An Inquiry into religious question in relation to "the secular" and "the urf": Revisiting Bijan Abdolkarimi's Narrative of the Secular

Bijan Abdolkarimi is one of the most progressive contemporary philosophers in Iran. He has attempted to invent a genre that could enable him to address the public and the academic circles. In this article, it has been argued that Abdolkarimi has conceptualized the question of religion in relation to the secular issue in a sense that one cannot see any distinction between this concept and 'Urf'. This lack of distinction seems to be related to his inability to view 'Urf' as a non-Catholic concept and by disregarding the meaning-domain of Urf, he has fallen prey into the traps of catholicization of knowledge which seems to be very influential in the context of the Shiite thought. But the question is how could Abdolkarimi deliver himself from such a dilemma? First of all, he should make a categorical distinction between the domain of Urf and the filed of Secular and secondly he should not conceptualize the meaning domains of Urf in terms of Christianity which led him to divide the theological categories into sacred and secular while in the Islamic metaphysics the being is distinguished in terms of 'Ghayb' and 'Shahadat'. I shall dwell upon these and other apsects of Abdolkarimi's project.