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Secularism
Political secularism has distinct European roots. It emerged in response to the problem of religion in political life. Islam has long been viewed as a religious tradition that is uniquely anti-secular. Influential scholars in the social sciences have argued that Islam’s early formative historical experience and its inner theology have prevented secularism from developing. The strength of these arguments was enhanced by the writings of political Islamists in the twentieth century who rejected any separation between dīn wa-dawlah (religion and government) in their normative theories on what constituted a just political order.
The problems with secularism in Muslim societies are rooted in the lived experiences of Muslim communities since the early nineteenth century. The most politically salient part of this lived experience has been the encounter with European (and later American) imperialism. The 2003 American-Anglo invasion and occupation of Iraq is just the latest chapter in a long series of interventions that has shaped the moral context in which debates on modernization and secularism have taken place. In broad terms, the Muslim experience has been marked by a perception of secularism as an alien ideology initially imposed from outside by invaders and then kept alive by the postcolonial states and the ruling elites who came to power after World War II. As a result, secularism in the Muslim world has suffered from weak intellectual roots and, with a few exceptions, most notably Turkey, it has never penetrated the mainstream of Muslim societies.
For generations of Muslims growing up in the postcolonial era, despotism, dictatorship, and human rights abuses came to be associated with secularism. Muslim political activists who experienced oppression at the hands of secular national governments concluded that secularism is an ideology of repression.
The Ottoman Empire And Its Legacy
Ottoman Turkey, as a bureaucratic empire, had institutionalized both civil and religious authority in the imperial administration and in the figure of the sultan. During the nineteenth century, a state-sponsored modernizing reform movement created secular institutions intended to introduce Western educational methods, legal systems, and military techniques. This process of reform, called the Tanzimat (reorganization), encountered resistance throughout the century.
After World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the new state of Turkey emerged under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk. He abolished both the political sultanate and religious caliphate, opening the way for a secular state on the French model in which Islam would be relegated to the private sphere. The Muslim calendar was replaced by the Gregorian and Arabic script by Latin, and the veil was discouraged. This top-down secularization process created an authoritarian secular state, but it could not erase Islam as a religion followed by the masses. With the advent of a multiparty democratic system after World War II, secular politicians often won elections by appealing to mass religiosity, thus appearing to threaten the legacy of Atatürk. Military intervention in Turkish politics has been frequent throughout the twentieth century. In 1997 the military once again intervened to topple a coalition government led by an Islamist-based party, thus highlighting the ongoing political tensions in Turkey over the boundaries of Islamic expression. The rise of a series of religious-based political parties in the 1990s has placed the question of secularism at the center of Turkish politics. The controversy is between contrasting interpretations of the concept of secularism: an Anglo-American version, which allows for religious participation in public life, versus a more draconian French secularism, which views such participation as a threat to social order and which is championed by the Kemalist establishment and the Turkish military. The overwhelming landslide victories for the Adalet ve Kalkınma (AK) Party in the 2002, 2007, and 2011 elections and the election of Abdullah Gül, a senior leader of the AK Party, as president suggest a victory for proponents of Anglo-American secularism in Turkey.
The Arab World And Iran
A range of governments exist in the Arab Muslim world, from the Wahhābī-2222.w2] ]]w sanctioned Saudi Arabian state to the avowedly secular socialist regimes in Algeria and Syria. Saudi Arabia, because of the two-centuries-old link of the House of Saud to the Wahhābī reform movement, proclaims itself an Islamic state. Technically, its rulers are secular officials governing in accordance with the Sharīʿa as interpreted by the ʿulamāʾ (clergy). Islam legitimizes the state, which is governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Saudi officials finance Islamic movements in other states against governments that are deemed hostile to Saudi Arabia’s interests. Nevertheless, the Saudi ruling family has come under attack from more fundamentalist Muslim groups for its supposed deviation from Islamic norms.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the secular regimes in Syria, Algeria, Tunisia (under Ben Ali), Egypt (under Mubarak), and Yemen (under ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ), each ruling in the name of various forms of Arab nationalism, although in the final years of the last three rulers they attempted to shore up their legitimacy in the face of Islamist opposition by claiming to respect and uphold religious values. Concessions have been made to religious groups in society in the hope of pacifying opposition to the state. The future of many of these regimes is uncertain due to the tumultuous events related to the Arab Spring.
