In defence of the secular state

COMMENT To many Muslims and especially the Islamists, the term secular is a very repugnant term and this abhorrence to anything secular stems mainly from the previously bitter experience of secularism in Turkey that had led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate; the last Caliphate in the Muslim world.

The fall of the Ottoman Caliphate led some Muslim scholars to push for a new entity known as an Islamic state.

The concept of an Islamic state was not known in the Islamic world before that. The main proponent for an Islamic state was none other than Muhammad Rashid Redha, a great Muslim reformer in the early twentieth century.