DID PREMODERN MUSLIMS DISTINGUISH

THE RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR? THE
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D>N–DUNY2 BINARY IN MEDIEVAL
ISLAMIC THOUGHT
R U SH A IN A B BA S I*
Harvard University
INTRODUCTION
Within both scholarly and popular understandings of Islam, one

frequently comes across the assertion that premodern Muslims never
distinguished the religious from the secular and that, on the contrary,
Islam pervaded all facets of life. It is an idea so widely held, in fact, that a
group as inimical as an orientalist, an Islamist, and a critical theorist can
find common ground in it.1 According to this view, these categories were
* My thanks, first and foremost, to Michael Cook for his meticulous editing,
critical questioning, and strong encouragement of an early draft of this paper. My
thanks also to the remaining members of the Spring 2016 paper clinic at
Princeton: Alexander Balistreri, Cecilia Palombo, and Wasim Shiliwala, all of
whom spent several weeks with the paper and provided very helpful suggestions.
I would also like to thank Khaled El-Rouayheb, Noah Feldman, Jonathan
Brown, and my wife, Safia Latif, for reading the paper in its entirety and offering
valuable feedback and suggestions. Finally, my thanks to the anonymous
reviewers of the Journal for their critical, yet constructive comments that have
proven not only useful for the article itself, but for my dissertation project as a
whole.
1
Thus, the popular Islamic historian Bernard Lewis writes: ‘such pairs of
words as. . .religious and secular have no equivalents in the classical languages of
the Muslim peoples’. Bernard Lewis, Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the
Capture of Constantinople: War and Politics: Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974), xvi. The now infamous Egyptian writer, Sayyid Qu3b,
presents an analogous position: ‘the idea that religion is separate from worldly
affairs did not arise in the Islamic world nor was it ever known to Islam’. William
E. Shepherd, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical
Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 2. Timothy Fitzgerald, a
prolific theorist in the study of religion, has devoted several works to arguing that
the two fixed categories of the religious and secular are novel to modern Europe
ß The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for
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2 ru sh ai n ab ba si
invented in early modern Europe and therefore sit uncomfortably within
the Islamic context. My article aims to problematize this uncontested
claim by illustrating how the medieval d;n;–dunyaw; distinction repre-
sents an autochthonous Islamic binary akin to the modern religious and

secular.
Of course, one must surely admit that the political doctrine of
secularism, based on the principled separation of religion and state, was
never a conceivable option in the Islamic past. Likewise, the allegedly
inevitable process of secularization, broadly characterized as the gradual
decrease in relevance of religion to public and political life, has in fact
been challenged by the continued politicization of Islam in the
contemporary Muslim world. Yet it remains to be seen to what extent
the category of ‘the secular’, which at its most basic level conceptually
signifies the realm of the non-religious, can be usefully attached to
Islamic civilization. It is this question that will reside at the heart of my
inquiry.
It is the late Shahab Ahmed, in his provocative and ambitious, What is
Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, who makes one of the more
cogent and rigorous arguments to date against the existence of a
religious–secular distinction in Islamic thought.2 I will therefore begin
with a theoretical critique of his approach, which will help situate my
own investigation. On balance, Ahmed reaffirms the current orthodoxy
in claiming that Muslims did not historically understand their world in
terms of a religious–secular binary and that this dichotomous view of the
world is the sheer product of the unique historical experiences of the
modern West.
Ahmed’s claim is not without precedent, which he duly acknowledges.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith was the first to question the category of
‘religion’, and, by implication, its counterpart of ‘the secular’.3 In his The
Meaning and End of Religion, he argues that scholars of religion should
do away with the category of ‘religion’ as a whole since it is not in itself
and absent in non-Western traditions like Islam. See his Discourse on Civility and
Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
2
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
3
Although he focuses on the category of ‘religion’, at one point in his book
Smith writes more explicitly that ‘The differentiation between a secular social
sphere and a sphere of religion is not quite shared by the Islamic world’: Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the
Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963 [Fortress Press,
1991]), 92.
3
‘an intelligible entity’ nor ‘a valid object of inquiry’.4 He makes his case
through a learned account of the modern reification of personal pious
feelings into an abstract universal category called ‘religion’. Although his
argument problematized the category of religion in the field of religious

studies, the term ‘religion’ still seems to hold normative weight in most
other academic disciplines and broader public discourse. A more direct
precursor to Ahmed’s arguments can be found in the work of the above
mentioned religious studies scholar, Timothy Fitzgerald, who has waged
a more direct critique against the religious–secular binary.5 Fitzgerald
makes the crucial observation that the construction of mutually
implicated ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ categories was integral to European
colonial discourses and should therefore be viewed with suspicion when
employed to describe non-European populations. Therefore, reading a
separation between religion and non-religion into these societies is ‘to
muddy the waters before immersing in them’.6
Ahmed and his predecessors do well to dislodge Euro- and modern-
centric readings of Islam, which often anachronistically project modern
categories and distinctions onto premodern Muslim societies that might
never have existed. However, in their attempt to challenge Eurocentric
views of Islam, these scholars fall into an unconscious Eurocentrism of
their own making.7 By basing their conclusions about the Islamic past on
theoretical critiques of European modernity instead of the indigenous
sources themselves, they place modern European history at the very
centre of their analysis of premodern Muslim societies. This obstructs the
ability of premodern Muslims to speak for themselves and reduces them
to simply acting as Western modernity’s antithesis. Hence, in their
treatments of the religious–secular division in Islam, there is little to no
textual analysis of what Muslims have actually had to say on this issue. It
is of course likely that premodern Muslims may not have shared the
4
Ibid, 12.
5
See his The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003) and Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. In a private conversation,
Ahmed informed me of the deep influence Fitzgerald’s work had on some of the
ideas presented in What is Islam?.
6
Timothy Fitzgerald, ‘Introduction’ in Timothy Fitzgerald (ed.), Religion and
the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London: Equinox, 2007), 7.
7
Anna Akasoy makes a similar point with regard to Orientalism: ‘the idea of
a Western, (early) modern, Orientalist construction of ‘‘religion’’ is itself
Orientalist since it does not consider the possibility that the category existed in
other historical and cultural spheres. . .’: Anna Ayşe Akasoy, ‘Al-Ghaz:l;’s Veil
Section: Comparative Religion before Religionswissenschaft?’ in Georges Tamer
and Frank Griffel (eds.), Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al-Ghaz:l;:
Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary (Leiden: Brill, 2015–16), ii. 150.
modern European concepts of the religious and secular, but it does not
necessarily follow that they did not articulate and develop an analogous
categorization of their own.
Ahmed, in line with the views cited above, claims in strong terms that

the distinction of the religious and secular is ‘a defining constitutive
element of the infrastructure and cosmology of the Western Modern’ and
that therefore, ‘the natural order of a world in which the ‘‘religious’’ is
self-evidently distinguishable from the ‘‘non-religious’’ ’ did not exist in
historically Muslim societies.8 Ahmed is right in recognizing that the
religious–secular binary is integral to the construction of the image of
the modern Western world.9 The rigid ideological separation of the
‘religious’ and ‘secular’ and the commitment to actively separating them
is a patent feature of Western modernity at-large. Some modern states
have pursued moderate courses of accomodationism, while others have
deliberately policed religion in order to prevent it from disrupting the
‘secular’ public sphere.10 Consequently, one of the persistent problems
facing Western states—and consequently many post-colonial states—is
the deeper ontological question of determining what is and is not
religious. This should certainly caution us against carelessly conflating
the modern religious and secular binary with the categories used by
premodern Muslims. However, does its novel usage in the modern world
entail that the distinction is itself new, or could it have had some basis in
the past? Could not these categories have been used in different ways in
8
Ahmed, What is Islam?, 178.
9
In acknowledging this, I do not mean to say that these categories are not
contested in multiple ways today in the West, which they of course are, but
simply that in the larger ideal narrative of the rise of the modern West presented
in histories and popular culture, this division is of central importance and largely
viewed as unproblematic. The recent hit television series ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime
Odyssey’, narrated by popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example,
presents the simplistic picture of the victory of the secular realm as represented
by science over the narrow confines of religion.
10
The most visible example of this is found in the French doctrine of laı̈cité
clearly presented in the founding document of the French Revolution: ‘No one
shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views,
provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by
law’; 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man translated by The Avalon Project at
Yale Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp (emphasis
mine). This also carries over into the Muslim world, as can be seen in the
constitution of the modern Turkish state: ‘All religious observances shall be free
on condition that they do not disturb the public peace. . .’; Edward Mead Earle,
‘The New Constitution of Turkey’, Political Science Quarterly, 40/1 (1925): 73–
100, at 97 (emphasis mine).
5
the premodern Muslim context? These are important questions to ask if
we are to argue for or against the existence of a religious–secular
distinction in premodern Islam.
Despite the deeply historical nature of his work, Ahmed does not

engage in a historical analysis suitable to the task of addressing the
questions above and substantiating his theoretical suppositions. He
conducts a general survey of Islamic history in its premodern manifest-
ations, thereupon conceptualizing how it functions as a coherent
phenomenon, and consequently decides whether or not this conceptu-
alization aligns with modern categories. Frankly, such a framework is set
up to support the argument of non-translatability since the sheer amount
of difference in time and space will likely present stark differences. An
issue as complex as the existence of the religious and secular in Islamic
civilization requires precisely what Ahmed calls for in grasping the
‘native’s model of Islam’.11 But on this issue Ahmed does not sufficiently
examine the evidence for precisely what he denied existed, which reveals
that his conclusions in this regard stem more from the theoretical
orientation discussed above than a rigorous historical inquiry.
Such an investigation would require a deep engagement with the most
likely corollary of the religious–secular distinction in Islam, namely, the
d;n–duny: binary. Commonly translated as ‘religion’ and ‘this world’—
and often used in juxtaposition to one another—the relationship between
these two terms merits close examination. Ahmed, however, devotes only
two pages to this topic in a brief engagement with the short Encyclopedia
of Islam entry on ‘d;n’ by Louis Gardet.12 He criticizes Gardet for trying
to maintain both d;n and duny: as ‘undoubted opposites’, whilst
11
This is the phrase Abu Hamid El-Zein uses in an influential article
proposing his theory of equally valid ‘Islams’, which Ahmed cites in agreement;
see El-Zein, ‘Beyond Ideology and Theology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 6
(1977): 227–54, at 251; Ahmed, What is Islam?, 134–5. El-Zein’s view is that
local traditions of Islam are no less valid than the so-called ‘great’ traditions of
the ulema, and they must therefore be equally accounted for within academic
studies of Muslim societies. Brad Gregory, in a similar vein, has called on
historians of religion to try to ‘see things their way’, which requires
‘understanding religious people on their own terms’, ‘reconstructing the way in
which they viewed themselves and their world’, and ‘depicting them in a manner
in which they would have recognized themselves’: Brad S. Gregory, ‘Can we ‘‘See
Things Their Way’’? Should we Try?’ in Brad S. Gregory, John Coffey and Alister
Chapman (eds.), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of
Religion (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2009), 25.
12
Ahmed, What is Islam?, 194–5. The article by Gardet is L. Gardet, ‘D;n’ in
B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht et. al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Islam (New
Edition), Volume II (Leiden, 1965), 293–6.
simultaneously attempting to present d;n as encompassing duny:. Ahmed
characterizes this view as contradictory and suggests instead that a
proper understanding of the ‘interactive d;n and duny: dynamic’ requires
moving beyond the modern religious–secular divide.13 In fact, Gardet

was onto something profound and instead of writing his interpretation
off as contradictory, I will try to show that this is precisely how many
premodern Muslim thinkers conceptualized these categories.
This article offers a conceptual historical analysis of the categories of
d;n and duny: in medieval Islamic thought in order to reveal to what
extent it can be seen as an analogue to the religious–secular distinction in
the modern world. In my use of ‘analogue’, I draw on the distinction of
‘homology’ and ‘analogue’ first conceived within the field of religious
studies by Jonathan Z. Smith.14 The former characterizes the search for
one-to-one equivalents of certain concepts across religious traditions,
which betrays a bias that presumes the existence of an equivalent word in
a foreign tradition for a certain Western concept. Analogies on the other
hand look for categories or terms that do the same kind of work within
similar contexts. In my case, this means the pursuit of a conceptual
binary fundamentally based on the difference of the ritualistic,
13
14
Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early
Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 1990). A good use of this distinction has recently been made
in an excellent article by Robert Ford Campany on the category of the ‘religious’
in premodern China: Robert Ford Campany, ‘ ‘‘Religious’’ as a Category: A
Comparative Case Study’, Numen, 65/4 (2018): 333–76, at 335–8. I do take
some issue, however, with this analytical distinction insofar as it represents a
certain postmodernist positioning that lacks any grounding. Drawing on the field
of biology, homologies occur when similar structures and traits are found in
animals due to their common descent (e.g., the existence of fins amongst fish),
whereas analogies are to be understood as those similarities that are found
without any common descent. Smith and Campany take issue with the former as
used within the realm of ideas and concepts, since a common descent, they allege,
would promote a universalistic stance that would erase cultural differences.
Personally, I’m not so sure why this apprehension against common descent or
genealogy is required in studying concepts across various human traditions, since
we are, after all, literally a part of the same species (that is, of common descent).
Drawing on the field of CSR (Cognitive Science of Religion), one might even say
that many of these concepts, which can be found across a variety of human
cultures, are simply the products of the way in which our human minds are
wired. Nevertheless, I do find utility in the distinction insofar as it helpfully
cautions us against universalizing modern Western concepts that may well be
nothing more than novel ideas produced within the past few centuries, a mistake
many a scholar has fallen into.
7
theological, and legalistic elements of Islam from all other worldly
matters, as is the case with the common understanding of ‘religion’ and
‘the secular’ today. Thus, my aim is not to search for the ‘religious’ and
‘secular’ in Islamic history, but rather something like this distinction.

