The problem with religion
Words have afterlives and the most consequential among them are those that appear entirely innocent. Some words become windows, others, while still pretending to be transparent, harden imperceptibly into walls.
Today, calling Islam a religion seems like the most natural thing in the world. The phrase adorns university handbooks, interfaith brochures and the religion boxes on government forms, filled in by Muslims and critics alike with equal unconcern. Islam can properly be called a religion in ordinary English.
Yet the word religion can be made to do more ambitious and quietly damaging work. It can assign faith a private room furnished with belief, worship, personal identity and the ceremonies that mark birth, marriage and death. Islam will not fit in that room. The trouble is that before the conversation about Islam has even begun, the word religion has already arranged the furniture.
In Europe, confessional war and the rise of sovereign states helped turn faith into a private affair. Christianity retained different public roles in different countries, but governments increasingly claimed the right to decide where its authority ended.
Islam, however, speaks to the whole human being. It addresses the heart and the tongue, the market and the family, politics and human appetites, wealth, treaties, war, forgiveness and death. We often hear the familiar reply that Islam is a comprehensive way of life. This contains a genuine truth, even if repeating the phrase carelessly has turned it into a cliché.
Islam is din. It is life itself ordered before Allah, inwardly through iman, i.e., conviction and faith, and outwardly through worship, obedience, mercy and justice. Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II (ra) explained that a true teaching is measured precisely by this: does it address every aspect of a person’s life or only a few selected, private matters?1
The scale of din is human life itself. Under a privatised understanding of religion, a person might worship at the mosque on Friday, then treat Monday’s business as exempt from the same moral demands. Under din, there is no such separation. The Friday prayer, the fair wages paid to an employee on Monday and the refusal to cheat a customer are all gathered under one single, undivided accountability to God.
When religion fails to describe Islam
Modern society usually treats religion as a stable, universal category. We assume it is a name that applies equally across cultures to describe what people believe, how they worship and what they hold sacred.
Scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Talal Asad challenge that assumption. The modern category of religion carries a particular history into definitions offered as universal.2
Western scholars decided which traditions belonged together under the name religion. Their decisions shaped what later appeared to be a neutral description of the world.3
When we force Islamic traditions to answer questions formed around a Western division between religion and secular life, the word becomes a means of deciding which parts of Islam count as properly religious.4
A borrowed word might seem helpful at first, but it arrives carrying its history on its back and that history has its own designs.
Stretching the concept to include Islam without questioning its assumptions hides the problem. After all, why do we confidently separate religions from other all-encompassing worldviews like capitalism, communism or secularism? These systems also teach people what to value, demand allegiance and order societies, yet they are not given the name.5
When we apply the Western label of religion to Islam, it can distort the faith’s scope and import Judaeo-Christian assumptions by stealth.6
For example, a definition built around Christianity encourages people to look for a church or clergy equivalent in Islam. It can also suggest that a Muslim’s faith should quietly step aside from economics and politics, as though the limits European governments placed on Christianity should decide where Islam must stop.
Ordinary English will keep its conventions and no one is demanding that the word religion be banned. Muslims can, of course, speak of Islam as a religion in ordinary English. The danger begins when the English word is allowed to govern the meaning of din. Translation is always a bargain with imperfection and we accept those terms daily without much distress. The harder, more demanding task is to remain alert to the moment when a borrowed term crosses from clarifying Islam to quietly editing it. We must notice when a label, initially offered as a courtesy, becomes a constraint. A name first proposed as a convenience can end up acting as a constitution.
To be fair, a concept can have a troubled history but still be useful for rough comparisons. For academics trying to map out different traditions, the English word religion retains some modest use.7
The confusion arises when we mistake a scholar’s definition for the reality it is meant to describe. When we crown religion as the master category into which all traditions must fit, we make Islam accept limits drawn for Christianity.
How empire privatised faith and remade Islam
The modern category of religion did not descend from the heavens. It was fashioned in the crucible of human argument and historical conflict. In 17th-century Europe, amidst the bloodshed of religious wars, thinkers sought a definition of religion that could embrace competing Christian confessions. Asad traces how belief came to be treated as religion’s defining feature, increasingly separable from public order and law.8
The more faith was understood as private conviction, the easier it became to leave law and government outside its reach.
