Shabbir Akhtar and the Imperial Theology of Islam:

A Rationalist’s Indictment

There are few intellectual frauds more dangerous than theologians who dress their faith in the robes of reason. Shabbir Akhtar was one of them. A Muslim apologist who paraded through Oxford in the garb of philosophy, Akhtar attempted to baptize—or rather Islamize—the secular mind in the waters of revelation. His two major works, The Qur’an and the Secular Mind and Islam as a Political Religion, pose as philosophical reconciliations between revelation and rationality, but they are in truth a calculated invasion of the secular domain by theocratic stealth. Akhtar was not a philosopher testing the limits of faith through reason; he was a fundamentalist who sought to shield revelation from reason’s cross-examination. His prose, learned and polished, was an apologetic strategy: to smuggle divine authority into the discourse of modernity. In that sense, Akhtar is less a thinker than a missionary who has learned the idiom of Oxford. He does not argue; he baptizes in footnotes.

Akhtar’s central conceit is that revelation and reason are two complementary sources of truth. But the very moment one introduces revelation as an epistemic equal, reason ceases to be sovereign. If truth can be received by divine dictate, the process of verification collapses. Logical empiricism rejects precisely this move: that one can exempt certain propositions from falsifiability by claiming they are “divine.” A truth that cannot be tested is no truth at all—it is obedience masquerading as insight. The moment one says, “reason has its limits,” theology floods through the breach. Akhtar’s entire project depends on this loophole: that reason can be made to bow without appearing to kneel. He calls it humility before the divine; the empiricist calls it surrender.

The Qur’an, in Akhtar’s hands, becomes an untouchable text wrapped in philosophical silk. He claims to “engage” with secular thought, but in practice, he tames it. Every apparent concession to modernity is a rhetorical strategy. When he uses the language of philosophy—truth, reason, justice, meaning—it is not to test revelation, but to protect it. Every time reason raises a contradiction, Akhtar retreats behind the veil of divine mystery. The dialectical process stops where faith begins. To him, philosophy is a tool of containment: it polishes revelation but never pierces it. Yet reason cannot coexist with immunity. The logic of empiricism demands that every claim—whether uttered by a prophet or a physicist—be open to verification or refutation. When the Qur’an speaks of creation in six days, of heaven and hell, of angels recording human deeds, of divine decrees determining all outcomes—these are not metaphors for the empiricist. They are hypotheses about the structure of reality. And they fail the test of evidence.

Akhtar’s intellectual trick lies in adopting positivist language while emptying it of positivist rigor. He writes of the “moral law” as if quoting Kant, but his law derives from revelation, not reason. He speaks of “rationality,” but his standard of rationality is the Qur’an itself. He invokes “truth,” but his criterion of truth is God’s word. This circularity is theological self-cannibalism disguised as reasoned dialogue. To the empiricist, it is the oldest fraud: the priest pretending to be a scientist. Dialectical materialism exposes this immediately. Thought does not descend from revelation; it arises from material and social conditions. Theology is not a revelation of eternal truths—it is a historical construction designed to sanctify power. The Qur’an is not the speech of God; it is the imperial charter of the Arab nation.

One must strip away the sanctimony and look at the Qur’an historically. Islam was not born as a philosophy but as a political revolution in seventh-century Arabia—a fusion of monotheism and tribal consolidation. Its earliest followers were warriors and administrators, not philosophers. The Qur’an’s vision of universal submission (Islam literally means “submission”) was not a metaphysical proposition but an imperial one. The rapid expansion of the Caliphate—from Arabia into Persia, North Africa, and Spain—was not merely religious fervor; it was geopolitical conquest wrapped in divine rhetoric. The Qur’an’s insistence that the “best of nations” are those who follow Muhammad (Qur’an 3:110) is not a universal ethic but a charter of supremacy. Islam’s expansion was the extension of Arab sovereignty under divine sanction. To claim this as a philosophy is to confuse empire with enlightenment.

