On Valentine's Day, 1989, novelist Salman Rushdie was driven into hiding in England by a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran decrying his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, as “blasphemy against Islam” and demanding Rushdie's execution. Twenty years later, Yale University Press refused to publish cartoon representations of the Prophet Muhammad in political scientist Jytte Klausen's book, The Cartoons That Shook the World. That book analyzed the controversy spawned by a Danish newspaper's publication of the cartoons in 2005 and the republication of the cartoons in several European newspapers in 2008, which led to protests by Muslims around the world. In 2010, Terry Jones, a Christian pastor in Florida, announced plans to publicly burn a Qur'an on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Under protest, he cancelled his book-burning plans for the 9/11 anniversary, but he made good on his promise six months later in March 2011, in an incident whose online video dissemination around the world is said to have motivated riots in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of twelve people. Throughout this period, with the regularity of a drumbeat, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) (formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference), a coalition of majority Muslim nations at the United Nations, introduced resolutions each year—first in the Human Rights Council (HRC) from 1999 forward and then in the General Assembly from 2005 forward—on “combating defamation of religions” at the UN and in wider global discourse.

In a short, provocative essay in First Things, political scientist Daniel Philpott argued that there is a new international theology. He called that theology “the liberal peace.” The liberal peace is an approach to international peacebuilding and transitional justice that emphasizes criminal trials alongside the rapid establishment of a market economy and a liberal democracy, especially in the form of elections. According to Philpott, this “theology” has its own cathedral in The Hague, its own pope (Luis Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court), magisterium (speeches by UN secretary generals, beginning with Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 document An Agenda for Peace), saints (Woodrow Wilson), and doctrinal tradition. The doctrinal tradition is composed primarily of the writings of liberal philosophers (Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Rawls, etc.) who highlight individual rationality as the ground of human rights and the protection of individual rights as the solution to the dangers of living in the state of nature.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of academic and popular writings on the relationship among Islam, secularism, and democracy. Often, this topic is approached through the question of compatibility: Is Islam compatible or incompatible with secular democracy? Regardless of whether one answers this question with a yes or with a no, such an approach does little to help one in achieving a more nuanced understanding of Islam or secular democracy as discursive traditions. The two works under review here do not follow this pattern. Though distinct in their disciplinary persuasions and in their questions and objects of research, both works offer critical insights into the interaction between Islam and the conditions and structures of secular modernity.