Why Not Secular Liberalism? A Deeper Reflection upon the Incompatibilities of Secular Liberalism and Islamic Governance at the Ontological and Epistemological Levels

My previous manuscript, currently awaiting a final contract offer with Palgrave, offered a normative model of Islamic governance. Chapter 2 explicitly argued that when crafting a model of Islamic governance (progressive or conservative), secular liberalism as a bedrock ideology is incompatible with the general Islamic worldview. Liberalism is incompatible with Islamic governance not merely at the manifest policy-specific level, but rather at its fundamental ontological and epistemological moorings. This article further extrapolates on that previous argument with the hopes of being a second book in due time. This particular Paper will offer a thorough investigation of the relationship between Islamic governance and secular liberalism. Recent scholars such as Ali Allawi, John Esposito, John Voll, and Khaled Abou El Fadl have made it clear that there are serious issues to consider when offering a model of secular liberal governance within Islamic socio-political discourses. This work will go into greater detail on these ideas by looking at the writings of essential thinkers within the Western liberal tradition. It will begin by looking at earlier thinkers such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and then engage with some of the more recent interpretations of liberalism offered by contemporary scholars. The purpose of this project is to show that the incompatibilities between Islam and liberalism are so deep that there really is no reason to anchor any model of governance in the Muslim world in such a discursive framework. This is not to suggest that 'all things liberal' are antithetical to Islam; rather it is to suggest that liberalism as a weltanschauung is inappropriate for conceptualizing a model of Islamic governance. This article will conclude that communitarian based models of social organization are actually far more compatible with Islam’s ontological and epistemological underpinnings than are liberal models.