My primary method in selecting passages from the wide corpus of
medieval Islamic thought is to focus on the utilization of the adjectival
forms of the words d;n and duny:: d;n; and dunyaw;.15 Examining how
these terms are used as descriptors gives us a sense of their common
connotations and the function of their usage. Although my study spans
multiple genres, diverse geographic regions, and several centuries, it is
not meant to be exhaustive nor representative of the entirety of the
premodern Islamic tradition, nor is it meant to be the final word on
the d;n–duny: binary. I have chosen to focus on popular writers from the
medieval period (roughly the eleventh to fifteenth centuries), all of whom
I believe are justifiably representative of various well-known streams of
Islamic thought at their times. Additionally, many of these works were
widely read and thus one can presume that many other Muslim writers
were familiar with and approving of the language employed in these
works, including the d;n;–duny:w; distinction. The passages I cite are
not intentional discussions about the terms d;n or duny: precisely
because I am more interested in how these terms were unself-consciously
used by multiple authors writing on various subjects.16
My paper will demonstrate that the medieval d;n–duny: binary
represented a conceptual separation of the world into distinct religious
and non-religious spheres analogous to the modern religious–secular,
with things like worship, prayer, and divine law on one side and all
worldly matters on the other. Similar to the modern conception, wherein
‘the secular’ is effectively equivalent to the ‘non-religious’, the Arabic
15
These can be compared to the adjectival forms of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’:
‘religious’ and ‘secular’.
16
One might object to my selection of sources: I have only included the works
of scholars writing in Arabic (with the exception of one text). This decision is not
intended to exclude or deemphasize the importance of investigating other genres
of writing like poetry or different Islamicate languages like Persian, but is simply
a product of the limitations of an academic article. Likewise, I have limited my
inquiry to the post-formative classical period out of necessity, which again does
not imply that other periods are not equally important. The main question this
essay hopes to resolve, however, is whether there was something like the
religious–secular distinction in premodern Islamic thought and what this would
have meant to those Muslims. If many popular Muslim scholars held this
distinction, then this confirms that there was something like a religious–secular
distinction in the premodern Islamic world, contrary to dominant thinking on the
issue.
term duny:w; is essentially defined by the non-d;n;. In this sense, the
categories are in a mutually-defining relationship, but not necessarily one
of opposition, as will be shown. The duny:w; was also viewed as a more
universal and neutral space, whereas the d;n; was seen as particular and

limited in scope and thus in more need of explication. Furthermore, the
binary was not simply a banal feature of the the Arabic language, but
was actively used to discuss and resolve major issues in Islamic thought.
There are, nevertheless, significant ways in which the d;n;–duny:w;
relationship diverges from the common understanding of the modern
religious–secular. For one, the categories of the d;n; and duny:w; were
never understood in a relationship of mutual opposition, which is the
popular secularist view of the religious and secular today. So, for
example, the idea that religion and state must remain separate was not
conceivable for premodern Muslims. The separationist view of d;n and
duny: that we find among medieval Muslim authors was one of
differentiation; a clear view of distinct aspects of reality, but not
mutually opposing ones. This is why Lewis, Qu3b, and Fitzgerald were
not entirely wrong in their assessments and did well to highlight an
important difference between the Islamic and Western contexts.
Moreover, the view of differentiation was not one universally held and
in what follows I will illustrate the noteworthy differences of approach
to and contention over the d;n; and duny:w;, which displays a spectrum
of viewpoints ranging from strict separationists to non-differentiation-
ists. Interestingly, despite the variety of views, the debate over the d;n;
and duny:w; does not seem to be nearly as paradigmatic to the
premodern Islamic world as the religious–secular binary is to the modern
world, which is another major difference.17 Finally, for many premodern
Muslims the duny:w; realm was always potentially open to the entrance
17
As some scholars have argued, the increased importance of the religious–
secular distinction in the modern world can be attributed to the transformed and
delimited role of religion in modern society, which requires that the religious–
secular question be perpetually raised; however, already in early and medieval
Christian society there was rich debate over the scope of the religious and secular
realms with regard to the question of the papacy’s relationship to temporal
power, a major issue in medieval European intellectual history, which suggests
that the significance of the distinction may go back further than the modern
period. For an overview of this history, see J. A. Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal
Powers’ in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought c. 350–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 367–
423. For the idea that the continuous redrawing of the lines of the religious and
secular is systemic to modern secularism, see Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning
Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and The Role of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 2012).
9
of the d;n;. The d;n; was often seen as above the duny:w; and could
breach it in an almost inverse relationship to the modern religious–
secular distinction, in which it is the secular that sets the terms for
religion.18 Premodern Muslims often maintained a conceptual distinc-

tion of the religious and secular at a primary level, but the former
permeated into the latter at a secondary level, rendering the religious
more powerful in a sense. The idea of a distinction with blurred
boundaries may seem contradictory at first sight, but if we reflect on the
fact that in the modern Western world the secular often regulates the
religious realm despite the widespread belief that the two should remain
separate, the premodern Muslim conception seems less alien than one
might suspect.
THE DIFFERENTIATION OF
D>N AND DUNY2
How did Muslim scholars distinguish the d;n; and duny:w;?

One of the most frequent uses of the d;n;–duny:w; binary among
premodern Muslim scholars is in their interpretation of the blessings
(ni6am) and benefits (manfa6a) of various things. This usage appears most
frequently in the tafs;r literature, but it also makes regular appearances
within other theological and spiritual texts outside the genres of Qur8:n
commentary.19 In many of these instances, Muslims scholars found it
unproblematic and useful to divide blessings and benefits into the d;n;
and duny:w;. This should raise a few eyebrows, but does the division line
18
For a nuanced discussion of this latter point see Asad’s Formations of the
Secular, in which he demonstrates how the category of the secular in the modern
world reconstructs and regulates religion: Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [2003]
2007).
19
I acknowledge the importance of taking into account the different temporal,
geographic, and intellectual contexts of each writer; however, since I am not
making any strong assertions about the writer’s specific ideas or arguments, but
rather attempting to interpret their usage of specific terms in the course of a
variety of discussions, the extent of my contextual engagement with their
writings will be insofar as it assists me in accurately reconstructing the meaning
of the text. I also do not follow any particular chronological order (besides
generally sticking to the above-mentioned time period), but have arranged the
selections according to the most effective presentation of my argument about the
usage of d;n; and duny:w;.
10 r us ha in a bb as i
up with what we would categorize today as religious and secular, or is
there no comparison to be made?
Fakhr al-D;n al-R:z; (d. 606/1209), the renowned Persian theologian,
utilizes the d;n;–duny:w; distinction on multiple occasions in his

voluminous tafs;r.20 Commenting on the verse of the Qur8:n in which
God makes a covenant with the Israelites,21 he explains that this event
displays both the d;n; and duny:w; benefits (manfa6a) of God’s grace. He
considers the covenant to be d;n; and interprets it as the scripture that
God sent down ‘in which there is a clarification of their d;n and an
explanation of the divine law (shar;6a)’.22 The duny:w; is attributed to
the second half of the verse in which God sends down the manna and
quails.23 For R:z;, scripture and divine law should be specially
designated as d;n;, whereas food is simply duny:w;.
A century earlier, another Persian expert, al-R:ghib al-IBfah:n;
(d. 502/1108), uses the distinction in a similar way in his own
20
R:z;’s commentary is much more detailed than the popular standard
madrasa-curriculum commentaries, like those of Suy<3; (d. 911/1505),
Zamakhshar; (d. 538/1144), and Bay@:w; (685/1286), which probably accounts
for the higher usage of the distinction and my frequent references to him. In
general, he carries more of an authorial voice in his commentary as well,
particularly in comparison to the commentaries of scholars like Ibn Kath;r (d.
774/1373) and Fabar; (d. 310/923), which rely more upon traditions of the early
community, which is also why the two do not feature in my account. To be sure,
scholars like Andrew Rippin and Ignaz Goldziher are right in pointing out the
subjectivity of many commentators from the tafs;r bi-l-ma8th<r (transmission-
based exegesis) tradition, but my point here is that R:z; feels more free to give his
own thoughts, which makes him a good subject of analysis for my particular
question. For the subjectivity of tafs;r commentators see A. Rippin, art. ‘Tafs;r’,
in EI2 and Ignaz Goldziher, Schools of Koranic Commentators (ed. and transl.
Wolfgang H. Behn; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz in Kommission, 2006).
21
‘O Children of Israel! We delivered you from your enemy, and we made a
covenant with you on the Holy mountain’s side, and sent down on you the
manna and the quails’. Qur8:n: F:h:, 20: 80. In my translations, I am using M.
A. S. Abdel Haleem’s translation of the Qur8:n (2004 edn.).
22
Fakhr al-D;n al-R:z;, Maf:t;A al-ghayb (Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 32 vols., 1420/
1981), xxii. 83. This distinction is found, almost verbatim, a little more than a
century later on the other side of the Muslim world (Andalusia) in the tafs;r work
of Ab< Eayy:n al-Gharn:3; (d. 745/1344): Ab< Eayy:n al-Gharn:3;, al-BaAr al-
muA;3 f; al-tafs;r (Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 10 vols., 1431–2/2010), vii. 63.
23
‘Manna’ and ‘quails’ are kinds of foods sent down to the Israelites in both
the Qur8:n and the Hebrew Bible; see Exodus: 16. There is endless debate over
the exact kind of food which these terms refer to.
11
commentary to explain the ‘benefit’ (naf6) of wine mentioned in S<rat al-
Baqara (The Cow).24 In elucidating this matter, he writes that in general
benefit is of two types: d;n; and duny:w;. The latter, he writes, are of two
kinds: those that are essential (@ar<r;) and those that are non-essential

(ghayr @ar<r;). Categorized as duny:w;-essential are things like ‘food’
and ‘sex’. According to IBfah:n;, however, ‘the benefit of wine is of a
non-essential duny:w; nature, for its benefit is strengthening aged bodies,
digesting food, assisting with sexual potency, increase in humidity
(ru3<ba) and heat (Aar:ra) of the two natural dispositions,25 and these
are [considered] non-essential. . .’.26 Based on this observation, he
concludes that it is only rational to stay away from something that is
non-essential when it is also considered to be sinful, as in the case of
wine. Although he neglects to elaborate the d;n; here, what is important
to note are the examples he gives as duny:w;, e.g., sex, food, and the
bodily humours, which are cited in distinction to d;n; benefits. Viewing
this in light of the last example, it seems that those things related to the
physical and bodily aspects of human life are naturally associated with
the duny:w; for these authors.
Outside the genre of tafs;r, the well-known scholar and provocateur of
the Maml<k period, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), makes a clear
distinction along these lines. In his J:mi6 al-ras:8il, a collection of
treatises on various topics, he devotes one section to the issue of
classifying the pleasures of life (tana66um, which is derived from the same
root for blessings) into those related to the duny:w; and the d;n;.
Regarding the duny:w; pleasures, he writes that ‘these are sensible (al-
Aissiyya), like food, drink, sex, clothes, and what follows from that, as
well as egoistic (al-nafsiyya), viz. leadership and power’.27 Not only are
food and sex distinctly related to this world, but the entirety of what can
be perceived by the senses is subsumed under the duny:w;, which is in
line with what we’ve seen. He goes on to explain that these luxuries are
open to all people, whether believers or non-believers, and that they
differ according to one’s personality and cultural or geographic back-
ground. This comment is interesting in light of the fact that he limits the
24
‘They ask you [Prophet] about intoxicants and gambling: say, ‘‘There is
great sin in both, and some benefit for people: the sin is greater than the benefit’’.’
Qur8:n, al-Baqara, 2: 219.
25
This refers to the balance of the bodily humours in the Galenic medicinal
tradition, which fluctuated between humidity and dryness, and hot and cold.
26
al-R:ghib al-IBfah:n;, Tafs;r al-R:ghib al-IBfah:n; (ed. MuAammad 6Abd al-
6Az;z Basy<n;; Tanta: Kulliyyat al-Adab, 5 vols., 1420/1999), i. 450.
27
Taq; al-D;n Ibn Taymiyya, J:mi6 al-ras:8il (ed. MuAammad Rash:d S:lim;
Cairo: al-Ma3ba6a al-Madan;, 2 vols., 1969), ii. 339.
d;n; pleasures to two: ‘the assent to the truth of the report’ (taBd;q al-
khabar), the ‘report’ here being the revelation of God, and ‘obedience to
the command of God’, which he associates with moral uprightness.28 For
Ibn Taymiyya, the duny:w; is much more universal in character than the