Akhtar’s Islam as a Political Religion is therefore not an intellectual inquiry but a confessional manifesto. His central thesis—that Islam is inherently political and must shape law, governance, and society—is an open declaration of theocratic intent. He defends Sharia as a legitimate form of political organization while accusing secularism of moral bankruptcy. Yet what he calls “moral order” is simply divine authoritarianism: obedience to revelation under threat of eternal punishment. The political theology of Islam is not moral law but total submission, not ethics but legislation, not faith but jurisdiction. It has nothing in common with Enlightenment rationalism, which grounds morality in reason and universality, not revelation and obedience. Akhtar’s call for Islam’s political resurrection is therefore not the voice of a philosopher but of a priest disguised as an academic.

What makes Akhtar dangerous is that he speaks in the language of Oxford while thinking in the categories of Medina. He wraps absolutism in analytic syntax. His argument structure mimics philosophy—premise, inference, conclusion—but his premises are faith-based axioms. He quotes Plato and Kant, but he reads them through the Qur’an, not the other way around. His entire project is to show that Islam can survive the secular age by mimicking its vocabulary. He replaces miracles with metaphors, but the dogma remains. He modernizes the wrapping paper, not the gift. And when confronted with contradictions—why divine law should bind all humanity, why reason should halt at revelation—he smiles with the humility of a believer and calls it “mystery.” But mystery is not philosophy; it is camouflage.

From the atheist standpoint, the Qur’an is a political artifact: a compilation of exhortations, legal codes, tribal laws, and poetic threats stitched into divine authority. Its cosmology is pre-scientific, its anthropology hierarchical, its moral law patriarchal. It speaks not to the liberation of reason but to the enslavement of conscience. The empiricist does not read it as revelation but as historical literature—a product of desert tribes forming a centralized imperial identity. The Qur’an’s obsession with belief, obedience, and fear of hell betrays its psychological origin: it is a book of control, not enlightenment. It punishes doubt, glorifies submission, and subordinates reason to faith. A civilization built on that text will inevitably oscillate between nostalgia for divine empire and hostility toward free thought.

Akhtar’s attempt to reconcile this with secular modernity is doomed from the start. You cannot merge revelation with reason without corrupting both. Reason demands freedom to falsify; revelation demands submission. The two are ontological enemies. His “philosophy of Islam” is therefore a linguistic farce: he speaks in the syntax of reason but thinks in the grammar of faith. When he declares that Islam must reassert its public and political dimension, he is simply restating the old theocratic impulse—to govern by divine law. He does not notice that this very impulse negates the foundation of philosophy: that no proposition is sacred, no book immune, no claim beyond dispute. The Qur’an is precisely that which cannot be disputed—hence it cannot coexist with reason.

The secular mind does not need to “engage” the Qur’an; it needs to dissect it. It must treat revelation as anthropology, theology as psychology, and scripture as ideology. The empiricist asks: who wrote this, for whom, under what conditions, and to what end? Once those questions are asked, the divine evaporates. The Qur’an becomes what it always was—a human document written to consecrate tribal power as cosmic truth. The emperor called himself a prophet. The conquest became salvation. The sword became revelation.

Akhtar’s defense of revelation under the banner of rationality is an old trick wearing new perfume. For centuries theologians have disguised submission as inquiry. What Akhtar adds is the Oxford accent of positivism—the vocabulary of verification stripped of its courage. He invokes “epistemology,” “modernity,” “the limits of reason,” but each term serves as a rhetorical incense to sanctify faith. He pretends to engage with secular philosophers, but his real engagement is with the insecurity of believers. His books are not addressed to the empiricist or the skeptic but to Muslims afraid of modernity. He tells them they can remain intellectually fashionable without surrendering their scripture. But to harmonize revelation and reason is like asking Galileo to validate astrology. The two belong to different epistemic universes: one demands evidence; the other demands obedience. The only bridge between them is deceit.

