Has the Sharia of Christianity Been Corrupted?

Abstract

This article takes the oeuvre of Syrian intellectual Farah Antun (1874–1922) as an entry point into the vexed relationship between religion, historicity, and the secular. Although it is true that Antun's concept of religion bore the unmistakable marks of European Christian heritage, the article seeks to illustrate something different: That Antun's work raised the very problem of the relationship between the category of religion and its historicity. Antun's commitment to viewing all religions as merely products of their historical context, the article argues, did not resolve the problem of the relative merits of Islam versus Christianity—the subject of his famous debate with Muhammad Abduh—but only generated a further question with a theological problem of its own: How to account for the emergence of the separation of politics and religion, the appearance of a secular mode of being, itself? Here the historicism that was the signature of Antun's thought encountered its sharpest limit—yet the limit is not his alone: It structures contemporary attempts to historicize the secular, which falter insofar as they struggle to see that religion follows historicity as its shadow.