d;n;, in that the former remains open to believers and non-believers alike
and is also open to cultural variation, while the d;n; is particular and to
be determined by the religious scholars themselves. On this view, the d;n;
for Ibn Taymiyya is primarily related to one’s relationship to God and
good moral character, which is something very different to the basic
worldly pleasures we all partake in.
Premodern Muslim scholars did not, however, limit the duny:w; to
physical objects, but also associated it with the mental and psychological
realms. Returning to R:z;, at another point in his Qur8:nic commentary
he offers a more taxonomic description of the d;n;–duny:w; difference
with respect to blessings than those cited above: ‘A ni6ma d;niyya is either
[having] knowledge of the truth in itself (ma6rifat al-Aaqq li-dh:tih) or
knowledge of the good so that one may act upon it. As for the ni6ma
dunyawiyya, they are either psychic/mental (nafs:niyya), bodily (bada-
niyya), or outward (kh:rijiyya). . .’.29 The term nafs:n; here likely refers
to the mental function of human beings, but the Persian polymath Ab<
Bakr al-R:z; (d. 313/925) (not to be confused with the later exegete
mentioned above), gives it a more emotive connotation, describing it as
those things like ‘happiness, sadness, grief, insomnia, anxiety, and
anger’.30 In light of this definition, one could read the words of Ab<
E:mid al-Ghaz:l; (d. 505/1111) as supporting the idea of the nafs:n; as
particularly duny:w;. In the section on the vices of wealth in his IAy:8
6ul<m al-d;n, he distinguishes the various duny:w; problems associated
with wealth from the d;n; ones and, in passing, adds that ‘. . .these are the
group of duny:w; afflictions, on top of what the owners of wealth suffer
from in this life, such as fear, sadness, anxiety (ghamm), worry (hamm),
hardship (ta8ab). . .and all that one has to do in protecting and acquiring
wealth’.31 The idea here is that stress, sadness, and other commonly
experienced human feelings which arise from life in this world are
duny:w; in nature. They are, if we were to put it into modern parlance,
secular feelings that are of no direct religious value. In light of R:z;’s
distinction, it seems one can place both human emotions and cognitive
28
Ibid, 341.
29
R:z;, Maf:tiA, xx. 82.
30
Ab< Bakr al-R:z;, al-E:w; f;-l-3ibb (ed. Eaytham Khal;fa Fu6aym;; Beirut:
D:r IAy:8 al-Tur:th al-6Arab;, 7 vols., 1422/2002), iv. 264.
31
Ab< E:mid al-Ghaz:l;, IAy:8 6ul<m al-d;n (Beirut: D:r al-Ma6rifa, 4 vols.,
2004), iii. 237.
13
capacity into the duny:w; realm, which is juxtaposed with the d;n;
realms of morality and theology.
The foregoing is supported by R:z; in the course of his comments on
another verse in which he argues that God continuously guides humans

throughout their lives. The duny:w; benefit of this guidance ‘is the
discernment of the senses (al-Aaw:ss) in distinguishing beneficial things
from harmful things’.32 This is the normal sensible perception that
protects someone from repeatedly burning their hands on the stove. The
d;n; benefits, however, reside in ‘the intellect’s (al-6aql)33 ability to
distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil’.34 Here the d;n; is
related to the more serious matters of distinguishing ‘truth’ and ‘the
good’, whereas the duny:w; is simply associated with the mundane
human function of perceiving harm. Thus, we see again that for R:z;, the
d;n; encompasses the moral realm of the human—more specifically a sort
of inner moral compass stemming from the human intellect—while the
duny:w; covers sense perception and basic mental functions.
Returning to Ghaz:l;’s aforementioned discussion of the effects of
wealth in the IAy:8 will help us get a better sense of what the d;n; meant
for him. In speaking on the benefits of wealth, it is interesting that he
feels the duny:w; ones need no explanation since these are well-known
(mashh<ra).35 This is something he and other authors frequently do,36
which supports the idea above that the d;n; is not universal like the
duny:w; and thus requires the elucidation of the religious scholars.
Ghaz:l; goes on to mention two d;n; benefits of wealth: ‘charity’ (zak:h)
and the ‘protection of honour’. With regard to charity, he thinks that ‘its
reward is clear and it extinguishes the anger of the Lord’.37 Remember
that earlier he associated the duny:w; benefits of wealth with its
emotional relief from sadness and anxiety; here he highlights the d;n;
32
R:z;, Maf:tiA, xxiv, 512.
33
The use of ‘intellect’ here should not be misconstrued as indicating merely
cognitive processes. In the Islamic tradition, especially in its philosophical
tradition (which was a major influence for R:z;), the intellect has more complex
functions which include an inherent, God-given ethical and moral capacity. See
Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2nd expanded edn.,
1994), 187–8.
34
R:z;, Maf:tiA, xxiv, 512.
35
Ghaz:l;, IAy:8, iii. 236.
36
Ab< al-Q:sim al-Zamakhshar;, for example, writes that the dunyaw;
benefits of the signs (:y:t) of God are in no need of explanation (amm: al-8intif:6
al-dunyaw; fa-C:hir), and goes on to elucidate its d;n; benefits; Zamakhshar;, al-
Kashsh:f 6an Aaq:8iq ghaw:mi@ al-tanz;l wa-8uy<n al-aq:w;l f; wuj<h al-ta8w;l
(Beirut: D:r al-Kit:b al-6Arab;, 4 vols., 1407/1986), i. 122.
37
benefits by bringing in a theocentric perspective, a clear differentiation
that would be familiar to any modern reader.
Elsewhere, Ghaz:l; provides us with a very clear instance of a Muslim
author classifying the effects of a single act into two distinct domains,

which aligns well with the idea of a distinction between the religious and
secular. In his chapter on the practice of seclusion (6uzla) in the IAy:8, he
finds that the d;n; benefits of isolation are obvious: one has more time for
worship and is less likely to fall into situations where one will be
disobedient. At the same time, there are duny:w; gains to be made. For
him, this is the ability of ‘the craftsman to get on with his job without
disturbance’.38 Beyond the apparent religious value of such a practice, it
can also do wonders for one’s work life. Through a persistent regimen of
isolating oneself from people, one can learn how to do his or her job
without constant distractions, which Ghaz:l; deems a distinctly duny:w;
benefit. Ghaz:l; also uses the d;n;–duny:w; distinction in other works
when speaking about matters such as human interactions (mu6:mal:t)39
and occupation (shughl),40 so it appears to be a natural binary within his
worldview.
It should be clear by now that for major Muslim scholars writing in a
variety of genres, the distinction between d;n and duny: was a
meaningful one that resembles the basic difference between the religious
and secular in the modern world. For them, d;n was often associated
with divine law, worship, reward, virtue, and was seen in relation to the
next life and God. This was viewed in distinction to the realm outside of
religion, the duny:w;, which had to do with the perceptual, the bodily,
the mental, the outward, and all the things of human life (like food and
sex) that are not, in their primary function, considered to be religious.
One can rightfully declare then, pace Ahmed, that premodern Muslims
did in fact associate d;n with ‘personal and communal acts in relation to
a higher power, particularly through piety and worship’, and viewed all
else as part of a non-religious realm.41 It would be helpful now, however,
38
Ibid, ii. 226.
39
Ghaz:l;, al-Mankh<l min ta6l;q:t al-uB<l (ed. MuAammad Easan H;t<;
Beirut: D:r al-Fikr al-Mu6:Bir, 3rd edn., 1419/1998), 470.
40
Ghaz:l;, al-Was;3 fi-l-madhhab (eds. AAmed MaAm<d Ibr:h;m and
MuAammad MuAammad T:mir; Cairo: D:r al-Sal:m, 7 vols., 1417/1996), ii.
571.
41
Ahmed, What is Islam?, 179. Preemptively, I will say that in many instances
these thinkers view duny:w; things like food and sex as d;n;, but this was done,
as I will argue, only at a secondary level, leaving the basic conceptual distinction
intact. This will be explained in more detail later in the paper; for now, it is
important to first consider the distinction as it is commonly used by these authors
in their writings.
15
to move to an examination of an important theological discussion found
in the influential work of one prominent premodern Muslim author,
which turns heavily on the d;n;–duny:w; binary. This will demonstrate
that this duality was not simply of marginal exegetical utility, but was

employed to resolve central issues in Islamic thought.
Delineating the scope of Prophetic authority

The foregoing might give the perception that the d;n–duny: binary was
arbitrarily used by premodern Muslim authors in minor matters of
religious interpretation. On the contrary, the distinction was crucial to
understanding the role of none other than the central figure of Islam: the
Prophet. The questions that sought resolution were concerned with the
nature of his authority: Were all of the Prophet’s actions divinely inspired
and therefore part of the domain of d;n? Does his prophethood
necessitate that he be the best advisor on ostensibly worldly matters
like farming or warfare? Or was the scope of his authority more limited?
A fascinating treatment of this topic is found in the premodern Islamic
bestseller of prophetic biography, Kit:b al-Shif:8 bi-ta6r;f Auq<q al-
muB3af:, by the Andalusian scholar, Ab< al-Fa@l 6Iy:@ (popularly known
as al-Q:@; 6Iy:@, d. 544/1149). 6Iy:@ wrote his book as a corrective to
earlier understandings of the Prophet which he considered to be faulty
(hence the title). In turn, he offered a new model for understanding the
Prophet, which seems to have won favour in subsequent centuries, given
the enormous amount of extant manuscripts and commentaries written
on it.42
Early on in his book, 6Iy:@ lays the groundwork for his d;n;–duny:w;-
inspired vision of prophethood in the following general comment:
To the lover of the Noble Prophet! He who probes into the particulars of the
great treasure of his reality. Know that the qualities of beauty and perfection in
human beings are of two kinds: [Those that are] required in a duny:w;-sense
(@ar<r; duny:w;), which human nature and the necessities of the life of this
world demand, and [those that are] acquired through d;n (muktasab d;n;),
which makes a person praiseworthy and brings him closer to God.43
The first thing one observes is that 6Iy:@ considers the duny:w; to be
innate and necessary, much unlike the d;n;, which is something that is
42
There are thousands of manuscripts and it remains the most widely
commented on biography of the Prophet. See GAL i., 369–70, and GAL S i.,
630–2.
43
al-Q:@; 6Iy:@, al-Shif:8 bi-ta6r;f Auq<q al-muB3af: (Amman: D:r al-FayA:8, 2
vols., 1407/1987), i. 139. The last phrase, ‘yuqarrib<na il:-l-l:hi zulf:’ is taken
from Qur8:n, Zumar, 39: 3.
later obtained through human labour and is therefore not essential to
living in this world. Unlike duny:w; traits, which are intrinsic to human
nature and presumably brought on by the need to live, the d;n; are
extrinsic qualities that cannot simply be obtained through natural causes;

instead, they must be developed through man’s active relationship with
God. This supports the aforementioned idea of the universality and
neutrality of the duny:w; as opposed to the particularity of d;n. In the
context of 6Iy:@’s work, these differences translate into a separation of
the scope and range of d;n; and duny:w; authority, which is an
important issue for discerning the extent of the Prophet’s authority over
his followers.
Later in the book, 6Iy:@ devotes an entire section to the specific topic of
the d;n; and duny:w; affairs of the Prophet. His objective is to analyse
the Prophet’s ‘circumstances in the affairs of this world (duny:). . .with
regards to his beliefs, sayings, and actions’.44 The question he sets out to
answer in the chapter is how one can maintain the Prophet’s protection
from imperfection (6iBma) despite the existence of several traditions
demonstrating his deficiency in deciding worldly matters. With regards
to the Prophet’s beliefs, 6Iy:@ writes that ‘it was possible for him to
believe something concerning the matters of this world based on one
interpretation when the opposite was true, or to be subject to doubt or
supposition regarding them. These matters are not the same as matters of
the divine law (shar;6a)’.45 Here we begin to see a clear delineation of the
religious domain of prescribed law from more worldly affairs as an
attempt to preserve the Prophet’s infallibility. He goes on to mention five
Prophetic reports that illustrate the problem and its potential solutions.
The first three narrations are variants of the well-known story found in
the 4aA;A of Muslim, in which the Prophet gives an unfortunate piece of
advice to some Madinan farmers:
R:fi6 b. Khad;j (d. 74/693) said: ‘The Prophet arrived in Madina while they
were pollinating (ya8bir<n) date-palm trees’. Thereupon, he asked: ‘What are
you all growing?’ They responded: ‘We have been growing date-palms’,
whereupon the Prophet replied: ‘Perhaps if you don’t do that (i.e., the
pollination) it will be better for you’. So they abandoned this practice and they
(the date-palms) began to yield less fruit. They mentioned this to him (the
Prophet) and he replied: ‘I am only a human being, so when I instruct you to
do something pertaining to your d;n, accept it. And when I instruct you to do
44
6Iy:@, al-Shif:8, ii. 416.
45
Ibid (emphasis mine).
17
something from my own opinion (ra8y), then indeed [know that] I am only a
human being’.46
In this report, the Prophet’s passing agricultural advice turns out to be

