“YOU PRAY LIKE WE HAVE FUN”: TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SECULAR ISLAM
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Abstract
Despite the commonplace nature of such terms as “secular Judaism” and the near synonymous relationship between modern secularism and classical liberal Christianity, there exists little discourse about “secular Islam.” One speaks of the “dynamic tension between Islam and secularism” or of split identities and loyalties between the two poles, but almost never of the possibility of secularity and Islam existing together, unproblematically, within the same civic subjectivity. While critiquing the distinction between secularity and laicism in the Turkish context, the article pursues a provisional, phenomenological explication of this dilemma and suggests why a conceptualization of secular Islam is ultimately necessary for European and German discourses about religion and civic culture.