The secular perspective is also a contemporary and historical one. There are several important and salient facts about Shari‘a law when viewed from the secular and contemporary historical perspective. First, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Iran, Shari‘a law is nowhere significantly and/or seriously applied in the contemporary Muslim world, save in the sphere of family and personal status law. Clearly then, the urgent calls we used to hear coming from various Islamists and Muslim Brothers types for the immediate application of Shari‘a law confirm that Shari‘a is on the whole nowhere really applied. So the question arises: Has Shari‘a, as we have known it, become inapplicable under the conditions of modem and contemporary life, even in the Muslim world and Muslim societies? The question acquires added significance when we note the fact that in such key Muslim countries as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Turkey, there is hardly anything in society, economy, politics, culture and even law that is currently conducted according to Islamic precepts, administered along the lines of Shari‘a law, or that functions in conformity with theological Muslim doctrine and/or teachings. Examine, in any one of those countries, the factory, the bank, the market place, the officer corps, the political party, the state apparatuses, the school, the university, the laboratory, the court-house, the arts, the media, and you will quickly realize that there is very little Shari‘a, religion or Islam in them, except for individual belief or unbelief, private piety or personal impiety.

What follows is a list of typical complaints made by Islamist activists and observers of the scene from about the mid-1970s onwards.

Above all they lament what they call “Islam's eclipse and isolation from life”, “the absence of Shari‘a from all realms of human activity, because it has been reduced to mere prayer, the fast, the pilgrimage and alms-giving”, the fact that “today Islam and its Shari‘a face the worst ordeal in their existence as a result of materialism, individualism and nationalism”. They bitterly complain about how “school and university curricula, though not openly critical of religion, subvert the Islamic worldview of Shari‘a and its attendant practices”; how “the modem and nominally Muslim nation-states, though having never declared a separation of mosque and state, nonetheless subvert Shari‘a as a way of life, as an all-encompassing spiritual and moral order and as a normative integrative force by practicing a more sinister de facto form of secularism and a functional form of the separation of state and mosque.”