wrong and he then goes on to clarify the extent of his prophetic
authority.47 In the variant narration of M<s: b. FalAa (d. 106/724),
which 6Iy:@ mentions, the Prophet is alleged to have added, ‘. . .for it was
just a personal opinion of mine, and do not accept [my] personal
opinion; however, when I tell you something from God, accept it, for I do
not lie about God, the Exalted and Glorious’.48 In the third narration of
Anas b. M:lik (d. 99-100/712), the Prophet is said to have added: ‘You
all are more knowledgeable about the affairs of your world’ (antum
a6lam bi-amr duny:kum).49 In all of the preceding statements, the
Prophet directly informs his followers that they are only obligated to
follow him in matters of religion, adding furthermore, that they are to
have no bearing on the efficacy of their worldly activities; thus, the latter
should be left to those who know it best.
Further explanation of this tradition is found in the well-known
commentary on the canonical Aadith collection, 4aA;A Muslim, penned
by the influential Sh:fi6; scholar, Ab< Zakariyy: al-Nawaw; (d. 676/
1277). In his comments on the first variation of the Aad;th mentioned by
6Iy:@, he puts forth the view that the Prophet’s ‘personal opinion’ (ra8y)
46
Ibid, 416–17. This report is drawn from Muslim b. al-Eajj:j, 4aA;A Muslim
(ed. MuAammad Fu8:d 6Abd al-B:q;; Beirut: D:r IAy:8 al-Tur:th al-6Arab;, 5
vols., 1312/1991), iv. 1835. There is a variation of the report, relevant for our
purposes, that replaces ‘And when I instruct you to do something from my
personal opinion. . .’ with ‘And when I instruct you to do something pertaining to
your world..’. (duny:kum); Ab< al-Q:sim al-Fabar:n;, al-Mu6jam al-kab;r (ed.
Eamd; b. 6Abd al-Maj;d al-Salaf;; Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Taymiyya, 25 vols.,
1415/1994) iv. 280; MuAammad b. Eibb:n, al-IAs:n f; taqr;b 4aA;A Ibn Eibb:n
(ed. Shu6ayb al-Arna8<3; Beirut: Mu8assasat al-Ris:la, 18 vols., 1408/1988) i. 202
(Ibn Eibb:n uses the verb ‘Aaddatha’ in place of ‘amara’ but similarly includes
‘duny:’).
47
This report is not found in the Shi6i Aad;th tradition, which is unsurprising
given that they developed a much more comprehensive conception of prophetic
infallibility that extends to the Prophet’s worldly actions as well. This would
mean that this was perhaps a distinctively Sunni emphasis. Although I have
included a few Shi6i thinkers in the course of my study, a comparison of the two
religious traditions on this issue requires further study beyond the scope of this
paper.
48
I have pulled the complete statement from the original report, from which
only the initial words are cited in 6Iy:@, al-Shif:8, ii. 417; Muslim, 4aA;A Muslim,
iv. 1836.
49
Ibid.
need not perforce be followed, since it refers to his subjective opinion
regarding ‘the affairs of this world and its provision, not divine
legislation (tashr;6)’.50 He continues:

As for what he (the Prophet) said through his own independent judgement (bi-
ijtih:dihi) . . .and considered to be related to the divine law (shar6), it is
necessary to act in accordance with it. The pollination of palm trees does not
fall under this category (naw6); rather, it belongs to the previously-mentioned
category under the phrase ‘personal opinion’ (ra8y). . .His personal opinion
concerned matters of livelihood and his conjecture concerned other matters.51
Nawaw; clarifies that one must make sure to follow the Prophet’s own
judgement when it comes to divine law; however, things like farming
practices and other ‘matters of livelihood’ do not fall under this sphere.
His use of ‘naw6’ (kind, type, or category), in particular, suggests a
deliberate classification on his part between seemingly religious and
secular spheres. The Prophet’s personal opinion on worldly matters are
to have no bearing on religious doctrine.
Nawaw;’s statement is supported by 6Iy:@’s clarification that this
report is to be considered as part of ‘what we have stipulated regarding
his speaking from himself with regards to the affairs of this world, and
his conjecture regarding its circumstances; not from what he says from
himself and his independent judgement regarding the laws he prescribed,
and the traditions he left (sunna sannah:)’.52 That is, the laws based on
his own judgements and the practices he initiated (all of which constitute
‘d;n’) should be distinguished from his passing remarks on matters of
worldly relevance. The Prophet had a particular religious function,
which needed to be disassociated from the secular role of an agricultural
consultant, which garners no special authority. Thus, what amounts to a
differentiation of the religious and secular spheres was integral to
resolving an important issue in Islamic thought.
TOWARDS A CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE

D>N–DUNY2 BINARY
Did Muslims distinguish religious and secular knowledge?
The debate over the scope of prophetic authority comes down to a more
fundamental issue, which is the question of how to classify different
50
Nawaw;, SharA 4aA;A Muslim bi-sharA al-Nawaw; (Beirut: D:r IAy:8 al-
Tur:th al-6Arab;, 2nd edn., 18 vols., 1392/1972), xv. 116.
51
Ibid.
52
6Iy:@, al-Shif:8, ii. 418 (emphasis mine).
19
kinds of knowledge. If religious and secular authority should be
distinguished in interpreting the Prophet’s acts and sayings, this must
entail a separation between religious and secular expertise. This idea
comes out in two passages in which 6Iy:@ makes a case for why fallibility

in worldly knowledge does not compromise the Prophet’s perfection:
As for things connected to this world, it is not a precondition that the prophets
be protected from a lack of knowledge about them or from believing them to
be different from how they actually are. This does not constitute a blemish in
them since their chief concern is the afterlife and knowledge of it, and the
matter of the Shar;6a and its laws. The affairs of this world are quite different
to that (ta@:dduh:).53
Fallibility of this kind which pertains to any such duny:w; matters which do
not involve the science of d;n, its beliefs, or teachings are permitted for him
since none of this implies imperfection or demotion. They are conventional
(i6tiy:d;) matters capable of being known by anyone who attempts to learn and
occupy himself with them. The heart of the Prophet, however, was filled with
gnosis of God’s lordship. He was full of the science of the Shar;6a.54
In the first passage, 6Iy:@ explicitly juxtaposes worldly knowledge with
matters of religion, the latter of which falls under the Prophet’s direct
authority and is entirely unlike matters of worldly concern. Moreover,
given the specialized nature of religious knowledge, it cannot be used to
learn more about this world since its primary goal is the other world. In
the second passage, he implicitly states that d;n; knowledge should not
be equated with duny:w; expertise since the latter can be obtained by
anyone through continuous experience and study. He is essentially
arguing for a conceptual differentiation between religious and secular
knowledge on the basis that they are fundamentally of a different nature.
According to this understanding, the duny:w; realm is viewed as
‘conventional’ or mundane while the d;n; is presumably extraordinary
and particular.
The relationship between these two domains is made clearer in his
follow up to the second passage cited above. Here 6Iy:@ returns to the
problem posed by the cross-pollination report. The paragraph is vague at
times, so it will be useful to read it with the popular commentary of the
renowned sixteenth-century scholar, Mull: 6Al; al-Q:r; (d. 1014/1606)
(which I have italicized in parentheses within the paragraph):
The Prophet [on the other hand], filled [his] heart with the knowledge of
divinity and occupied himself with the knowledge of divine law. He devoted
53
Ibid, 270 (emphasis mine).
54
Ibid, 418 (emphasis mine).
his mind to [both] the d;n; and duny:w; interests of the community (i.e., those
which have a connection to the matters of the next life); however, this (i.e.,
that which he thought on his own, whose contradiction appeared) only
occurred in some (duny:w;) matters (which have no primary connection

(ta6alluq aBlan) to d;n; matters). . .this was not [however, the case] with most of
his (affairs), which would be on the verge of (indicating) foolishness and
heedlessness.55
The Prophet is said to have specialized in the knowledge of God, His law,
and concern for his own religious community, which appears to have left
little space for expertise in worldly matters. One might be confused by
6Iy:@’s statement that the Prophet took care of the d;n; and duny:w;
needs of his community, right after saying that his role was only d;n; in
nature; however, Q:r; explains that even the duny:w; here is understood
with respect to the next life, which is the unique purview of the Prophet.
This hints towards a way in which something duny:w; can become
religious, a point which I will return to later. According to 6Iy:@, the
Prophet only made these quasi-mistakes with regards to duny:w;
matters, which preserves his infallibility in the realm of his real
authority: the d;n;. On this point, Q:r; offers a fascinating comment
that supports one of the understandings of the d;n–duny: binary
presented in this paper. Those duny:w; matters, on which the Prophet
has erred, are not primarily seen as having to do with d;n. The use of the
term ‘primary (aBlan)’ here suggests that things are divided between the
d;n; and duny:w; at a primary, inherent level, but have a potential to
cross over at a secondary level. That is to say, something could be
inherently duny:w;, but could become d;n; under specific conditions.
This point will be explained in more detail in a later section.
This clear separation between religious and worldly knowledge,
however, was not a distinction universally held by all premodern
Muslims. Having established the significance of differentiating the
religious and secular in Islamic thought, it would be good now to
illustrate the spectrum of views Muslims held regarding this distinction,
which ranged from a rigid separationism to one of virtual non-
differentiation. The former view is best exemplified by Ibn Khald<n (d.
808/1406), who wrote the following on the issue of prophetic medicine:
The medicine mentioned in religious tradition [shar6iyy:t] is of the (Bedouin)
type. It is in no way part of the divine revelation [laysa min al-waAy f; shay8].
(Such medical matters) were merely (part of) Arab custom and happened to be
55
6Iy:@, al-Shif:8, ii. 418; 6Al; al-Q:r;, SharA al-Shif: li-l-Q:@; 6Iy:@ (ed. 6Abd
All:h MuAammad al-Khal;l;; Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 2 vols., 1421/
2001), ii. 340 (emphasis mine)
21
mentioned in connection with the circumstances of the Prophet, like other
things that were customary in his generation. They were not mentioned in
order to imply that that particular way of practising (medicine) is stipulated by
the religious law [mashr<6]. Muhammad was sent to teach us the religious law

[al-shar:8i6]. He was not sent to teach us medicine or any other ordinary matter
[al-6:diyy:t]. In connection with the story of the pollination of the palms, he
said: ‘You know more about your worldly affairs (than I)’.56
In this passage we find the already familiar conflation of religion with the
divine law (al-shar:8i6) and an understanding of medicine and other
natural sciences as conventional (essentially the same term is used: al-
6:diyy:t). In Ibn Khald<n’s mind, the Prophet was an authority in
religious matters alone. Like 6Iy:@, he deemed it crucial to clarify the
difference between the religious and non-religious sciences. His citation
of the aforementioned narration about the Prophet’s farming advice
suggests that this specific report and the consequent notion of
distinguishing the Prophet’s religious knowledge from his secular
expertise seems to have been a familiar idea amongst premodern
Muslim thinkers. Notably, one also detects a polemical tone in Ibn
Khald<n’s statement, which was likely made in reaction to the popularity
of Prophetic medicine amongst the masses who saw it as religious truth.
This polemic suggests that the d;n;–duny:w; divide was a point of
contention for Muslims, since the targets of his criticism would have
likely disagreed with the very distinction he attempts to make between
religious and worldly affairs.
The spectrum of views is on full display in the conflicting interpret-
ations over a single, famous, tradition attributed to Im:m al-Sh:fi6;, the
eponymous founder of the legal school (d. 204/820), in which he is
alleged to have said, ‘knowledge is of two kinds: the science of d;n and
the science of duny:’.57 Ibn Ab; E:tim al-R:zi (d. 327/938/), the great
Aad;th scholar, in his biography of the Im:m, adds al-Sh:fi6;’s clarification
that the former refers to the science of fiqh (jurisprudence) and the latter
to medicine’.58 A plain reading of this suggests a clear classification of
56
Ibn Khald<n (transl. Franz Rosenthal), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction
to History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3 vols., 2nd edn., 1967), iii.
150. For the Arabic, see Ibn Khald<n, T:r;kh Ibn Khald<n (ed. Khal;l ShiA:da;
Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 8 vols., 1409/1988), i. 651.
57
Ibn 6As:kir, T:r;kh mad;nat Dimashq (ed. 6Umar b. Ghar:ma al-6Amraw;;
Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 80 vols.,1415/1995–8), li. 410; Ibn 6Abd Rabbih, Kit:b al-6Iqd
al-far;d (Cairo: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 7 vols., 1359/1940), ii. 208.
58
Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in
Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill: 2007), 243–4. 6Abd al-RaAm:n ibn MuAammad
Ibn Ab; E:tim al-R:z;, 2d:b al-Sh:fi6; wa-man:qibuh: Aad;th wa-fiqh, fir:sa w:
religious and worldly knowledge. The tradition also has another, more
popular, variation: ‘science is of two kinds: the science of religions
(ady:n) and the science of bodies (abd:n)’.59 The Persian historian Ab<-l
Fa@l Bayhaq; (d. 470/1077), in his Ghaznavid era history, T:r;kh-i

