Political Science Department Shahid Beheshti University
Abstract
After reviewing the history of the entrance of secularism to the Islamic world and studying a few contemporary Islamic thinkers’ attempt to make secularism compatible with Islam, the present paper explains the formation of the theory of Islamic secularism. The epistemological turn in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutic theory has provided the tenets and means needed by the new epistemological system to go beyond the epistemological foundations of the old Islamic intellectual tradition. Some contemporary Islamic thinkers, on the basis of these tenets, have provided the necessary epistemological foundations. Islamic secularism theory, too, is built on these foundations and, as a result, has specific epistemological implications which are discussed in the paper.
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