For Akhtar, the Qur’an is not merely revelation; it is ontology. He writes as if Being itself speaks Arabic. The universe, he implies, is a moral text encoded in divine grammar. This is theology’s most arrogant illusion—that nature is not indifferent but communicative, that the cosmos whispers the verses of a tribal deity. Logical empiricism rejects this mystification outright. The universe does not speak; it exists. Meaning is not inscribed in the stars but constructed by human reason through observation and inference. To claim otherwise is to return to animism wearing a doctoral gown. The dialectical materialist understands that the Qur’an, like every scripture, is a historical product of class, tribe, and struggle. It arose not from heaven but from a desert economy seeking legitimacy through sanctity. The Prophet’s revelation was not metaphysics but politics: an alliance of orality, memory, and power. Akhtar’s “divine speech” is therefore the ideological echo of empire.

Every civilization produces its intellectuals of concealment—those who turn the violence of history into the poetry of destiny. Akhtar belongs to this species. He takes the imperial theology of Islam and rephrases it as universal ethics. But beneath his philosophical syntax lies the same absolutism that justified conquest. When the Qur’an declares that “those who disbelieve shall be humbled” (Q 59:2), it is not a metaphor of conscience but an edict of domination. Akhtar does not confront such verses; he deodorizes them. He calls them “contextual,” “moralized,” or “allegorical,” as if empire becomes innocence when expressed in Greek categories. The dialectical critic, however, does not moralize history; he historicizes morality. What Akhtar calls eternal truth is merely temporal victory fossilized into doctrine. The revelation he venerates was the soundtrack of expansion. The Qur’an was the constitution of empire long before it became a text of faith.

His Islam as a Political Religion confirms this without intending to. He admits that Islam cannot retreat into private spirituality, that its nature is legislative, public, and total. In other words, Islam is political because it never was anything else. But instead of examining this as a historical fact, Akhtar celebrates it as divine design. He calls theocracy destiny. To him, the secular separation of religion and state is not moral progress but apostasy. He accuses secularism of moral relativism, yet his own morality depends on unquestionable revelation. This is not ethics; it is obedience sanctified. Every tyrant dreams of such a moral code—where disobedience equals sin and loyalty equals virtue. When Akhtar defends Sharia as an alternative to secular law, he is not proposing justice but hierarchy: man over woman, believer over infidel, cleric over thinker. That is not politics; it is medieval theocracy rehearsing its return.

Akhtar’s supposed dialogue with modernity is therefore fraudulent. He imagines that by using the language of philosophy he can domesticate reason itself. He misquotes Wittgenstein, paraphrases Kierkegaard, flirts with existentialism, but each reference is ornamental. He never internalizes their skepticism. Wittgenstein’s doubt, Kierkegaard’s despair, Sartre’s freedom—all would horrify the Qur’anic worldview that demands submission. Akhtar borrows their vocabulary but not their courage. His “Qur’anic reason” is the intellectual equivalent of halal certification: philosophy cleansed of heresy. But genuine reason is heretical by nature. The empiricist asks questions until authority collapses. The dialectician follows contradiction until truth becomes history. Revelation fears both. That is why every religion, when pressed by reason, resorts to metaphor. When cornered, Akhtar says the Qur’an must be read “spiritually.” That is the theologian’s final refuge—the fog of metaphor as escape from evidence.

An atheist reading of the Qur’an is therefore not blasphemy but reclamation. It restores to humanity the authorship that theology stole. The Qur’an’s cosmology, with its heavens, angels, and divine bookkeeping, belongs to the infancy of thought. Its metaphors of light and darkness, paradise and fire, are pre-scientific mythopoetics. They speak of fear, not knowledge; obedience, not inquiry. To read such a text literally is superstition; to read it metaphorically is cowardice. The only honest reading is historical: who needed this text, and for what? The answer is simple—the rising Arab polity of the seventh century needed divine justification for its power. The Prophet became the mouthpiece of necessity. Revelation followed conquest like a shadow follows a sword. Akhtar’s error is not only to ignore this but to elevate it. He mistakes political success for metaphysical truth. To him, history’s victors are God’s spokesmen. That is imperial theology, not philosophy.

