Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many scholars and researchers in the Arab and Western worlds have been involved in the controversy around whether (political) religion/Islam is compatible with (political) modernity, democracy, secularity, etc. While some suspect that this question is posed incorrectly or refuse to answer it (Bishara 1994, 57–8; 2013, 7–9), there are generally speaking two camps in this respect: (1) those who deem that the compatibility of Islam with modernity is possible to the extent that one can talk about modern, democratic and secular Islam (Hanafi and al-Jabri 1990, 38); and (2) others who completely disagree and say that Islam is hostile to modernity, because Islam is – in its core, and necessarily – incapable of separating religion from politics (Lewis 2002). Against this background, it could be argued that most of the basic concepts – including secularity, secularism, Islam and modernity – invoked in this debate have been objective sources of (mis)understanding when addressing this topic in the Arab and Islamicate world. For example, the concepts of secularity and secularism, as “thick normative concepts,” include description and evaluation (Kirchin 2017; 2013; Väyrynen 2013). This duality, between descriptive and evaluative, creates distinct theoretical and methodological problems, leading to misunderstandings or to a greater differentiation between understandings.

It is also important to note that the terms “secularity,” “secularism” and “secularization” refer to different concepts, as clarified in the third section (pp. 000–00, “Secularity/Secularism between al-ʿAzmeh and el-Messiri”).