Religious and Secular in Premodern Islam and Christianity

Pollack, Detlef

Abstract

The paper sets out to describe forms of difference between the religious and the secular. To do so, it compares premodern Islam with premodern Christianity, with regard to their forms of differentiation and de-differentiation of the religious and the secular. This comparison of the two world religions in their premodern periods highlights both similarities and differences in their forms of interplay between the immanent and the transcendent. The thesis of this article is that Latin Christianity in the High Middle Ages established a claim to supremacy over all areas of society - including politics, science, and morality - that provoked non-religious areas into asserting themselves and constructing secular logics of rationality. In premodern Islam, however, the extensive rejection of the supremacy of the religious over the secular contributed to a more relaxed relationship between the two spheres. While the Roman Church’s universalist claim to validity produced a sharp opposition between the religious and the secular, the extensive renunciation of such a claim in Islam allowed the two spheres to coexist, and to oscillate between differentiation and de-differentiation.