The Promise of Ash’arite Semiotics

Abstract

In his important study Public Religions in the Modern World, sociologist Jose Casanova describes the “deprivatization” of religions on a global scale since the 1970s.¹ This phenomenon has forced many scholars to rethink previously hegemonic theories of secularization that envisioned the increasing marginalization of religion within the public sphere in favor of positivist, secular-humanist societies. As the world has seen, forecasts of religion’s public demise have proven far too hasty, and, with the exception of the phenomenon of differentiation remaining valid (i.e., delineated conceptions of religious and secular spheres), have left classical theories of secularization largely bankrupt. Contemporary societies must then address the reality of “public religions,” or the repoliticization of religions that have rejected the marginalized, privatized status afforded or forced upon them by modernity, and to grapple with the sensitive and potentially explosive dynamics of religion and the modern nation-state. This reality is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in contemporary Muslim societies. In his study Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies, Leonard Binder has argued that the formation and success of political liberalism in contemporary Muslim nation-states will ultimately depend on the ability of Muslim scholars and theorists to formulate a “vigorous Islamic liberalism.”²