Bayhaq;, attributes the saying to the Prophet (as well as al-Sh:fi6;) and
offers some very interesting thoughts on the discipline of history in light
of this distinction. Using this tradition, he writes that there are two kinds
of history: one religious, the other not. The religious aspect of history
concerns the history of prophets and their miracles and the details of
various religious communities. The ‘science of bodies’, however,
concerns the precedents left by past societies, which is exemplified best
by the science of medicine. The contraction of diseases in the past led to
the invention of various cures, which gradually accumulated over time so
that later scholars could benefit from them; an almost progressive
account of secular knowledge.60 In Bayhaq;’s text, we find a sophisti-
cated theoretical discussion of knowledge and history in light of a
religious–secular distinction, which is provided as a methodology for his
approach to history writing. I would call this a differentiationist view of
the religious–secular, but one not as rigid as that of Ibn Khald<n.
There is, however, a common recurrence of the tradition in the Islamic
exegetical literature, which promotes a non-differentiated conception of
the religious and worldly. In several commentaries on verse 7: 31 (S<rat
al-A6r:f), in which God says, ‘eat and drink, but do not be excessive’, a
story is related that the 6Abb:sid caliph, H:r<n al-Rash;d (r. 170–93/
786–809) once had a clever Christian physician who, in an attempt to
undermine the truth of Islam, claimed that there was no medicinal
knowledge in the Qur8:n and then cited the above-mentioned tradition
(the ady:n–abd:n tradition) to make the point that an integral aspect of
knowledge is missing from the Holy Book. His respondent, one 6Al; b. al-
Eusayn,61 counters by asserting that God combined the entirety of the
3ibb, t:r;kh wa-ad:b, lugha wa-nasab (ed. 6Abd al-Ghan; 6Abd al-Kh:liq; Aleppo:
Maktabat al-Tur:th al-Isl:m;, 1953), 321–2.
59
Ab< 6Abd al-RaAm:n al-Sulam;, Fabaq:t al-B<fiyya (ed. N<r al-D;n
Shurayba; Cairo: Maktabat al-Kh:nj;, 1960), 480; AAmad b. 6Al; al-
Qalqashand;, 4ubA al-a6sh: f; Bin:6at al-insh:8 (Cairo: al-Mu8assasat al-MiBriyya
al-62mma li-l-Ta8l;f wa-l-Tarjama wa-l-Fib:6a wa-l-Nashr, 14 vols., 1964), xi.
253–4.
60
62l; b. Zayd Bayhaq;, T:r;kh-i Bayhaq (ed. AAmad Bahmany:r; Tehran:
Kit:bfur<sh; Fur<gh;, 2nd edn., 1960), 7–8.
61
This is most probably the relatively unknown traditionist 6Al; b. al-Eusayn
b. W:qid Ab< al-Easan al-Muraw;, who died in the year 211/826; Bukh:ri, al-
T:r;kh al-kab;r (Hyderabad Deccan: D:8irat al-Ma6:rif al-6Uthm:niyya, 8 vols.,
1941–64), vi. 267.
23
science of medicine within the aforementioned verse. The physician
moves on to the Prophet, whom he claims he never spoke on matters of
medicine. In response, 6Al; invokes the Prophetic tradition, ‘the stomach
is the home of sickness and abstinence (from food and drink), the chief of

all cures, thereafter, give to each body what you have made it accustomed
to’.62 The physician replies, ‘Your book and your prophet have left no
medicine for Galen!’63
This report requires careful dissection. First, it is important to note
that the ‘two sciences’ tradition was so well-known that a Christian
could cite it in the course of a polemical debate. He employs the tradition
in a way that signals the belief that a religious text like the Qur8:n should
contain some natural science, and he takes the fact that it does not to be
an inherent flaw in the book. The Muslim interlocutor in this report,
likewise, collapses any distinction between the religious and secular,
maintaining that there is plenty of medicine to be found in the Qur8:n
and in the Prophet’s sayings. All of the Muslim exegetes who cite this
story also likely held the same view as the participants in the debate, the
general idea being that the Qur8:n and the Prophet could both speak on
matters of medicine. In light of the statements above, a spectrum emerges
in which on one side we have thinkers like Q:@; 6Iy:@ and Ibn Khald<n
who promote a separationist view of the religious and secular and on the
other, the protagonist of the story and the exegetes who cite the same
tradition taking a non-differentiated view. There is, however, an
additional middle space in which both views come together, which is
integral to understanding the categories of the d;n; and duny:w; in
premodern Islamic thought.
For this we may return to our primary interlocutor, al-Ghaz:l;. At one
point in his chapter on ‘the marvels of the heart’ in the IAy:8, he seems to
support a clear division of the religious and secular sciences. In
describing sciences that are duny:w;, he gives the examples of ‘medicine,
62
This tradition is not mentioned in any of the canonical or non-canonical
Aad;th texts and is likely not a saying of the Prophet.
63
Zamakhshar;, al-Kashsh:f, ii. 122; Burh:n al-D;n al-Kirm:n;, Ghar:8ib al-
tafs;r wa-6aj:8ib al-ta8w;l (ed. Sharm:n Sark:l Y<nus al-6Ijl;; Jeddah: D:r al-Qibla
li-l-Thaq:fa al-Isl:miyya, 2 vols., 1988), i. 402; Ab< IsA:q al-Tha6lab;, al-Kashf
wa-l-bay:n 6an tafs;r al-Qur8:n (ed. Ab< MuAammad b. 62sh<r; Beirut: D:r IAy:8
al-Tur:th al-6Arab;, 10 vols., 1422/2002), iv. 230. BurAan al-D;n al-Kirm:n;,
Ghar:8ib al-tafs;r wa 6aj:8ib al-ta8w;l (Jeddah: D:r al-Qibla li-l-Thiq:fat al-
Isl:miyya, 2 vols., 1988), i. 402; Ibn al-Jawz;, Z:d al-mas;r f; 6ilm al-tafs;r (ed.
6Abd al-Razz:q al-Mahd;; Beirut: D:r al-Kit:b al-6Arab;, 4 vols., 1422/2001), ii.
114; R:z;, Maf:t;A al-ghayb, i. 142; Shams al-D;n al-Qur3ub;, al-J:mi6 li-aAk:m
al-Qur8:n (eds. AAmad al-Bird<n; and Ibr:h;m A3faysh; Cairo: D:r al-Kutub al-
MiBriyya, 20 vols., 1384/1964), vii. 192.
arithmetic, engineering, astronomy, and the rest of the crafts (Airaf) and
skills (Bin:6:t)’. He juxtaposes these with the ukhraw; sciences (related to
the afterlife) which are ‘the sciences of the states of the heart, the vices of
actions, and knowledge of God, His attributes, and His actions’.64 I

think it is safe to assume that the use of ukhraw; above is synonymous
with d;n;, given that elsewhere in the text Ghaz:l; links the two and often
uses them interchangeably.65 Whether or not one concedes this, however,
there is a clear differentiation being made between the religious sciences,
which are theological and ethical in orientation and the secular sciences,
which are presumably everything else one can learn. This is supported by
Ghaz:l;’s preliminary discussion in the same chapter of the IAy:8. He
mentions that there are two senses in which the term ‘heart’ can be used,
one of which refers to the ‘cone-shaped organ of flesh’ located in the
chest. This meaning, however, is useless for his discussion since it has
nothing to do with the religious aims (al-aghr:@ al-d;niyya) of his book
and only serves the medicinal aims of the physicians.66 In his autobiog-
raphy as well he repeatedly distinguishes d;n; and duny:w; knowledge.
In describing the mathematical sciences of the philosophers he writes
that their subject-matter is arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, which
‘have nothing to do with the religious sciences (6al-ul<m al-d;niyya) by
way of affirmation or negation’.67 He says the same about the study of
logic (l: yata6alluqu shay8 minh: bi-l-d;n).68 Even the science of
governance (al-siy:s:t) derives from ‘administrative rulings which are
concerned with the worldly affairs (al-um<r al-dunyawiyya) and Sultanic
governance’.69 This upsets Ahmed’s contention that historians of science
are simply projecting back the modern religious–secular binary in their
analyses, which conceives of science as a purely secular endeavour.70
64
65
In commenting on the meaning of nafs (soul) and r<A (spirit), Ghaz:l; writes
about ‘the divisions of the 6aqliyya, d;niyya, dunyawiyya, and ukhrawiyya
sciences’. He goes on, ‘Know that the heart is, by its very nature, inclined to
accept the realities of social interactions (Aaq:8iq al-ma6l<m:t) . . .however the
sciences which settle in it (taAillu f;-h;) divide into the rational and the legal, and
the rational divide into the essential and the acquired, and the latter into the
dunyawiyya and the ukhrawiyya’: ibid, 16. Thus, the ukhraw; is often used in
contrast to the duny:w; (similar to the d;n;) and here seems to be a part of, if not
a synonym for, the d;n;.
66
Ibid, 3.
67
Ghaz:l;, al-Munqidh min al-@alal (ed. 6Abd al-Eal;m MaAm<d; Cairo: D:r
al-Kutub al-Ead;tha, 1974), 138.
68
Ibid, 141.
69
Ibid, 151.
70
25
If we are to take Ghaz:l; at his word, then we must concede that he held
a somewhat dichotomous view of religion and science in light of a d;n;–
duny:w; divide.
Confounding then is the presence in the IAy:8 of a less dichotomous

conception of knowledge. In his chapter on the etiquette of travelling
(:d:b al-safar), Ghaz:l; makes some remarks about the intentions for
travel, which employs the d;n;–duny:w; distinction, but in a way that
challenges any clear distinction of the religious and secular:
As for what is sought after (in travel), it is either something duny:w; like
wealth and fame, or d;n;. The d;n; is either knowledge or work. [D;n;]
knowledge is either knowledge of the d;n; sciences, or knowledge based on
experience of one’s own character traits and attributes, or knowledge of the
earth’s signs and wonders, like the travel and wandering of Dh< al-Qarnayn
and his band throughout the regions of the earth.71
In this curious passage, Ghaz:l; provides three examples of d;n;

knowledge, the first of which is unsurprising, viz. the various Islamic
intellectual disciplines (e.g., tafs;r, fiqh), which he calls ‘al-6ul<m al-
d;niyya’. The additional usage of the term d;niyya to describe these alone
does not negate the religious nature of the other two, but it does suggest
that these disciplines are seen as evidently and primarily religious, which
goes to show that something can be inherently religious at a primary
level as opposed to only religious at a secondary level. The second form
of d;n; knowledge is knowledge of the self, which is presumably the
inward science of Sufism or ethics (akhl:q). The third form of
knowledge, which is of most interest to us here, is the knowledge of
the physical world. This is clear from the example given of Dh< al-
Qarnayn (the Two-Horned One), whom Ghaz:l; and other Muslims
understood to be Alexander the Great, and who was also thought to have
travelled across the world indicating that this third knowledge refers to
that which can be obtained through the study of the natural world. In
contrast to the previous understanding of Ghaz:l;, wherein worldly
study was viewed as distinct from religious inquiry, in this case it is
presented as d;n;. The difference seems to reside in the specific wording
and context Ghaz:l; gives in his description. The study of the world is
garbed in a sacred cloak through the phrase, ‘signs (:y:t) of the earth
(:y:t al-ar@)’, which connotes the signs in nature that point to God.
Ghaz:l;, then, seems to have considered the study of the earth to be
potentially d;n; when conducted as a study of the signs of nature, which
is seen as the counterpart to the :y:t (verses) of the Book of God (the
Qur8:n).
71
Ghaz:l;, IAy:8, ii. 245.
Ahmed lays out a similar method for understanding Islamic science in
his book, even citing the conception of the signs (verses) of God present
in the Book of Nature, but he argues further that any distinction of
religious and secular/scientific knowledge obstructs our understanding of

Islam.72 Yet in light of all the preceding examples of an apparent
differentiation of the religious and worldly, his claim is mistaken.
Ghaz:l;’s is precisely the middle view along the spectrum I have tried to
outline above, which acknowledges an inherent division between the
religious and secular sciences, whilst simultaneously understanding the
latter through a religious cosmology that embeds the word of God into
His natural creation. It is not difficult to understand how one could make
sense of this in their mind; the idea being that there is an obvious
distinction to be made (in terms of methodology, sources, etc.) between
empirical science and the properly religious sciences, but that religion
still remains above the secular realm and can potentially endow it with
meaning and purpose. It would be good now to illustrate exactly how
this latter process works.
How does the duny:w; become d;n;?

