On the occasion of the (re)publication of contributions by the Middle East historian Alexander Flores, this article discusses exemplary findings on pre-modernity and (post-)colonialism. The freedom from conflict that Flores suggests with the notion of “immanent secularity” in the course of the emergence of hadith scholarship is put into perspective by a conflict-sociological recourse to the Mihna (833 to 851 / 852 CE), the so-called Islamic Inquisition at the height of the Abbasid Empire, which illustrates the struggle for politico-religious authority. In a next step, the “narrowing” of the debate on secularism in (post-)colonial Egypt from the beginning to the end of the 20th century described by Flores is outlined and complemented by Talal Asad’s analysis “Formations of the Secular”. The latter’s approach became popular in a context marked by the decline of Marxism and political economy. The paper concludes with methodological reflections on the secular as a tertium comparationis in historical comparison from a Marxist perspective. The challenge consists in to neither authenticate the religious tradition nor to adopt the perspective of the liberal capitalist state. In this regard, the article undertakes a bridging between Islamic studies, socio-historical analysis, and socio-theoretical reflection.