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Abstract
A number of far-right politicians and conservatives in the United States continue to argue that the First Amendment's freedom of belief does not apply to Islam because it is not a religion in the western sense of the term, but a way of life that includes politics. By providing definitions from both western sociologists of religion and conservative political lobbyists and think tanks, I show that most experts on religion in the United States define religion as a way of life that governs behavior in the public sphere. I also argue that these definitions match similar definitions, offered by Muslim scholars in the Middle East and South Asia for the last fifty years, of the Arabic word din, typically translated as "religion." By tracing the origins of the idea that din signifies something other than religion because of its relation to regulating public behavior, I show that earlier mid-twentieth century Muslim critiques of equating din and religion had little to do with any intrinsic nature if Islam itself and far more to do with western scholarship of that period's understanding of secularity, conceptualization of the state, and prediction of the inevitable demise of religious belief and practice.
KEYWORDS: Din, Religion, Ethics, Politics, Islam, Islamophobia, Sociology of Religion, Law, Shari'ah, Theology, Tasawwuf, Secular, Dunyawiyah
Introduction
While speaking at a Tea Party event in 2011, radio host, Baptist minister, and GOP House Candidate from Georgia Jody Hice made the following claim: "Most people think Islam is a religion, it's not. It's a totalitarian way of life with a religious component."1 The following year in his book It's Now or Never: A Call to Reclaim America, he wrote: "Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection."2 Other statements in this vein include that of Oklahoma state legislator John Bennett who, in an interview with Alyona Minkovski for HuffPost Live, remarked: "I would even submit to you that Islam is not even a religion. It's a political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest."3 Evangelist Pat Robertson also made a similar statement on an episode of the 700 Club for...