Although we’ve come across ample examples of a clear separation
between d;n and duny:—that in many ways resemble the modern
commonplace distinction of the religious and secular—there are also
many instances in which d;n encompasses duny: in ways that challenge
any clear differentiation and, furthermore, place religion above the
secular in an almost inverse of the modern relationship between the two.
A good example of this fluidity can be found in a section of the IAy:8 in
which Ghaz:l; weighs the potential benefits of companionship against
seclusion. In his chapter on sociability (:d:b al-ulfa), he writes about the
benefits of maintaining good company:
One seeks both d;n; and duny:w; benefits from fellowship (BuAba). As for the
duny:w;, it is the likes of benefitting financially or in terms of honour, or
simply to be sociable by being present and neighbourly; however, this is not
one of our objectives.
As for the d;n;, various objectives come together in it as well. Among these are
the benefit one obtains in terms of knowledge and action; the honour
protecting from harm one whose heart is burdened and diverts him away from
worship and the wealth to make one independent from squandering time in
seeking out daily bread. . .’73
72
Ahmed, What is Islam?, 430–5.
73
Ghaz:l;, IAy:8, ii. 170–1.
27
The use of the d;n–duny: binary should be unsurprising by now, but
what is unusual here is Ghaz:l;’s overlap between the two: honour and
wealth are mentioned under both categories. How does this make sense
and why distinguish them at all? It seems that in the example above

wealth is understood as primarily duny:w;, but when it is used to free
one’s time for more pressing matters like worship, it dons a d;n; cloak.
Likewise, honour can become d;n; when it allows for more focused
worship. Although the things of d;n remain the same, e.g., worship and
knowledge, more mundane and worldly things can be dipped into a pool
of sacredness once they bring about a d;n; benefit like more time for
worship. This suggests that duny:w; things can be instilled with a d;n;
meaning once they are used for a distinctly d;n; purpose. Here, Ghaz:l;
wants to utilize the d;n;–duny:w; distinction whilst simultaneously
allowing the former to enter into the latter.
In the following chapter on the merits of seclusion (discussed earlier),
Ghaz:l; lists six major benefits of the practice, the first two of which are
d;n; in nature. These are the free time one obtains to engage in more
worship and reflection74 as well as the protection one gains from general
wrongdoing and disobedience.75 He then mentions the following four
benefits:
1. ‘Freedom from tribulations (fitan) and rivalries (khuB<m:t), and preservation
of the d;n and soul from being absorbed in these things and being exposed to
their dangers’.76
2. ‘Freedom from the evils of people’.77
3. ‘[It] cuts off the people’s desire for you, and your desire for people’.78
4. ‘Freedom from having to see distasteful and stupid people, and having to
endure their stupidity and behavior, for indeed the sight of a distasteful
person is a minor [form of] blindness’.79
For Ghaz:l;, these are all primarily duny:w;. As he himself says, ‘aside
from the first two, these (latter four) benefits are connected to the present
(al-A:@ira) duny:w; objectives. . .’.80 We must make sense of how these
are all duny:w;. The annoyance, anger, sadness, and helplessness one
might incur through human interactions are all nafs:n; things, and if we
go back to the earlier association of the nafs:n; realm with the duny:w;,
74
Ghaz:l;, IAy:8, ii. 226.
75
Ibid, 228.
76
Ibid, 232.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid, 235.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid, 236.
one can assume that those things having to do with human emotion are
viewed as distinctly non-d;n;. They are, as is highlighted clearly above,
part of this present world and that is what distinguishes them from
purely religious matters. But why is ‘preservation of the d;n and soul’

included in the duny:w; list? This overlap will only make sense if we
read Ghaz:l;’s further comments.
Ghaz:l; curiously adds that all four of these benefits ‘are also
connected to d;n’. He explains that these duny:w; benefits can also be
viewed in a d;n; sense, ‘in that a man, whenever he is annoyed at the
sight of a fool, will not be safe from slandering or speaking disparagingly
of that which is a creation of God. Thus, when he is annoyed by
another’s slander, evil thoughts, jealousy, calumny or its like, he will not
abstain from retaliating, and all of this leads to the corruption of d;n’.81
D;n, in this instance, is understood as the potential to avoid falling into
sin. According to Ghaz:l;, the duny:w; dealings of humans are always in
some way connected to the d;n; sphere since one’s d;n can be corrupted
or enhanced in the course of these interactions. This is why he
unproblematically includes ‘preservation of the d;n’ among the
duny:w; benefits. The example he provides illustrates how this practic-
ally functions: being annoyed by stupid people is primarily duny:w; in
that one will be bothered and develop feelings of restlessness and stress,
which are ordinary human emotions. It can become d;n;, however, when
one acts on these bad thoughts and commits the sins of slander and
backbiting, which can slowly corrupt one’s religion over time. Thus, for
Ghaz:l;, the duny:w; realm is not a neutral zone, but one that has
potentially religious ramifications, which in a sense places religion above
the secular, since the latter is always open to the infiltration of the former.
This process is given a more concrete example in another chapter of
the IAy:8 mentioned earlier, in which Ghaz:l; discusses five d;n; benefits
of wealth. It would be helpful now to look at the first way one can use
wealth towards a d;n; end. Ghaz:l; thinks that this can happen when it is
used for the facilitation of one’s own worship:
. . .one can spend it for himself, either in worship or to seek assistance for the
sake of worship. As for worship, it is making use of it for the likes of Aajj and
jih:d, both of which cannot be attained except through money, and both of
which are among the core of pious deeds, of which the poor man is prevented
from their bounty. As for that which strengthens him in [his] worship, these
are food, clothes, shelter, marriage, and the essential needs for living. When
these needs are not facilitated, the heart will be devoted to their management
and thus cannot be devoted exclusively to d;n. Anything without which
81
Ibid.
29
worship cannot be attained, is considered worship. So he takes sustenance
from the world for the sake of facilitating one of the d;n; benefits. . ..82
Ghaz:l; brings d;n and duny: together in claiming that there can be no

proper d;n without adequate worldly sustenance, and that in fact this can
be called worship when it is used towards a d;n; end. This hints again at
the idea that the duny:w; can be encompassed in an aura of sanctity
when the intention is religiously guided. It is important to keep in mind,
however, that it is not simply that money or food are now d;n; things;
rather, worship, which is obviously d;n;, can now be legitimately
attached to it. This helps us in understanding how the d;n; potentially
encompasses the dunyaw;, in that when a duny:w; thing attaches itself to
something d;n; like the Shari6a, revelation, or worship, it then becomes
part of the d;n; realm.
This is more explicitly laid out by R:z; in his exegesis of Q. 2: 165 a
verse of S<rat al-Baqara. In it he offers an account of how something
primarily duny:w; becomes d;n;. He writes:
Know that blessings are of two kinds: duny:w; and d;n;, and these eight
matters (the heavens, earth, the alteration of night and day, ships, rain, earthly
creatures, winds, and clouds),83 which God has enumerated, are duny:w;
blessings in the apparent sense. Then, when the thinking person (al-6:qil)
reflects on them and is guided by them (istadalla bi-h:) to the knowledge of the
Creator, they become d;n; blessings; however, their benefit with regards to
duny:w; blessings are not complete without the soundness of the senses and
the health of the humours (BiAAat al-miz:j), and likewise their benefit with
regards to d;n; blessings is not complete without the soundness of the intellects
(al-6uq<l) and the opening of the inner vision (al-baBar al-b:3in).84
R:z; thinks that things like ships and rain are duny:w; ‘in the apparent
sense’, which supports the idea that these Muslim thinkers understood
the duny:w; as that which is primarily of this world, or as 6Iy:@ would
have it, that which is fundamentally required by life in this world. He
also related the dunyaw; to the senses and the humours, both of which
are bodily and physical, as opposed to the d;n;, which is based on the
higher intellect and one’s spiritual perception. Nevertheless, they also
have the potential to become d;n;. This transformation occurs when
someone views these things as signs (:y:t) of God, which consequently
82
Ibid.
83
These eight blessings are not explicitly mentioned by R:z;, but are in
reference to the previous verse, 2: 164. R:z;’s commentary is with regards to the
following verse, 165.
84
R:z;, Maf:tiA, iv. 174.
leads them to Him (remember this is also what made the natural sciences
a d;n; activity according to Ghaz:l;). Significantly, this transformation
takes place within the actor himself; it is the person that transforms the
dunyaw; object into something d;n;. This implies that the d;n;–dunyaw;

binary is understood by this Muslim author as an inherent component of
the human mental landscape, a natural distinction embedded within the
way we view the world. It is up to us to endow the world with a religious
meaning. Needless to say, this is not akin to the modern secularist
position that this meaning is simply a projection from ourselves. For
R:z;, this is to see the world as it truly is: a manifestation of God.
The foregoing has illustrated that although a distinction is often made
at a primary level between the d;n; and duny:w; among premodern
Muslim authors, the two can overlap at a secondary level. This can
happen by instilling a d;n; intention into a duny:w; act or object, or by
viewing it in a way that conjures the God–human relationship, for
example by seeing something as the sign of God. In this sense, d;n is all-
encompassing in a way that modern secularized religion is thought not to
be. However, the potential to cross over does not nullify the distinction at
a primary level, as has been displayed in numerous examples above.
POLITICS IN ISLAM: A RELIGIOUS OR

SECULAR PHENOMENON?
Given that the question of the religious and secular in the modern world
is one primarily of a political nature, it should be unsurprising that the
interaction of d;n and duny: features prominently in premodern Islamic
political discussions. It is commonly held, by both modern Muslims and
scholars in the West, that in Islam, religion is intimately linked to politics
in a way drastically unlike other religions.85 The question is, however,
what does this entail exactly? Does this mean that Muslims did not
conceive of distinct religious and political spheres? Or, that in Islamic
thought the two came together more easily. My interest in this final
85
Ab< al-A6l: Mawd<d; (d. 1979) attributes this inherent political nature to
Islam’s unique combination of the religious and secular in a chapter on the
‘Political Concepts of the Qur8:n’: ‘The chief characteristic of Islamic ideology is
that it does not admit a conflict, nay, not even a significant separation between
life spiritual and life mundane’: Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, The Islamic Law and
Constitution (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 8th edn., 1983), 154. For an erudite
comparative analysis illustrating the unique case of Islam’s fusion of religion and
politics, see Michael Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case
in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
31
section is to explore the implications of the fusion of religion and politics
in Islamic history for the study of the religious and secular in Islamic
thought.

