Muslim Secular Democracy

Voices from Within

Lily Zubaidah Rahim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137282057
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

The book offers a nuanced and innovative analyses of the emergence of an inclusive secular democratic state paradigm which incorporates the sacred within the framework of secular democracy in the Muslim World.

PART I

CONCEPTUALIZING WASATIYYAH DEMOCRACY

1

RELIGIOUS SECULARITY

RECONCILIATION BETWEEN POLITICAL ISLAM AND SECULAR DEMOCRACY

Naser Ghobadzadeh

By the close of the 1970s, the widely accepted secularization thesis had begun to wane. Its critics pointed to a number of cases that confirmed the trend toward religious resurgence and Islamic revivalism. Iran’s 1979 revolution had not only provided evidence of an upsurge in political Islam, but it had also seen the overthrow of a secular regime and its replacement by an Islamic state. Initially, it served as an inspiration for Islamic movements around the world, revealing for Islamists the possibility of claiming political power. Three decades on, however, the events of the Arab uprisings highlight a dramatic shift in this perception. Although Islamists have claimed tremendous influence in the post-Arab uprising, they continue to operate within the secular democratic framework. Any notion of an Islamic state is noticeably absent from their lexicon. Inclusive secular states such as Turkey and Indonesia have become models for political emulation.

This trend is not confined to practical politics. The policy shift among Islamist groups has been influenced by progressive Muslim thinkers who have developed a new understanding of religion-state-society relations within an Islamic context. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, it seems appropriate to mention that in the societal context of the Muslim World, a shifting trend is traceable. Gallop Poll surveys and John Esposito, for example, have documented this attitudinal shift across Muslim World.¹ A distinguishing feature of this shift is the refutation of both authoritarian secularization and state-sponsored Islamism. This signals the emergence of a discourse that bypasses the conventional “Islamism-secularism” conflict.

CONCEPTUALIZING RELIGIOUS SECULARITY

As a part of broader enterprise of religious reformation in the Muslim World, a politico-religious discourse that challenges the legitimacy of the Islamic state and draws attention to the detrimental impact upon both religion and state is taking root. The religious secularity discourse objects to both the politicization of Islam and authoritarian secularism. While the main thrust of secularism is the emancipation of state and economy from religion, religious secularity is rooted in religious concerns, in particular the emancipation of religion from state.

The Islamic state is constructed upon the assumption that religion is capable of offering solutions to governance dilemmas and providing policies required for the governance of the state. Improving the socioeconomic and political standing of Muslims had become the core aim of political Islam. In this all-encompassing notion of political Islam, religion is not confined to worshipping but incorporates sociopolitical dimensions. It is assumed that religiously inspired leaders have the capability to govern Muslim countries. This has been the extravagant claim of Islamists in the last few decades of the twentieth century.² This all-encompassing understanding of Islam has given rise to unrealistic expectations of religion.

By no means can governance be free of human error and failure. Therefore, attributing state policies to religion simply shifts the responsibility for governance failures from government to religion. Arguing that Islam lacks specific guidelines for governance in the modern age, the religious secularity discourse singles out God and the hereafter as the two principal missions of religion.³ Religion thus ought to be discharged from sociopolitical responsibility to retain its principal mission. In an effort to emancipate religion from sociopolitical responsibility, Mohsen Kadivar, an Iranian scholar states: “Religion is not established to organise politics, to manage our economy, and to shoulder management responsibility. We are capable of assuming these responsibilities. Human beings can deal with politics, the economy, and management by making use of human wisdom and experience.”⁴ Religious secularity thus prescribes the limits of religion in sociopolitical life and the state. Not only is religion incapable of offering a blueprint for addressing sociopolitical challenges, but the state is also not competent to administer religion.

Providing religious justification for a secular political system is the primary objective of the religious secularity discourse: it draws heavily from Quranic verses and Islamic history in which the case for secularity is implicit. Critical of the notion of an Islamic state on religious grounds, An-Na’im maintains that Islamic values are promoted when the state is neutral with regard to religion.⁵ He further asserts that an inclusive secular state is the only effective political system compatible with Islamic principles, traditions, and decrees. He also draws attention to the lack of any record of “Islamic states” in the Muslim tradition. An-Na’im, who regards the concept of an Islamic state as a postcolonial phenomenon rooted in the Western innovation of nation-state, challenges its efficacy in the Islamic context.⁶ Highlighting the distinction between state and politics, An-Na’im favors a secular state based upon the separation of religion from state but not from politics. The statement “I need a secular state to be a Muslim” is repeated several times in his book, thereby highlighting the religious rationale for supporting a secular democratic state.

