A comparative, case study analysis of Christian and Muslim perspectives on the secular world and associated possibilities for interfaith dialogue

Within a case study framework, this dissertation considers the perspectives of a Christian scholar and a Muslim scholar, John Milbank and Shabbir Akhtar respectively, on the possibilities for meaningful relationship between religion and the secular world. Milbank’s conceptualisation, drawn principally from ideas presented in 'Theology and Social Theory', is foregrounded and evaluated. Consideration is then given to what the ideas of Akhtar, in 'The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam', might add to them. A critical, reflective rationale for this structure is presented. The outcomes of this comparison are examined in relation to Christian theology and in terms of whether it offers insights into possibilities for interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims.What Milbank calls for can be described as a specific religious reactive counter-formation to secular modernity. This is quite different to the inherently intertwined Islam-state/politics relationship presented by Akhtar and his suggestion that religious engagement with the secular world should be located within a framework of secular reason, at least at the outset. In response to Akhtar, Milbank would surely insist that Christianity should not adapt or accommodate to the secular world in general and specifically to the places in that world to which Christianity has been consigned. Milbank’s position raises the question of the nature and form that a religious reactive counter-formation to secular modernity would take. One idea is a ‘politics of the middle’ as elaborated by Vincent Lloyd. This picks up Milbank’s understanding of intermediate or ‘middle’ bodies as the site of politics and his concept of ‘complex space’ in which political sovereignty is reclaimed by these bodies within an overall consensus about the (Christian) transcendent. What is potentially more useful, though, is Luke Bretherton’s advocacy of ‘hospitable politics’, which involves framing interfaith relations not in terms of dialogue but in terms of common political action.