Were the Seljuks religious?
In What is Islam?, Ahmed makes an important case for not merely
viewing the Seljuks as a group of nominally Muslim opportunists, but as
an authentically religious, or to use his own terminology, ‘Islamic’
regime. He argues that the Seljuks were directly responsible for several
distinctly Islamic institutions like the Sufi kh:nq:h and the madrasa,
which goes to show that they were very much makers of ‘Islam’, and not
simply secular rulers totally removed from religion.86 I agree with
Ahmed’s contention that Muslim rulers and political theorists did not
envision a strict separation of religion and politics (à la secularism). This
conception is no more clearly stated than in the words of the well-known
M:tur;d; theologian, Ab< al-Mu6;n al-Nasaf; (d. 508/1115),: ‘the
Imamate includes both religious and political authority (al-im:ma ma6a
amr al-d;n f;-h: amr al-mulk wa-l-siy:sa)’. Nasaf; emphasizes this point
by contrasting the Islamic view with the Jewish one in which ‘political
authority was in the hands of kings and religious authority in the hands
of prophets (k:na amr al-siy:sa f; ayd; al-mul<k wa-l-diy:na f; ayd; al-
anbiy:8)’.87
In reference to the Seljuks, however, Ahmed goes on to claim that
‘there is no indication that these rulers regard themselves as acting in a
separate domain of ‘secular’ values, or that they, or anyone else,
recognized the operation of two separately constituted domains of truth
or of value. . .’.88 Thus, Ahmed believes that the Seljuks, and Muslims
more broadly, did not view politics as a distinctly secular activity. Ahmed
contends that ‘. . .the Sultanate represents a (re-)ordering of the world in
terms of Islam in which the religious–secular distinction is not present’.89
For Ahmed, the close link between the political and the religious in Islam
proves that Muslims did not think in terms of a religious–secular binary.
86
Cf. the view of Ovamir Anjum who, regarding the Seljuks and the Buyids,
writes: ‘it is unlikely that either were particularly committed to their respective
religious identities or rites’: Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law and Community in
Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 94.
87
Ab< al-Mu6;n al-Nasaf;, TabBirat al-adilla fi; uB<l al-d;n (ed. Kl<d Sal:ma;
Damascus: al-Ma6had al-6Ilm; al-Farans; li-l-Dir:s:t al-6Arabiyya, 2 vols., 1990–
3), ii. 829.
88
89
Ibid.
This does not, however, seem to have been uniformly accepted by
premodern Muslims.
Again employing the Jewish comparison, the great Khwarizmian
polymath Ab< RayA:n al-B;r<n; (d. 439/1048) notes the astrologers’

prophecy of the Buyid takeover of the 6Abb:sids, which for all intents
and purposes rendered the 6Abb:sids powerless except in a formal
religious role. The astrologers, he writes, believe that what the 6Abb:sids
retained was
merely a d;n; and creedal (i6tiq:d;) authority, not a political (mulk;) and
duny:w; one; it resembles the role of the Rosh Ha-Galut among the Jews—a
d;n; leadership without kingship or state. The present ‘Abb:sid incumbent is
merely the head of Islam (ra8;s al-Isl:m), in the view of the astrologers, not a
king (malik).90
Although B;r<n; is citing the view of the astrologers here, he appears to

reference it approvingly and goes on to give the reason why the 6Abb:sids
failed to sustain their rule. Even if one were to question B;r<n;’s own
view, however, the fact that the idea of a religious–secular/political
separation was floating around and was attributed to a whole class of
people and was discussed by B;r<n; is significant in and of itself. In this
passage, d;n is associated with creed and juxtaposed with the duny:,
which, according to the astrologers (and possibly B;r<n;), falls under the
distinct domain of the political (mulk;). This serves as an example of
Muslim thinkers who did in fact conceive of two separate domains of the
d;n; and the duny:w;/mulk; when discussing political matters. Moreover,
according to B;r<n;/the astrologers, the 6Abb:sid caliph is in charge of
‘Islam’ but not the civil realm (mulk), which seems to challenge Ahmed’s
claim that ‘Islam’ encompassed all facets of life, including the political.
Here, Islam is not simply d;n plus duny:, but d;n in distinction from
duny:. This is not to say that B;r<n;/the astrologers did not view Islam as
a ‘political religion’; they are simply making an empirical observation.
But it does show that they thought it was natural to see politics as a
primarily non-religious, or secular, activity. As we saw in the case of
knowledge, in the realm of politics premodern Muslims also made a
distinction between religious and secular authority.
Politics as a secular phenomenon

B;r<n;’s statement should not be seen as an exceptional point of view
written only within the context of a rare division of religion from politics
90
B;r<n;, al-Ath:r al-b:qiya 6an al-qur<n al-kh:liya (ed. Parv;z Azk:8;; Tehran:
M;r:sB-i Makt<b, 2001), 171. I am grateful to Professor Michael Cook for the
last two Arabic references.
33
in Islamic history. It seems to have stemmed instead from a general view
of politics as a secular or worldly engagement with power in contrast to
the religion. Ibn al-Fiq3aq: (d. 709/1309), the Shi6i historian from Mosul,
writes at one point in his Fakhr; (an historical overview of Islamic

political regimes and manuals of statecraft) that the first four caliphs ‘in
all things resemble a d;n; more than a duny:w; quality’ and proceeds to
describe the impoverished lives of the early caliphs and how they lived
like their subjects in contrast to the Umayyads. He also adds that ‘this
conduct (of the early Caliphs) does not conform to that of temporal
rulers (mul<k al-duny:) but resembles rather the methods of prophets or
the things of the next world’.91 Ibn al-Fiq3aq: here mirrors 6Iy:@’s earlier
desire to distinguish the other-worldly and religious nature of the
Prophet’s mission from the worldliness of secular life.
According to this Muslim historian, the early Caliphs were distinctly
religious, in contrast to the worldliness of later rulers, which is the
natural consequence of the secularity of political life. He does not
mention this by way of nostalgia, but simply to say that a comparison
between the early caliphs and the current Mongol rulers is not helpful,
since their righteous rule was of a unique nature. In fact, he believes that
his own ruler, the Mongol convert to Islam, MaAm<d Gh:z:n (r. 1295–
1304), should be considered one of the greatest Muslim rulers in history;
‘none of the Muslim dynasties are worthy of comparison with this
(present) dynasty’,92 he boldly declares. In a similar vein, Donald Little
has shown how the Maml<ks (Turkic slave converts ruling in Egypt and
North Africa in the medieval period) were popularly viewed by their
subjects as religious. He quotes Ibn Khald<n, who believed that the
Mamluks ‘embrace Islam with the determination of true believers, while
retaining their nomadic [virtues]. . .’.93 These examples do lend credence
to Ahmed’s contention that the post-Caliphal sultans should not be
viewed simply as secular leaders. However, Ahmed’s apprehension
against ‘. . .the deleterious effect that conceptualizing Islam in terms of
the religious-versus-secular binary can have for understanding an
individual Muslim’94 seems to be unfounded. In fact, it would be
difficult to understand Ibn al-Fiq3aq:’s statement above without thinking
in terms of a religious–secular binary.
91
Ibn al-Fiq3aq:, al-Fakhr; f; al-:d:b al-sul3:niyya wa-l-duwal al-Isl:miyya
(Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tij:riyya al-Kubr:, 1345/1927), 25.
92
Ibid.
93
Cited in Donald P. Little, ‘Religion Under the Mamluks’, Muslim World, 73/
3–4 (1983): 165–81, at 166.
94
In the course of his discussion of the ‘Islamic’ Sultanate, Ahmed cites
the ethical work of Ab< al-Easan al-M:ward; (d. 450/1058), popularly
known as Adab al-duny: wa-l-d;n, in favour of his argument.95
Strangely, he overlooks the salience of such a title for the question of

the religious and secular distinction in Islam. In M:ward;’s discussion of
the d;n–duny: relationship, one notices a subtle awareness of the
difference between the political and religious. M:ward; touches on this
in his treatment of the question of whether the intellect (al-6aql) or the
divine law (al-shar6) is prior. M:ward; sides with the former since human
beings need a sound intellect prior to deriving the correct understanding
of the law. He then writes:
There are two kinds of ethics (al-adab adab:n): The ethic of divine law (adab
shar;6a), and the ethic of political administration (adab siy:sa). The ethic of
divine law is that which brings about the execution of (religious) obligations
(add: al-far@), and the ethic of political administration is that which brings
about the prosperity of the earth (6amar al-ar@). . .96
The clear distinction made above between political and shar6; ethics can
link up to the primary distinction between d;n and duny: outlined
throughout the course of M:ward;’s book. In fact, the statement above is
actually a common refrain in Islamic political literature and in its other
variations employs the d;n–duny: distinction.97 Ibn al-Eadd:d (d. 673/
1274), for example, quotes the passage almost verbatim in his al-Jawhar
al-naf;s f; siy:s:t al-ra8;s:
There are two kinds of administration (siy:sat:n): the administration of d;n
and the administration of duny:. The administration of d;n is that which
brings about the execution of (religious) obligations, and the administration of
duny: is that which brings about the prosperity of the earth.98
95
Ahmed, What is Islam?, 223. The full original title of the text by M:ward; is
Kit:b al-Bughyat al-uly: f; adab al-d;n wa-l-duny:.
96
Ab< al-Easan al-M:ward;, Kit:b Adab al-duny: wa-l-d;n (ed. MuAammad
al-4ab:A; Beirut: D:r Maktabat al-Eay:t, 1986), 134.
97
Us:ma b. Munqidh, Lub:b al-:d:b (ed. AAmad MuAammad Sh:kir; Cairo:
Maktabat Luw;s Sark;s, 1935), 56; Ibr:h;m b. AAmad Raqq;, AA:sin al-maAasin
in Khams al-ras:8il (Constantinople: Ma3ba6at al-Jaw:8ib, 1301/1883), 145. I was
first alerted to the abundant recurrence of this phrase by Ri@w:n al-Sayyid, in the
footnotes of his edition of Ibn al-Eadd:d’s al-Jawhar: see Ibn al-Eadd:d, al-
Jawhar al-naf;s f; siy:sat al-ra8;s (ed. Ri@w:n al-Sayyid; Beirut: D:r al-Fal;6a li-l-
Fib:6a wa-l-Nashr, 1983), 61, n. 2.
98
Ibn al-Eaddad, al-Jawhar, 61–2.
35
For these authors, the divine law and religious obligations are under the
purview of d;n and shar;6a. These are actively differentiated from the
duny:w;-siy:s; sphere, which is primarily concerned with human flourish-
ing in this world. Here we find a clear religious–secular binary presented as

objective comments on the nature of two distinguishable domains.
The foregoing examples do not, however, entail the idea of a
separation of religion and politics that has become a central feature of
the modern West. In fact, Ibn al-Tiq3aq: and M:ward; both held the
same belief that religion and politics were intertwined. M:ward;, in
another work cites the famous political adage, ‘religion and kingship are
twin brothers’, which many scholars have shown to be the standard
metaphor for the Islamic theory of the combination of religion and
politics.99 Ibn al-Fiq3aq:, in the same historical work mentioned above
cites another well-known religio-political aphorism: ‘People follow the
religion of their kings’.100 Another Shi6i thinker, the famous rationalist-
theologian al-Shar;f al-Murta@: (d. 436/1044), also seems to have held a
very subtle understanding of the difference between religious and secular
concerns, particularly in the realm of politics, but challenges the
dissociation of religion from politics. In a short treatise on how the
Shi6i should accommodate themselves to the illegitimate governments of
their time, he takes a pragmatic position, allowing them to work for
these governments even in the absence of the Im:m because of their
increased ability to do good in their high positions for the Shi6i
community. Towards the end of the essay, he poses a hypothetical for
the reader: if someone works for an unjust government with the purpose
of commanding good and forbidding evil but also to obtain some
worldly benefits, is his act still considered righteous? He answers with
the following:
If this office holder accepted the office and entered it when its tenure satisfied
only d;n; aims and not duny:w; ones, and would not have ventured upon it if
it satisfied only the aims of duny: but not the aims of the d;n, this would be an
indication that his aim in it was founded in d;n, even though it is possible that
another aim, not primarily intended, was combined with it. If the matter was
99
M:ward;, Kit:b Tash;l al-naCar wa-ta6j;l al-Cafar: f; akhl:q al-malik wa-
siy:sat al-mulk (ed. MuAy; Gil:l al-SarA:n; Beirut: D:r al-Nah@a al-6Arabiyya,
1981), 149. For a particularly insightful treatment of this idea in light of the
deficiencies in modern constitutional theory, see Noah Feldman, ‘The Ethical
Literature: Religion and Political Authority as Brothers’, Journal of Persianate
Studies, 5/2 (2012): 95–127.
100
Ibn al-Fiq3aq:, al-Fakhr;, 17.
the reverse of this, then the sincere, primarily intended aim was based on
duny:, and in this case his tenure of office is evil.101
According to al-Murta@:, if someone takes a government position for

primarily secular reasons, the legitimacy of the act is rendered null and
void, since the chief justification of the act is that religious purposes be
served. Here the author makes a clear distinction between religious and
secular motivations, in line with the authors above; however, he does not
view politics as a purely secular phenomenon but, on the contrary, as one
of deep religious significance.
CONCLUSION: THEORETICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
The preceding survey of the d;n–duny: binary in Islamic history has

presented a historical account of how medieval Muslims spoke in terms
of two distinct spheres of religion and non-religion. I have found that the
distinction undeniably existed in the Islamic context and that the d;n–
duny: binary lines up well with the plain usage of the categories of the
religious and secular in the modern world. God, scripture, divine law,
reward and worship all fall under the d;n; realm while all worldly
matters outside of the strict purview of d;n are attributed to the duny:w;.
This latter category is often associated with the anthropocentric and
physical, whereas the religious is more abstract and fundamentally
theocentric. Even in the realm of knowledge, subjects like maths and
logic were seen as duny:w; sciences in contradistinction to the
specifically religious disciplines like fiqh and tafs;r. Politics was also
viewed as a sphere of activity distinct from the aim of religion, even if the
two could came together in a happy marriage. The understanding of the
duny:w; among premodern Muslim authors seems to have been
determined by its primary relation to matters of this world, as opposed
to those of the next. Moreover, its distinction to d;n was not simply
present, but was actively used to help resolve and understand various
issues in Islamic thought. It was used, for example, to delineate the
Prophet’s religious authority, categorize the various benefits of certain
actions, and to understand major political developments in Islamic
history. Even if the dividing lines were sometimes blurred, the blurring
and negotiation itself implies the existence of distinct spheres.
101
Wilferd Madelung, ‘A Treatise of the Shar;f al-Murta@: on the Legality of
Working for the Government (Mas8ala f; l-6amal ma6a 8l-sul3:n)’, BSOAS, 43
(1980): 18–31, at 24, 29. I have slightly amended the translation of Madelung.
37
Significantly, the duny:w; was also more universal and neutral than
the d;n;, which implies that the latter is in particular need of being
defined by the religious scholars and that the former is more open to non-
Islamic influences. Looking back at M:ward; and the other political