In Iraq, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Islamist parties and militias flourished. Despite their differences and the competition for resources and political power, these parties were united by an explicit rejection of secularism. This was in large part because of the perception of Baʿthist rule as an outgrowth of secularist ideology. Even the once powerful Communist Party, decimated under Saddam Hussein, adopted the politics of religion to spread its message. In the constitutional meetings that sought to draft a new Iraqi constitution, the majority of the delegates, reflecting popular opinion, insisted on assurances that the principles of Islam would not be violated and that Islam would be the state religion and a source of legal opinion. A similar set of events occurred in Afghanistan during its post-Taliban constitutional process.
A condemnation of the concept of secularism and secularist intellectuals has been a staple of Islamic revolutionary discourse in Iran since the 1979 revolution. The perception of a close association between secularism, imperialism, and the foreign policies of the great powers has been a staple of p-official ideology of the Iranian regime since its rise to power.
In the second decade after the Iranian Revolution, a gradual indigenization of political secularism took place in Iran, led by religious intellectuals and some dissenting clerical figures. The enveloping context that gave force to this intellectual transformation was Iran’s negative experience with clerical rule after the revolution and the failures of the Islamic Republic to meet the aspirations of many members of the educated and middle-class segments of society who desired more freedom, rights, and accountability in government. Most of Iran’s leading intellectuals and political dissidents, including prominent figures such as Shirin Ebadi, Abdolkarim Soroush, Akbar Ganji, Mohsen Kadivar, Ibrāhīm Yazdī, and many others support a separation of religion from state, although not a separation of religion from politics.
The Arab world is currently in the midst of a momentous political transformation known in the West as the Arab Spring. In 2011 three longstanding dictators were toppled (Zine el Abedine Ben Ali, Tunisia; Hosni Mubarak, Egypt; and Muʿammar al-Qadhdhāfī, Libya) while two others, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ in Yemen, clung to power in the face of massive nonviolent protests. To the extent that these countries undergo democratic transition, the questions of religion-state relations and political secularism will inevitably emerge as points of contention that will be strongly debated and hotly contested. Events in Tunisia and Egypt post-2011 have demonstrated this point.
South And Southeast Asia
India’s Muslim population is estimated at 140 million, which is only 12 percent of the total population. With independence in 1947, the Indian polity proclaimed itself a democratic secular state with religious identities presumably subsumed under the common bond of Indian nationalism. The dominant Congress Party had long claimed to embrace all religious and ethnic groups as Indian. Although still a secular state, India has fallen victim to sectarian passions, Sikh as well as Hindu. Hindu revivalism has focused on a desire to erase India’s Islamic past. Hindu sectarianism, encouraged by poverty and illiteracy, has become a political force threatening the basis of Indian citizenship.p’’’
In principle, Pakistan has always been an Islamic republic; however, it was governed for years as a secular state. MThe 1956 constitution, though making obeisance to Islamic thought, was not bound by Islamic statutes. It contained secular laws creating a parliamentary democracy on the British model with the parliamentary right to ensure that no laws were passed that undermined Islamic legal principles. The distinction between adherence to Islamic legal principles versus a strict application of Islamic law is the classic modernist position. It essentially permits the existence of a secular state and the tolerance of a secular urban culture in a Muslim society whose constitutional framework and popular culture would remain Islamic.
Pakistani history in the twenty-first century has reflected the tensions inherent in its past struggles between democracy and state enforcement of an Islamic system, as well as between conflicting visions of Islam. The struggle between Islamic modernism and traditionalism continues, buffeted by external factors such as Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation, which became a popular Sunnī Muslim cause and strengthened traditionalist as well as fundamentalist Islam during the 1980s. NATO intervention in Afghanistan after 11 September 2001 has strengthened this trend to a considerable degree.
The South Asian experience has produced two social movements with opposing philosophical orientations with respect to society and the state, the Jamāʿat-i Islāmī and Tablīghī Jamāʿat. On an organizational level, the politically activist Jamāʿat-i Islāmī has succeeded in influencing political debate in Pakistan but has failed to win popular electoral backing; the Tablīghī Jamāʿat in contrast rejects political activism, opting for individual preaching and moral reform. In essence these movements reflect the two poles of Islamic daʿwah, or propagation of the faith. The first group rejects secularism outright; the second views its political manifestation as a necessary evil to be tolerated in order to fulfill personal religious goals. They both claim to return to the same source, early Islam, for inspiration, as do Islamic modernists and Islamic fundamentalists.
Analogous differences appear in the two sharply contrasting approaches to Islam and secularism found in Malaysia and Indonesia, which are a result of their different histories and colonial experiences. As Manning Nash has observed, both Malaysia and Indonesia are “Islamic nations but secular states,” but their concepts of nationhood are quite different.