Protestant emphasis on inward belief helped make this separation seem natural.9
Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, the renowned Muslim jurist and diplomat, described how the supposed conflict between religion and science was bypassed by confining religion to worship, rites and ceremonies. He also recognised the efforts of Christian ministers to recover its “old and true position” as the source of moral and spiritual values “governing the whole field of life”.10
The secular state nevertheless claimed the right to decide which matters belonged to religion. Religious institutions could remain powerful while the state decided which of their claims would carry legal force.11
European empires carried distinctions between the religious and the secular into their scholarship, law and administration abroad, where local people contested and adapted them. Defining what counted as religion was never merely classification. It was an exercise of colonial power.12
Once a faith was named and categorised as a religion, it could be counted, compared, regulated and, ultimately, reduced. Colonial officials put scholarly classifications to work. The footnote and the garrison worked in tandem.
In the great 19th-century comparative charts of world religions, Islam fitted badly and it was made to pay for the awkwardness. European scholars divided the world’s faiths through deeply racist and theological hierarchies. For example, Buddhism was sometimes praised as a noble Aryan philosophy, while Islam was dismissed as derivative, Semitic and crudely Arabian. One prominent European scholar even dismissed Islam as merely a side-branch of Judaism and Christianity, scraped together by an Arab for Arabs.13
The catalogue of such verdicts is long, but to repeat every colonial insult at length is only to grant the old tribunal another sitting.
In Egypt, for example, the reordering of law involved Egyptian rulers’ efforts to strengthen the state as well as European pressure and, from 1882, British occupation. New courts and imported codes progressively displaced sharia jurisdiction in commerce and criminal law. Family law and religious endowments remained, increasingly set apart as the proper sphere of religion.14
Rules once justified through obligations to God were increasingly recast as commands of the state.15
Islam could then be described through the beliefs, rites and family matters left to it, as though commerce and public law no longer belonged to its concerns.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith traced how the defence of Islam could change the way Muslims understood it. Under attack, a living faith could become a fixed system to be vindicated on the critic’s terms.16 Tayob also shows Muslim thinkers challenging and reworking the definitions of religion offered by European scholarship.17
When a colonised mind wins its case by conceding to the coloniser’s rules, that victory is also, in some measure, a capitulation.
Reclaiming din: Islam as an action, not a label
Islam begins with its own language and that language opens up a world that modern Western categories were not designed to understand. The Holy Quran does not present itself as an entry in a taxonomy of world religions. Its grammar begins elsewhere, with words like din, islam, iman and ummah. These words ask how a person believes, obeys and lives with others before God.
We can translate din as religion without assuming that the two words cover exactly the same ground. A translation that stops at private belief and worship leaves much of the Quran’s teaching outside the word.18
Din concerns how a person lives before God. What one believes makes claims upon what one does.19
The Quran refuses to confine din to a devotional corner of life. The word names judgment in the opening Surah. Elsewhere it names the Islam accepted by Allah and the teaching perfected for the Prophet’s (sa) community.20
In his exposition of Surah al-Maun, Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II (ra) explains din here as service to the Community. The Surah describes a man who pushes aside the orphan and fails to urge the feeding of the poor. It also condemns those who withhold ordinary help. Neglecting others belongs to what it means here to deny din.21
Older translations sometimes tried to translate din as law. This at least made room for obligations beyond private worship, but the Quran’s call includes social order and ethics right alongside belief and worship. 22
When we separate these elements to fit the modern Western mould, we see exactly what is lost: taken alone, law becomes rules to be enforced, worship turns into empty liturgical theatre and belief becomes mere admiration, contemplated safely at a distance.
The word islam itself is a verbal noun, the name of an action carrying submission, surrender and willing obedience. The decision is renewed through every act of a person’s life, long after the moment of conversion.23
The inward act of surrender takes physical shape in everyday conduct. The Quran binds that surrender to how a person treats others.