writers, one could say that their general receptivity to Persian and Greek
ideas is in some ways based on their distinction of the d;n; and duny:w;;
for them, the tools for building up civilization are duny:w; and therefore
universal, so they can freely draw from non-Muslim influences without
compromising their Islam. Their worldview stands in stark contrast to a
central feature of modern Islamist thought, which is the understanding of
Islam as an all-encompassing ideology that must comprehensively inform
the politics, economics, and culture of Muslim societies. Given this view,
it is unsurprising that these authors actively argued against the
applicability of the religious–secular distinction to Islam.102 The
particularity of religion in the premodern conception goes to show that
these Muslims did in fact have an idea of a delineated realm of ‘religion’
that stood out from the universal duny:w; elements of human life, which
should temper the growing urge to do away with the category of
‘religion’ when speaking about premodern Muslims.
Where the modern secularist and Islamic conceptions diverge, how-
ever, is in the extent of the boundaries drawn between the two respective
spheres, which is exemplified by the active interplay between the two
categories in Islamic thought. Thus, the opposition of the religious and
secular, which has become a norm in the modern Western world (as
typified by the separation of church and state) was not an understanding
held by premodern Muslim societies. When premodern Muslims did
think in terms of a distinction between d;n and duny:, it was a matter of
differentiation rather than opposition. Hence, instead of viewing religion
102
This is exemplified best in the thought of the influential Sayyid Qu3b, who
viewed Islam as a ‘way of life’ that promotes a specific understanding of
economics, politics, and culture. This drives his critique of Islamic history, which
he believes, rightly, drew from a variety of non-Muslim sources: Sayyid Qu3b,
‘Signposts Along the Road’ in Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman
(eds.), Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-
Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 141.
Earlier Arab writers like Rash;d Ri@: and Khayr al-D;n al-T<nis;, however, did
acknowledge a religious–secular distinction and consequently argued that
matters of governance and economics need not draw from Islamic sources.
Ri@: actually cites the abovementioned Prophetic tradition on the farming
advice. See the selections of their writings in Charles Kurzman (ed.), Modernist
Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),
42, 84. Given the variety of views, a study of the modern Islamic understanding
of the religious–secular distinction is a clear desideratum.
as corrupting the venture of science, as is so often thought today, they
mixed the two freely. Moreover, for many premodern Muslims, d;n was
located above duny: and in many ways encompassed it without
compromising the distinction conceptually. There appears to have been

some difference of opinion over the use of such a distinction, ranging
from those who deny it completely to those who go out of their way to
uphold it. Yet the binary itself does not seem to play a major role in the
medieval Muslim world as it does in the modern world. On balance, one
could say that the objective of keeping d;n and duny: apart was not as
constitutive of the premodern Muslim world as the separation of the
religious and secular is today within the modern Western world.
So did premodern Muslims have a conceptual dichotomy akin to the
modern Western religious and secular? Yes, and no. I think it should be
apparent by now that Muslims did have a concept of ‘religion’ and that
they would distinguish it from all that they considered non-religious
precisely for the purpose of clarifying exactly what religion entails. This
is a distinction analogous in essence to the modern religious–secular
binary. In fact, this should be unsurprising in light of Christoph Kleine’s
recent work on medieval Japan and his suggestion that the religious–
secular distinction is ‘a potentially universal structural principle by
which complex cultures are conceptually organized’.103 Drawing on
the ideas of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, Kleine contends that the
concept of religion exists in human societies in order to make the
indeterminate features of human existence determinate and to organize
this unempirical domain of life so as to make it available and accessible
to humans. The transcendent must then necessarily be distinguished from
the immanent since it is easy to talk about non-empirical matters
inexhaustibly to the point of collapsing its seriousness; hence, religion
instinctively draws a boundary between itself and all else. This is
precisely what it seems the Muslim authors above were doing.
Many scholars would take issue with the ‘universalistic’ and ‘essen-
tialist’ position presented above. However, the case against the univer-
sality of the religious–secular distinction has generally been based on
very weak arguments. S. N. Balaganghadara, in a recent journal article,
carefully breaks down the core arguments of this critical scholarship in
religious studies and exposes their glaring deficiencies. He sums up the
accusations laid against the religious–secular binary into three: that ‘(1)
103
Christoph Kleine, ‘Religion and the Secular in Premodern Japan from the
Viewpoint of Systems Theory’, Journal of Religion in Japan, 2/1 (2013): 1–34,
at 5.
39
the distinction is slippery or fluid;104 (2) the meanings of the words
‘religious’ and ‘secular’ have changed over multiple historical contexts;
(3) the distinction is a binary or dichotomy. . .’.105
With regards to the first claim, which essentially argues that there is a

lack of criteria to distinguish the religious from the non-religious, he
writes, ‘. . .the absence of a set of criteria can never be a good reason to
abandon making a distinction. If anything, it should propel us in the
direction of research that either provides such criteria or shows why it is
impossible to do so’. This is precisely what I have done in this article.
Secondly, he argues that the fact of diachronic change or multiple
meanings does not entail the invalidity of a concept or conceptual
distinction, or else why not do away with a concept like ‘God’, which has
obviously changed over time.106 He makes the further helpful observa-
tion: ‘Since it is not possible to make the radical claim that words do not
have any meaning outside of the contexts where they occur, the
occurrence of this distinction in multiple historical contexts with
multiple meanings does not establish the case that, therefore, this
distinction makes no sense to us in our context.’ In other words, the fact
that d;n and duny: meant something different to premodern Muslims
from what the religious and secular means to us today does not imply
there is no relation between the two understandings. Thirdly, he argues
that it is not clear why binaries in themselves are necessarily a problem,
104
An example of this can be seen in the opening article of the edited volume
Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. In analysing
Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s work, Timothy Fitzgerald writes: ‘The problem is that
by attributing personal lives (or cultural worlds) with a ‘‘religious’’ dimension,
and assuming as Smith does that such personal religious consciousness is
ubiquitous and universal in place and time, we are still left with the problem of
deciding which purportedly universal aspect of human experience is ‘‘religious’’
and which is not religious.’ Fitzgerald, ‘Introduction’ in Timothy Fitzgerald (ed.),
Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, 11. One would
ask why this is necessarily a ‘problem’. Isn’t it precisely one of the intrinsic
functions of the idea of religion to answer what is or is not religious, just as all
concepts are helpfully defined by what they are not, which is precisely what we
have observed many premodern Muslims doing.
105
S. N. Balaganghadara, ‘On the Dark Side of the ‘Secular’: Is the Religious–
secular Distinction a Binary?’ Numen, 61/1 (2014): 33–52, at 34. As is clear from
my introduction, not all scholars have resorted to these arguments alone;
however, these three elements are frequently used (whether implicitly or
explicitly) amongst most of the critical literature including that discussed at
the beginning of the paper.
106
Ibid, 35.
since the universal dichotomy of good and evil is an example of a valid
and useful binary that no one would attempt to problematize.
This critique does not imply, however, that we must do away
completely with the important idea that the modern religious–secular

distinction is a radical break from what came before. There is a real sense
in which these distinctions and boundaries were much more porous in
the premodern world than they are today, as we have seen in the case of
premodern Islam. Building off of Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘porous’
selves in the premodern world,107 one might say that what is unique
about the modern world is not the existence of binary categories as such,
but the attempt to draw rigidly the boundaries between various
categories like the religious and secular and the natural and supernatural.
This would support Jose Casanova’s intention that ‘differentiation serves
precisely as one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of modern
structures’.108 In a more critical mode, scholars like Talal Asad and John
Milbank have forcefully undermined the common triumphalist narrative
of the ‘secular’ by exposing the uniquely Christian genealogy of the term
and the violent ends towards which it is used in the modern world.109
Therefore, the active drive to differentiate between categories like
religion, science, and politics was not as central to the medieval Islamic
worldview as it is to the modern one, which is perhaps best exemplified
by the total absence within the premodern Islamic context of the idea
that religion must remain separate from politics.
In light of this, a consistent, one-to-one translation of the d;n–duny:
binary into the Anglophone distinction of the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ has
the potential of distorting the interaction of the d;n; and duny:w; in
premodern Muslim societies.
In my view, then, two points must be kept in mind in debating the
translation of d;n and duny: into English. On the one hand, its
translation into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ serves the purpose of accurately
representing the many divisions premodern Muslims made between the
107
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
108
Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 212.
109
As stated earlier, this is not the place to evaluate the critical scholarship
regarding ‘the secular’, although it is an endeavour integral to furthering the
study of Islam’s relationship to the secular. It would be good here just to mention
the works of John Milbank and Talal Asad, whose works are among the most
interesting and influential critiques of the secular: see John Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) and
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular.
41
religious and non-religious in a way that makes sense to us today. By not
using these terms and leaving them untranslated in the Arabic, we would,
in a way, be implying that these categories are not intelligible to us
modern Westerners since they are so utterly different—a clear case of

‘otherization’. As my historical study has shown, this difference is not as
evident as it has been made out to be. If we are to truly understand
premodern Islam and relate to it in a meaningful way, translation into
our own languages is of utmost importance.
Moving on to the specifics, the term ‘secular’ may not always be the
best choice for translation since there also exists the term ‘worldly’,
which accurately renders the term dunyaw; in certain contexts, but
without the extra baggage the term ‘secular’ carries within the modern
world. I would leave it, then, to the translator’s discretion to choose
which term functions more appropriately in context. In my opinion, it
works well in some contexts and not in others. Nevertheless, ‘d;n’ as
‘religion’ almost always works as a useful translation, since there is no
other word in the English lexicon that represents the totality of what d;n
signifies, e.g., ritual, worship, and divine law. Moreover, the connotation
of ‘religion’ in the modern context need not always signify some
privatized belief in the divine. For example, Anglophone Muslims often
use ‘religion’ as a general term for Islam and mean by it something far-
removed from the uniquely Christian view that Ahmed and others
maintain is inextricably linked to the term ‘religion’. Many Muslims
today see Islam as ‘a way of life’, applicable to economics as much as it is
to prayer, even as they use the term ‘religion’.
Yet beyond the specifics of my argument, what I hope to have shown in
the preceding pages is that a close philological engagement with texts is
the closest we can come to understanding the premodern non-Western
world on its own terms. The current hyper-theorization that aims to
slowly chip away at the epistemological legacy of colonialism in the
West, though commendable, is far too introspective and inward-looking
to teach us much about ‘the other.’ What the current ‘post-colonial’
moment calls for, then, is a more serious and deliberate engagement with
the ideas of the past, which will protect us from the progressivist hubris
of an Enlightenment mentalité, but also the subconscious posturing of a
post-modern ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which perfunctorily dismisses
the palpable connective tissue running through the shared ideas and
questions humanity has been grappling with from time immemorial.
Abstract
This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside
academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between
the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages

of the d;n–duny: binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic
writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the
categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern
Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the
argument against the relevance of the religious–secular distinction to
Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of
Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the
broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in
terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this
distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant
as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted
in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the
modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was
religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these
similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account
of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problem-
atizes the current standard account which holds that these categories
were invented within the modern West.

Abbasi, Rushain 2020 - Did Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish The Religious and Secular? The Din-Dunya Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought

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Abbasi, Rushain 2020 - Did Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish The Religious and Secular? The Din-Dunya Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought

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Journal of Islamic Studies 0:0 (2020) pp. 1–42 doi:10.

DID PREMODERN MUSLIMS DISTINGUISH

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Within both scholarly and popular understandings of Islam, one

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How did Muslim scholars distinguish the d;n; and duny:w;?

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Delineating the scope of Prophetic authority

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TOWARDS A CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE

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In this curious passage, Ghaz:l; provides three examples of d;n;

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How does the duny:w; become d;n;?

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POLITICS IN ISLAM: A RELIGIOUS OR

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Although B;r<n; is citing the view of the astrologers here, he appears to

Politics as a secular phenomenon

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According to al-Murta@:, if someone takes a government position for

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The preceding survey of the d;n–duny: binary in Islamic history has

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