This book offers an original understanding of the relation between contemporary Islam and Secular Reason. The suspicion of an increasing intrusion of the political into the religious is neither absent in critical readings of contemporary Islam, nor entirely alien to the modernizing logic of secularization. Little is novel in the recognition that in modernity religion becomes vastly more susceptible to politics; that in modernity spaces of the religious progressively begin to show signs of infirmity; or that in modernity the religious increasingly accommodates politics for its self-preservation. Equally salient is the ascendancy of the economic over the religious. The spaces in which religion survives, even thrives, are conditioned by a self-expanding economic logic. However, the universalizing effect of Secular Reason in the Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) as the intensification of religiosity has not received the critical scrutiny it deserves. Often, this effect is eclipsed by the opposing processes of secularization. While secularizing tendencies are irrefutable, this monograph sees the universalizing effect of the colonization of the religious by the political not as secularization, but despiritualization, a process marked by the progressive evacuation of transcendence from faith and the degradation of the moral code attached to that faith. The apparent resurgence of religious sentiment in the ICZs on this view is an integral part of despiritualization. Exploring the workings of Secular Reason on three registers—secularity, nihilism, and sovereignty, this critical inquiry challenges established thinking on political Islam and its religious underpinnings.

Mustapha Kamal Pasha is Professor Emeritus at Aberystwyth University in Wales, United Kingdom.  Before joining Aberystwyth as Chair in International Politics in 2013, he was Sixth Century Chair and Head of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen (2006-2013). His notable publications include Islam and International Relations: Fractured Worlds (Routledge 2017); Globalization, Difference, and Human Security (Routledge 2013; as editor); and Colonial Political Economy (Oxford 1998). Professor Pasha received the International Studies Association (ISA) Global Development Section’s Eminent Scholar Award in 2024. He served as Vice President of the ISA in 2012-2013.