The secular mind he pretends to court is precisely the mind he wants to subdue. His target audience is the Western academic elite that still mistakes erudition for neutrality. By writing in Oxford English, Akhtar enters their sanctum. He quotes Augustine and Aquinas, sprinkles Latin phrases, and calls his creed “philosophical Islam.” The effect is seduction: theology wearing a lab coat. Many Western scholars, anxious not to appear Islamophobic, treat him with deferential curiosity. They miss the deeper game: Akhtar is not reconciling Islam with modernity; he is reconquering modernity for Islam. His purpose is missionary, not philosophical—to restore the moral authority of revelation within the discourse of reason. He is a Trojan horse of theocracy rolling through the gates of the secular academy. That Oxford tolerated him is not proof of pluralism but of philosophy’s fatigue.

Dialectical materialism allows us to cut through this fog of respectability. It teaches that consciousness is conditioned by material life, that ideas are the superstructure of production and power. Viewed thus, the Qur’an is the ideological expression of early Islamic society: a merchant tribe’s moral code elevated to universality. Its God is a projection of collective discipline; its revelation, a mechanism of social control. When the Qur’an commands charity, it regulates redistribution; when it mandates jihad, it organizes expansion. Its metaphysics is the poetry of statecraft. To claim divine origin for these laws is to mistake the echo of history for the voice of heaven. Akhtar’s theology thus collapses under its own dialectic. The divine word he worships is merely the human word of a victorious tribe. The proof lies not in revelation but in archaeology. The material world keeps no record of angels—only empires.

Reason must therefore reclaim its throne. The secular mind owes no apology to revelation. Akhtar’s lament that the West has lost its “sacred center” is the nostalgia of a cleric who cannot live without hierarchy. The true moral revolution was not the rise of monotheism but the death of it. When humanity ceased to tremble before the sky, it began to build civilization. The Enlightenment did more for justice than all the prophets combined because it replaced revelation with verification. That is what Akhtar cannot forgive the secular mind for: it no longer kneels. His books are an attempt to restore the posture of prayer within the vocabulary of philosophy. But reason does not kneel; it dissects. The Qur’an, like every scripture, must face the scalpel of skepticism until the aura fades and the anatomy of power is revealed beneath the skin of piety.

Akhtar’s entire architecture collapses when confronted by the question of evidence. He insists that revelation is a legitimate mode of knowing, but evidence is not democratic—it cannot be granted to voices simply because they claim sincerity. To the empiricist, a revealed text is not proof; it is data about human psychology. When the Qur’an asserts that God “sent down iron” (Q 57:25) or “made the heavens a canopy” (Q 21:32), Akhtar asks us to marvel at its scientific foresight. But this is intellectual forgery. To retrofit modern science into seventh-century metaphor is not discovery but desperation. The dialectical materialist does not confuse poetry with physics. Truth does not need revelation; it needs replication. Akhtar’s repeated attempts to prove the Qur’an’s “scientific depth” betray the insecurity of belief confronted by empirical triumph. When reason builds telescopes, faith must invent allegory.

His theology fails most blatantly in its moral reasoning. The Qur’an’s ethics are not universal; they are tribal imperatives dressed as eternal law. The text divides humanity into believers and unbelievers, commanding mercy for one and punishment for the other. Akhtar, ever the apologist, calls this “moral clarity.” But moral clarity built on exclusion is moral blindness. The Qur’an sanctions slavery, endorses polygamy, and prescribes corporal punishment. Akhtar’s defense is always contextual—“that was the seventh century”—yet he insists simultaneously that the Qur’an is timeless. This is the theological contortion of the modern believer: to universalize convenience and historicize embarrassment. The dialectical method exposes the contradiction. If the text is divine and perfect, it cannot evolve; if it evolves, it is historical and therefore human. Akhtar cannot choose both without intellectual fraud.

Equally revealing is his treatment of doubt. In The Qur’an and the Secular Mind, he portrays skepticism as moral failure, a sickness of the soul. To the atheist, this is tyranny disguised as psychology. Doubt is not disease; it is the immune system of reason. A mind that cannot question is already colonized. Akhtar fears doubt because it dissolves revelation’s monopoly on truth. His strategy is moral intimidation: he shames inquiry by calling it arrogance. Yet every discovery in human history began as an act of arrogance against divine authority. Galileo, Darwin, Freud—all heretics by Akhtar’s measure. The Qur’an condemns those who “ask too many questions” (Q 5:101); philosophy begins precisely there. A religion that fears interrogation is a dictatorship of the invisible.

