Islam has its own pre-modern secularity that is distinctly different from the European Universalist understanding of secularism: This is the intriguing argument made by Sherman Jackson in The Islamic Secular. His new book argues that secularism was widely practised in the Muslim world and the intention of Sharia — a body of religious law that forms a part of the Islamic tradition based on the scriptures of Islam — was to have a large secular space. Jackson often produces fascinating work, whether delving into the history of Islam among Black Americans, tackling medieval Ayyubid-Mamluk law, or …