Secularism

The issue underlying much of the Nahda debate of the last few posts is whether the Arab world’s governments can be or should be secular and/or to what extent. The nature of Arab nationalist thought was clearly secular as Arabs belong to several religious groupings and the idea of the nation required a unifying theme which thus clearly couldn’t be seen to unduly favour any particular religion. Science and education were considered important progressive forces and it was generally considered that freedom required progress. National education schemes were therefore instrumental in producing an ethos of secularism without ever fully articulating its nature.

More recently, attempts have been made to more fully do this job of articulating how secularism fits into Arab politics and society. The Arab words for secularism and secular are respectively ‘Almana and ‘Almani. Other words used include ‘Ilmaniyya, ‘Alamiyya, ‘Aqlaniyya, ‘Asrana and the French words Laïcus and Laicité. The current articulations pick up threads from the work of such major Arab thinkers and opinion formers as Tahtawi, Bustani, Kawakibi, Farah Antun, Husri, Zurayq, ‘Aflaq and Rihani. The three main secular ideas are that religious tolerance is desirable, that a secular national education is progressive and that, while religion has a valid role in politics and society, there ought to be some separation between religion and politics and between religion and the state (ad-Din wa ad-Dawla).

The secular theorists thus did things like critique political sectarianism (at-Ta’ifiyya as-Siyasiyya) and advocate civil courts (Mahakim Madaniyya), reform of some personal status laws and the principle of equality of all citizens regardless of sect or creed. Rationalism was thought to be the best approach to producing fairness and progress towards secular aims. The parlous situation in Lebanon, a system dominated by sectarianism, was an obvious focus of attention for many thinkers anxious to make a secular anti-sectarian system seem desirable. Many thinkers opposed to extremes of secularism could equally point to the alleged depredations of radically secular Kemalist Turkey.

Thus secular and anti-secular camps developed, each with examples of the extremes to which the ideas of the other camp might be expected to lead. It has been argued by thinkers such as Muhammad Arkoun (b. 1928) and Aziz al-Azmeh (b. 1947) that conservative religious ideologies are unhelpfully extreme in their anti-secular prescriptions. Such progressive Islamic thinkers have called for Islamic thought to be secularised. Azmeh, in particular, has promoted a new understanding of secularism and argued that secularism is necessary for any democratic order and that it has been misunderstood as being anti-religious. I will discuss further the debates concerning the merits or otherwise of Western liberal or other democracies later.

The idea that secularism ought to be a rational choice received further impetus from the events of 9/11. Fehmi Jadaane and Clovis Maksoud have contributed to the most recent debate. Maksoud has suggested that the role of Islam is not comparable with the role of religion in the West and that secularism is therefore a more problematical process as there is no institution of the church to be separated from the state. He also notes that Islam is a component of national identity for Arab Christians as it is for Arab Muslims and the peace treaty Anwar Sadat made with Israel following the 1967 Nakba has therefore contributed to a complex attitude to secularism which remains to be and must be resolved rationally. The debate continues.