The Qur’an’s metaphysics fares no better under rational scrutiny. It claims a perfect, omnipotent God who is also perpetually angry, jealous, and vengeful. Omnipotence does not need worship; insecurity does. The God of the Qur’an behaves less like an infinite being than a tribal monarch demanding tribute. He sends guidance yet hides himself, decrees fate yet blames disbelief, creates evil yet punishes its victims. Akhtar calls these “mysteries of divine wisdom.” The logician calls them contradictions. To maintain coherence, Akhtar retreats to paradox—his final refuge. He writes that divine logic transcends human categories. But if logic itself is suspended, what remains to discuss? The moment contradiction becomes holiness, philosophy becomes idolatry. The dialectical materialist refuses this mysticism of incoherence. If God cannot be understood without abolishing reason, he is not profound; he is meaningless.

Akhtar’s insistence on divine command as the basis of morality reveals his authoritarian core. In Islam as a Political Religion, he declares that only God can define justice. This annihilates moral autonomy. To act rightly becomes to obey, not to reason. The secular conscience—grounded in empathy, reciprocity, and social contract—is replaced by fear of punishment and hope of reward. The Qur’an’s moral psychology is transactional: paradise for obedience, hell for dissent. Akhtar sanctifies this as moral order. But an ethic enforced by terror is indistinguishable from tyranny. The Enlightenment replaced divine command with human conscience precisely to escape this slavery. Akhtar’s nostalgia for revelation is the nostalgia of a man uncomfortable with freedom. He wants law without debate, certainty without doubt, virtue without choice. That is not philosophy; that is submission masquerading as stability.

Even Akhtar’s supposed rationalism is theological ventriloquism. He argues that secular morality collapses without transcendence, that without God values are mere preferences. This is false both logically and historically. Compassion, cooperation, and justice predate monotheism; they are social necessities, not divine donations. Morality evolved because species that practiced empathy survived longer than those that did not. No scripture taught wolves to share a kill or mothers to protect their young. The divine sanction of morality is an afterthought, a clerical copyright on biology. Akhtar’s claim that God is required for ethics is refuted every day by billions of decent atheists who do not rape or murder despite lacking revelation. The only morality worth having is one that survives without surveillance.

When Akhtar speaks of politics, his mask slips entirely. He claims that Islam must offer an “alternative modernity,” one rooted in Sharia and prophetic governance. What he calls “alternative” is in fact reactionary. The political history of Islam—from the Rashidun to the Ottomans—is one long experiment in theocratic absolutism. Its achievements were cultural, not moral; its legacy, imperial, not philosophical. Akhtar’s dream of resurrecting that order is an invitation to relapse. The modern secular state arose to prevent precisely this fusion of creed and coercion. To return to divine legislation is to re-enslave the mind. The dialectical materialist recognizes such nostalgia as counter-revolutionary: a longing for the comfort of hierarchy amid the chaos of freedom. Akhtar’s “Islamic polity” is not the future of faith but the afterlife of empire.

The Qur’an itself cannot sustain rational defense because its ontology is pre-scientific and its cosmology obsolete. It speaks of seven heavens, stationary mountains, and hearts as seats of thought. To interpret these as metaphors is to concede their falsity; to read them literally is to embrace ignorance. Akhtar’s compromise is to treat error as symbolism. But symbols do not orbit stars or cure disease. The empiricist does not interpret facts; he tests them. Every modern discovery—from heliocentrism to evolution—contradicts scriptural cosmology. Revelation has been on the wrong side of every scientific revolution. Akhtar’s response is to redefine revelation until it is unfalsifiable. But an unfalsifiable claim is indistinguishable from nonsense. When everything can mean anything, the text means nothing.