The Promised Messiah (as) gave this concept of surrender its most searching formulation. He defined Islam as the act of laying one’s soul at the very threshold of God with absolute contentment and without reservation.24
The true Muslim holds nothing back. Appetite, livelihood, family, speech and power all come under the claims of din.
Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II (ra) illustrated this during what seemed to be an ordinary dispute about vocational education. When some argued that teaching trades to the poor diverted attention away from din, he replied: “Islam is the name of setting right all branches of life.” Work undertaken with love of din and a spirit of sacrifice, he explained, is itself din. Teaching the poor to earn their living was part of that religious duty.25
Islam rectifies worldly life from within, in every dimension.
The Quran places prayer, life and death within a single, indivisible declaration: “Say, ‘My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death are (all) for Allah, the Lord of the worlds’” (Surah al-An‘am, Ch.6: V.163). The decisive word is life, the life lived in the market, the household and the public square. Din judges the partition modern society takes for granted, treating public business as serious while leaving private devotion comfortably optional.
Law, worship and the moral life
The desire to rescue Islam from being a privatised religion comes with its own major temptation. Today, some political movements attempt a shortcut: they try to restore din to public life by simply handing it over to the government. They act as though the machinery of state legislation and police enforcement could somehow do the work of teaching people to live justly before God.
Wael Hallaq argues that the modern Islamic state is a contradiction.26
The state, in his account, claims the right to make law, command obedience and shape the people it governs. Giving it an Islamic name leaves those claims intact.
For Hazrat Khalifatul Masih IV (rh), the question began with the people who would have to live under the law. The prophets first prepared people to accept divine law willingly. He warned against using sharia simply to seize political power. Government, he insisted, must deal justly with everyone, irrespective of faith or creed. This was the secular principle he endorsed. For Muslims living in Western countries, this, of course, does not mean asking the state to impose Islamic law on others.27
A legal code can be proclaimed in an afternoon. The human character capable of bearing it with justice and wisdom cannot.
Islamic legal history makes the point concrete. Across centuries, jurists addressed family and civic duties as obligations before God. What a person owed to another was also a matter of obedience to Him.28
Rulers can also turn religious law into a demand for obedience to themselves. They cannot make their own commands sacred simply by issuing them in the name of Islam.
The Quran addresses outward conduct and the conscience that governs it together. It is no coincidence that the great classical books of Islamic jurisprudence begin with chapters on worship. Criminal codes come later.29
Worship trains the willing, self-disciplined soul. Law then speaks to people who recognise a duty even when there is no official present to enforce it.
Modern theories of religion have often treated ritual chiefly as a way of expressing beliefs or representing social life.30
The Promised Messiah (as), however, explained how the body can educate the soul. The physical postures of worship act powerfully and directly upon it. Outward physical humility, when enacted with sincerity, ripens over time into genuine, inward humility.31
Prayer, fasting and almsgiving (zakat) do not just express an already-formed character. They teach us to attend to God, restrain appetite and recognise what we owe to the poor. And they accomplish all of this long before a government administrator has had occasion to arrive.
Adding more rules to a private faith does not restore the life that was cut away from it.32
The old cliché that Islam is a whole way of life has survived because it preserves a truth that modern categories try to evade.33
The Quran provides the necessary principles for physical, moral and spiritual development, while leaving many specific details to be worked out by human reason and changing circumstances.34
No government system can exhaust guidance of that magnitude, nor is it meant to. For Muslims, wherever they live, din offers moral guidance on political questions precisely because issues of justice, property, war and public obligation are fundamentally moral matters before they are technical ones. The idolatry of the state commences at the exact moment when power over bodies begins to imagine itself sovereign over hearts. Din runs deeper than politics, which is why it can guide a Muslim’s judgement of political power.
The test of ordinary life
For Hazrat Khalifatul Masih V (aa), faith is tested in the texture of ordinary life. A believer, he insists, must carry taqwa, i.e., mindfulness of God, equally into family dealings, social relations, commercial transactions and international obligations. No worldly affair is exempt from the claims of din.35
Contracts, wages, promises and the quiet, unwitnessed opportunities for deceit all enter a divine account in which nothing is overlooked.