Indonesia is home to more than 242 million people, with a population that is nearly 88 percent Muslim. It is the largest Muslim country in the world, but the state is based on the concept of Pancasila, whose first principle, enshrined in the constitution, is “belief in the one and only God.” Secular and Islamic educational systems are both state-sponsored, and secular and Sharīʿah courts coexist, but this duality does not mean that the products of the secular education system are anti-religious. Many, like their counterparts in Northern Africa, are devout Muslims who accept a quasi-secular state as preferable to a religious one so long as all mainstream religions are respected. Infringement can arouse protest, as occurred in the mid-1970s when the government was forced to withdraw a proposed family status/marriage law that would have permitted Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men and granted civil courts final authority in cases regarding divorce or polygamy. Strong public opposition led to a reassertion of Muslim statutes and legal authority in such cases and banned inter-religious marriages for Muslim women. Indonesian tolerance and pluralism regarding manifestations of Islam could easily change if the state were perceived as trying to Westernize at the expense of Islamic norms.
Indonesia, like the rest of the Muslim world, experienced an Islamic resurgence in the latter half of the twentieth century. This resurgence played a central role in opposing the authoritarianism of the Suharto regime (1966–1998) and in the democratic transition that followed his ouster. A distinguishing feature of this religious resurgence — in contrast to the rest of the Muslim world — has been its tolerant and democratic orientation; “civil Islam,” in the words of Robert Hefner.
Malaysia is over 50 percent Muslim. Islam serves as a source of national identity to Malays in a country with Chinese and Indian minorities amounting to 37 and 11 percent of the population, respectively. Nevertheless, Malaysian Islam is itself fragmented. Though there is a national government and Islamic officialdom, there are thirteen states, nine of which have their own bureaus, legal officials, and religious courts. With such official fragmentation, Islamic revivalism has taken root in the dakwah (missionary) movement. Many young Malays of the dakwah desire an Islamic state. They are quite similar in aspiration to the Muslim Brotherhood. The achievement of their goals would signify the end of the current Malaysian secular state unless explicit guarantees for ethnic minorities were given. The main political party that embodies these aspirations is the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS).
In both Malaysia and Indonesia there has been a growing movement for the implementation of Sharīʿa law. This poses a major challenge to the secular state and has mobilized a coalition of groups composed of feminists, human rights activists, religious minorities, lawyers, and intellectuals who oppose this trend.
The Secular States And Its Elites
The historical relationship between secularism and Islam has passed through several stages that have varied according to the particular Islamic society in question. Muslim governing elites were often attracted to Western secular values in the nineteenth century, because Western culture had proved superior militarily. In the early twentieth century, a new generation mostly educated in Western schools more readily turned to European values in the context of struggles for national independence that produced various forms of secular nationalisms.
In many Muslim-majority societies the early postcolonial states were ruled by secular nationalist leaders who attempted to rapidly modernize their societies. While the case of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey was certainly unique in terms of its harsh secularization polices, most ruling elites in the Muslim world followed this developmental model. What these regimes all had in common was their authoritarian nature, and their policies eventually produced a backlash. Summarizing the trend, Vali Nasr has noted:
“Secularism in the Muslim world never overcame its colonial origins and never lost its association with the postcolonial state’s continuous struggle to dominate society. Its fortunes became tied to those of the state: the more the state’s ideology came into question, and the more its actions alienated social forces, the more secularism was rejected in favor of indigenous worldviews and social institutions — which were for the most part tied to Islam. As such, the decline of secularism was a reflection of the decline of the postcolonial state in the Muslim world. (Nasr, 2003, p. 69)”
Asef Bayat has identified an emerging trend in Islamic politics called “post-Islamism.” Based on a specific trajectory of mainstream Islamist thought, it seeks to reconcile tradition with modernity, especially democracy and human rights. According to Bayat, “post-Islamism is not anti-Islamic or secular; a post-Islamist movement dearly upholds religion but also highlights citizens’ rights. It aspires to a pious society within a democratic state” (Bayat, 2011). He lists Iran’s Green Movement, Turkey’s AK Party, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD), and Egypt’s Ḥizb al-Wasat Party as embodying this trend. Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, led by Rāshid al-Ghannūshī, arguably could also be added to this list. The internal debates on religion-state relations and secularism within this broad intellectual trend will likely dictate how Muslim societies will approach the concept of secularism in the coming decades.
Secularism
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Last Updated: 11/2021
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