The atheist’s task, then, is not to blaspheme but to demystify. The Qur’an is not sacred; it is sociological. It tells us what seventh-century Arabs feared, desired, and imagined. It reveals the anxieties of a tribe caught between trade and transcendence. Its paradise is the oasis extended into eternity; its hell, the desert at noon. Its God is the patriarch magnified to cosmic scale. To study it rationally is to recover the humanity buried beneath divinity. Once we recognize the Qur’an as a product of its time, the illusion of timelessness dissolves. The text ceases to speak for the universe and begins to speak for history. That is liberation: the transformation of revelation into anthropology.

Akhtar would call such analysis arrogance. But arrogance, in the service of truth, is courage. The real arrogance lies in claiming that one desert tribe spoke for all humanity, that one language could contain the mind of God, that one man’s visions could bind every future. The atheist merely refuses to genuflect before provinciality in cosmic costume. Islam’s genius was not revelation but organization; its tragedy was to mistake discipline for divinity. Akhtar repeats that mistake in academic prose. His God is the bureaucracy of the cosmos, his philosophy the paperwork of submission. What he calls faith, reason calls empire remembering itself as theology.

Akhtar’s project ultimately reveals more about the crisis of Islamic thought than about philosophy itself. He is the intellectual symptom of a civilization caught between nostalgia and disbelief. He wishes to modernize without secularizing, to inherit modernity’s vocabulary while rejecting its premise. But reason cannot be borrowed like grammar. The Enlightenment was not a linguistic event; it was a rebellion against revelation. Akhtar wants the fruits of that rebellion without the revolt. He quotes Hume yet denies skepticism; he cites Kant yet rejects autonomy; he invokes Popper yet exempts the Qur’an from falsification. This is the pathology of the colonized theologian—he envies the prestige of reason while fearing its consequences. Oxford gave him a platform, but it could not give him courage.

His books read like philosophical taxidermy: the body of reason stuffed with the straw of faith. Every concept is borrowed, embalmed, and placed in a theological museum. He writes of “epistemic humility,” but his humility ends where revelation begins. He calls secularism arrogant, yet it is theology that claims omniscience. The empiricist admits ignorance and investigates; the believer proclaims knowledge and forbids inquiry. Akhtar mistakes submission for wisdom because he has never experienced intellectual freedom. He calls the Qur’an “the word of God,” but he has never asked the most elementary question: how does one distinguish divine speech from human imagination? If revelation cannot be independently verified, it is not epistemology—it is performance.

The Qur’an itself collapses under dialectical analysis. Its contradictions are not mysteries but residues of compilation. One verse extols free will; another decrees predestination. One preaches peace; another commands war. One praises tolerance; another prescribes subjugation. The traditional answer—that context reconciles them—is sophistry. Context explains error; it does not erase it. The dialectician recognizes contradiction not as divine profundity but as historical layering: fragments from different moments, assembled to serve evolving political needs. The Qur’an’s unity is not metaphysical but editorial. Its coherence was manufactured by power, not discovered by reason. Akhtar refuses to see this because faith cannot survive textual archaeology. Once you admit that scripture has drafts, revelation becomes literature.

Akhtar’s language of “moral transcendence” disguises a theology of domination. The Qur’an’s God is obsessed with hierarchy: men above women, believers above infidels, angels above men, and God above all. Equality appears nowhere; submission everywhere. Akhtar calls this order “divinely ordained harmony.” The dialectical materialist calls it patriarchy sanctified. The function of such hierarchy is social control. Religion converts coercion into devotion. By calling obedience “faith,” it makes servitude appear voluntary. Akhtar’s insistence on political Islam is therefore not about justice but about preserving command. The very structure of monotheism—the single will ruling all—is political absolutism projected onto the cosmos. The caliph and the deity share the same grammar: both demand submission, both forbid dissent, both claim infallibility.

This is why the Qur’an and modern freedom are irreconcilable. Modernity begins with the autonomy of the subject; revelation begins with its abolition. The secular state recognizes citizens; the Islamic state recognizes believers. To believe in divine sovereignty is to reject popular sovereignty. Akhtar wants to synthesize the two, but synthesis is impossible when one term denies the other’s existence. His “Islamic democracy” is an oxymoron—a theocracy that votes. He claims that divine law ensures justice because it transcends human whim. But what transcends humanity cannot serve humanity. Justice must be empirical, negotiated, and revisable; otherwise it is tyranny frozen in scripture. A law that cannot be amended becomes the graveyard of reason.