For the Promised Messiah (as), to be a Muslim is to devote one’s entire being to God. That devotion is shown in worship and obedience, in sympathy for God’s creatures and in a willingness to serve them and bear their burdens.36
The mosque, the market and the neighbour all stand under the judgment of one Lord. Huquq Allah, that is, the rights and duties owed to God, and huquq al-‘ibad, that is, the rights and duties owed to God’s creation, are not two separate checklists. They bind worship to the fulfilment of our duties towards others.
To say that Islam is not a religion, i.e., not in the modern, privatised, bounded sense of the word, is to begin the work of recovering its reach into every part of human life. When faith is separated from law, belief from public life and inward conviction from outward discipline, what remains can no longer express the whole teaching. Under din, the individual and the community are alike answerable to God. Those who exercise power in a family, a business or a government remain answerable to a judgment they cannot escape.
Islam gathers worship and mercy, law and family, knowledge and economy, bodily discipline and spiritual ascent under the single command of Allah. It joins the solitary prayer to the public trust, the heart’s fear of God to the hand’s pursuit of justice and life in this world to final answerability. An age that keeps faith apart from daily life can reduce religion to a private sphere. The Quran, which addresses the whole of life, calls it din.
Endnotes
1. Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad, Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam (Tilford: Islam International Publications, 2007), p. 33
2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 16-17; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 28-29
3. Abdulkader Tayob, ‘Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies’, in Journal for the Study of Religion 31, no. 2 (2018), pp. 7-35, at p. 10
4. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, pp. 28-29
5. Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 180-184
6. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 21
7. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi
8. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, pp. 40-43
9. Philip Wood, ‘Paradigms of Religion and the Swift Birth of Islam: Wilfred Cantwell Smith Revisited’, in Leif Stenberg and Philip Wood (eds.), What Is Islamic Studies? European and North American Approaches to a Contested Field (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 154-175, at p. 156
10. Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, Islam and Modern Life (Islam International Publications, n.d.), pp. 4-5
11. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 191
12. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, p. 23; Philip Wood, ‘Paradigms of Religion and the Swift Birth of Islam’, p. 157; Abdulkader Tayob, ‘Decolonizing the Study of Religions’, pp. 8-9
13. Abraham Kuenen, as quoted in Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 145, 196
14. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 208-211
15. Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. ix-x, 82-83
16. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, p. 105
17. Abdulkader Tayob, ‘Decolonizing the Study of Religions’, pp. 8-9
18. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 39-42
19. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, p. 219
20. The Holy Quran, Ch. 1: V. 4; Ch. 3: V. 20; Ch. 5: V. 4
21. Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad, Tafsir-e-Kabir, 15-volume edition (Farnham: Islam International Publications, 2023), Vol. 14, pp. 514-515
22. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion, pp. 41-44
23. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, p. 103
24. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Lecture Lahore, in Ruhani Khaza’in, Vol. 20, pp. 151-152
25. Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad, Friday Sermon, 15 January 1937, Khutbat-e-Mahmud, Vol. 18, pp. 31, 34-35
26. Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State, pp. ix-xiv, 1-2, 23
27. Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, The Relationship Between Religion & Politics in Islam (Tilford: Islam International Publications, 2017), pp. 13-15, 28-30
28. Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad, Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam, pp. 234-235; Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State, pp. 82-83
29. Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State, pp. 116-118
30. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, pp. 55-58
31. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam, in Ruhani Khaza’in, Vol. 10, p. 319; Malfuzat [Urdu] (2022 ed.), Vol. 4, p. 79
32. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, pp. 28-29; Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?, pp. 190-192
33. Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?, p. 188
34. The Holy Quran with English Translation and Commentary (Islam International Publications, 2018 ed., reprinted 2019), Vol. 2, pp. 752, 818-819, commentary on Ch. 5: V. 4 and Ch. 5: V. 102
35. Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, Friday Sermon, 6 March 2015, Khutbat-e-Masroor, Vol. 13, p. 159
36. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Aʼina-e-Kamalat-e-Islam, in Ruhani Khaza’in, Vol. 5, pp. 59-62