Stanford Humanities Center
Rushain Abbasi received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University. He was formerly an associate research scholar in the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School. His scholarly work seeks to bring the Islamic intellectual and cultural heritage to bear on contemporary debates in religious studies and social theory. His articles have been published in the Journal of Islamic Studies and Studia Islamica. His dissertation, “Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam,” was awarded the Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies at Harvard University.
SHC Project
Beyond the Divine Command: A History of the Secular in Premodern Islam
Abbasi’s current book project is an intellectual history of the development of the idea of the secular in the premodern Islamic world. The study is aimed at undermining the current academic orthodoxy which maintains that the distinction between the "religious" and the "secular" is a modern European invention, and thus wholly at odds with an Islamic worldview. More constructively, however, the book illustrates how premodern Muslim thinkers engaged in sophisticated and complex secularizing strategies in order to resolve a variety of questions pertaining to theology, politics, law, and epistemology. In essence, the project is one which attempts to intervene in contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between Islam and modernity, but through a historically grounded investigation of a single concept (or rather, dialectic) in premodern Islamic thought.