Akhtar’s positivist mimicry collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Positivism begins by excluding metaphysics; Akhtar reintroduces it as revelation. He praises empirical verification, then exempts the Qur’an from it. He admires scientific progress, then insists moral truth requires prophecy. His arguments are not bridges between Islam and modernity but revolving doors that lead back into theology. The atheist observes this with a mixture of pity and precision. Akhtar is not defending Islam against secularism; he is defending his own psychological need for certainty against the abyss of reason. His God is the last barricade against chaos. But truth has never required comfort. The empiricist prefers the void to illusion, the unanswered question to the unquestionable answer.

It is telling that Akhtar’s tone is perpetually defensive. He speaks of the “insults to Islam,” the “alienation of believers,” the “arrogance of Western reason.” This rhetoric betrays insecurity, not confidence. A faith secure in its truth would not fear critique. But Islam, like all revealed religions, survives only by policing doubt. Akhtar’s books are part of that policing: intellectual border patrol disguised as dialogue. He wants to impose respect, not earn it. But respect cannot be legislated. It must be deserved by evidence, coherence, and honesty—qualities revelation conspicuously lacks. The Qur’an is not threatened by atheism because atheism is hostile; it is threatened because atheism is correct.

When reason strips the Qur’an of divinity, what remains is a text of surprising mundanity. Its heaven is a sensual oasis; its hell a torture chamber; its morality a code of tribal survival. There is poetry in it, yes—but poetry does not prove divinity. The Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, and the Iliad are equally profound; none claim infallibility. What separates the Qur’an is not its beauty but its authority. It demands belief under threat. Akhtar calls that “moral seriousness.” The rationalist calls it extortion. A truth that requires punishment for disbelief is not truth; it is propaganda.

The dialectical materialist reduces this phenomenon to its base: religion as ideology of power. Every god is a reflection of the ruling class. Yahweh was the tribal deity of Hebrew pastoralists; Christ the redeemer of Roman servitude; Allah the commander of desert empire. Each universalized its local necessity and called it eternity. Akhtar’s Oxford career is the afterlife of that process: theology seeking new legitimacy in the ruins of modern certainty. But history has moved on. The laboratory, not the mosque, is humanity’s temple now. No prayer can cure disease or launch satellites; equations do. The secular mind does not need revelation; it needs reason disciplined by evidence and compassion grounded in material justice.

The final judgment on Akhtar’s project is simple. He attempted to make theology respectable by dressing it in the language of philosophy. But respectability is not a substitute for truth. The empiricist rejects all claims that bypass verification; the dialectician unmasks the social forces behind them. In both lights, Akhtar’s work is exposed as sophisticated fundamentalism. His books are polished apologies for submission. They plead for the restoration of divine authority in an age that has outgrown it. He fails not because he is unlearned but because he is unfree. The chains he calls faith are the very objects of philosophy’s abolition.

To read Akhtar and the Qur’an through an atheist lens is to recognize the difference between intelligence and independence. Intelligence may decorate theology; only independence can destroy it. Akhtar possessed the first, never the second. He was clever enough to mimic reason but not brave enough to follow it. The secular mind owes him no reverence. His legacy will endure only as an example of how faith, when cornered by science, disguises itself as philosophy. The task of rationalism is to tear away that disguise until revelation stands naked before evidence. And when that moment comes, the verdict of reason will be final: Islam, like every imperial theology before it, was not the voice of heaven but the echo of power.t

Citations 

1. Shabbir Akhtar, The Qur’an and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam (Routledge, 2008).
2. Shabbir Akhtar, Islam as a Political Religion: The Future of an Imperial Faith (Routledge, 2010).
3. Carool Kersten, review of Islam as a Political Religion, Religion 41:2 (2011).
4. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (University of California Press, 1951).
5. Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism (Lawrence & Wishart, 1950).
6. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (George Allen & Unwin, 1927).
7. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).
8. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927).
9. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
10. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (Harper, 2015).