The principle of popular sovereignty deprives the state of any claim to a sacred foundation and legitimacy through religious symbolism. By problematizing divine sovereignty, which is the linchpin of the notion of the Islamic state, religious secularity argues for the necessity of adopting popular sovereignty in the interests of capturing the true spirit of religion: justice.⁷ Under a secular democratic political structure believers are offered with a more conducive environment to cultivate their faith. By contrast, the authoritarian secular and Islamic states in the Muslim World have compromised religion. Due to these experiences with state power, religious secularity insists on the need to uncouple religion from the state to capture the true spirit of religiosity.

In the mainstream literature related to secularism that is generally discussed from a Western Judeo-Christian perspective, being secular is usually defined as antithetical to being religious.⁸ However, the border between the religious and the secular is neither pronounced nor, as evinced by Islamic history, is the relationship between the two accurately understood in dualistic terms. This may provide an explanation for the difficulty in translating the term “secular” into native languages in the Muslim World. In keeping with this tradition, a distinction between religion and religious knowledge ought to be drawn. “Religious” in this way refers to knowledge, not necessarily to religion itself. Religion, as the logic goes, is eternal and ultimate, tied to God and His will. Humans can never know the mind of God as we are only presented with traces of Him in the Quran. Human knowledge of religion therefore is a worldly and temporary phenomenon, wholly dependent upon the discursive practice of human actors. Thus, religious secularity refers to the process by which human beings develop knowledge of religion in an earthly context.

This being said, the experiences of secular efforts in the Islamic context have differed from those in the Western World. In the West, the relationship between science and religion and the desire for worldliness was a major part of secularization. But, as these dimensions of secularism are already embedded in Islamic teachings, there is no need to contest them.⁹ In this vein, the dichotomy between the religious and the secular can be challenged, and to be religious is to be secular and to be secular is to be religious. This is why the current debates surrounding secularity in the Muslim World neither incorporates the science-religion conundrum nor engages in worldliness-next-worldliness speculation. Rather than being a philosophical-comprehensive project, religious secularity is a politico-religious discourse, which is focused on depriving the so-called Islamic state of any transcendental claims.

It is neither possible nor prudent to privatize religion, and as An-Na’im argues it is important to distinguish politics from state.¹⁰ Religious secularity advocates for public involvement of religion and acknowledges that through its contribution to civil society, religion preserves its role in public life and even the political process. However, religious secularity insists upon the importance of an institutional division of state from religion. In effect, the religious secularity discourse offers a constructive vision for negotiating of religion-state-society relations.

Religious secularity is imbued with normative, descriptive, and strategic meaning. As a normative ideal, it offers an alternative to the unification of religion and state—an ideology that is the basis of the Islamic state. It is also descriptive inasmuch as it encapsulates the debates and initiatives of religious scholars who sanction revisionist political Islam but challenge the unification of religion and state from a religious standpoint. Furthermore, this conceptualization provides a pathway through which the Muslim World can accommodate modern democratic ideas. As a strategic concept, religious secularity at once safeguards religion from politicization and emancipates religion from the state. Synchronous with its rejection of Islamic fundamentalism and dogmatic secularism, religious secularity promotes negotiation, compromise, and conciliation to accommodate religious concerns within a secular democratic structure. In this way, religious secularity not only effectively negotiates the relations between politics and religion but also those of religion and state.

According to José Casanova, the term “secular” is central to constructing, codifying, grasping, and experiencing “a realm or reality differentiated from the religious.”¹¹ The religious-secular dichotomy is rooted in this understanding of the secular. But, as it discussed above, in the Islamic context there is no fundamental distinction between religion and the most important dimensions of the secular. The term “secularization” refers to a comprehensive historical process whereby religion loses its significance both in individual and societal spheres. Individual belief in transcendental forces weakens, and, at the societal level, religion loses its influence in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Spirit of Wasatiyyah Democracy
• Part I   Conceptualizing Wasatiyyah Democracy
• Part II   Resistance and |Reform
• Notes on Contributors
• Index