1 Leipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019 www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion Saïd Amir Arjomand Secularisation through Legal Modernisation in the MENA-Region As the theory of multiple modernities began to question the uniform transformation and conversion of all modern societies, 1 several cul- turally specific definitions of secularism/laïcité by modernising elites were already prevalent in different nation states in the non-Western world. Although the Turkish constitution of 1928 was the first to set up a secular state and to explicitly define laïcité, as Talal Asad and others have noted, de facto secularisation in the form of control and definition of religion by the state had already been ongoing for the better part of a century. 2 State-building, Constitutionalism and de facto Secularisation Secularisation occurred in both the Middle East and North Africa, and was the inevitable result of state-building. We should note, how- ever, that this secularisation was de facto and never de jure. e de facto secularisation in question acknowledged the distinction of the religious and political domains without any explicit delimitation of religion or any hint of the disestablishment of the official religion while shiſting control of the administration of law and control of the judiciary from the religious to the political domain – that is from religious courts to the state. In fact, separating religion and the state or interfering with religion and the Islamic doctrine was far from the intention of the bureaucratic reformers of the third quarter of the 19 th century who were responsible for the reception of modern con- stitutionalism in the Muslim world. On the contrary, they attempted 1 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 2 Talal Asad, inking about Secularism and Law in Egypt (Leiden: International In- stitute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, 2001); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).