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| Turkish anti-Islamist uprsing (2013). |
Whenever democratic space has opened
up, people have been eager to choose those who not only provide a better
solution for their economic and social problems, but who can also offer them a
recognition of the authenticity of their cultures.
The idea that the West has a mission to
civilize the rest of the world rests on a conventional view of modernity in
which modernity is viewed as involving a separation between religion and the
public sphere.
This mission sets out to impose a
singular and unidirectional conception of modernity on Islamic countries that
overlooks the differentiated experiences and perceptions of non-western
societies, as well as the differentiated experiences within the west towards
modernity. Instead, religion becomes the decisive factor in determining who is
modern and who is not, and, by extension, who is civilized and who is not.
Such a viewpoint asserts that there is
an “organic” linkage between modernization and secularization, of which the
west has been the bearer for the past century and a half. This tends to create
a dangerous binary that excludes the rest of the world, especially countries
with Muslim majorities, as uncivilized members of the community of states.
I argue here instead that the masses in
Muslim majority countries have rejected such a view, instead supporting the
Islamists who have an alternative prospect in view which involves blending
modernity and Islam.
It is elites in Turkey, Egypt and
Bangladesh, who are opposed to such an understanding and are rather inclined to
replicate the western construction of religion, i.e., Islam as a hindrance to
modernity. This is only paving the way for more unproductive tension in these
countries.
Secularism: the great invention
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| Egyptian women nude protesters in Europe (2012). |
The modern west has made itself
distinct from the rest of the world by separating the temporal and spiritual
worlds from each other. This separation, according to Charles Taylor, is “the
great invention of the West.”
Reformations throughout the sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries in Europe paved the way for the rise of humanism, and a
modern understanding of the world that is distinctively secular. Secularism
refers to the confining of religiosity to the private domain of life.
The term was initially coined by George
Jacob Hollyake in 1851 as a way of creating a conscious difference between a
secular approach to religion in which religion was to be considered part on
one’s private life, and atheism.
The term was in frequent use for this
purpose during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The distinction
between atheism and secularism originated in the fear that endorsing a secular
public sphere would be misunderstood as denoting the eradication of religion,
which was quite the opposite of the Kantian agenda for the secular. Kant, a
principle theorist of the secular, defined a clear boundary between a private
and public sphere.
He insisted that making the public
sphere secular did not indicate the end of religion, and he certainly did not
disapprove of the practice of religion in the private sphere of human beings.
Rather Kant insisted that reliance on a transcendent God violated human
autonomy and freedom.
Modernity was thus perceived to
diminish the role of religion in public life in favour of reason and science.
This was a central assumption in the theories of John Locke, Emile Durkheim,
Max Weber, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to name but a few.
In one way or the other, the proponents
of this school of thought, with their varied backgrounds and ideological
orientations, argued that religion was a private matter for citizens. Although
few said so explicitly, one further implication of this argument was that
religion would eventually disappear, as secularization was essentially
progressive.
By the beginning of the twentieth
century there was a widespread assumption in the west that, as had been implied
by the Enlightenment framework, religion was “a soon-to-disappear remnant of
the “dark ages.” However, this view of the early twentieth century changed
dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s with the beginning of the studies of
“history from the below” in the west.
The predicted eventual end of religion
in modern societies was challenged, based on the evidence of thriving religious
practices in everyday life. Since then, the increasing visibility of religion
in the west has led to the late-twentieth century perception that there has
been a ‘return’ of religion to the west.
The dilemma of the Muslim majority countries
The growth of the modern nation-state
system and its continuation in its modern form is directly linked to keeping a
separation between religion and public space. It is interesting to note that as
the secularization thesis developed in the west, some major theorists, such as
Durkheim or Weber, did not endorse the usual teleological view of modernity,
and in particular did not support the imposition of such a modernity on
non-western societies.
Nevertheless, enlightenment theories in
general predicted the eventual decline and death of religion wherever these
theories were to be applied. As these theories served as the basis of
modernity, they also served as the basis of westernization and extended beyond
the west to form the basis of universalism.
Secularisation came to essentialize
religion as a hindrance to modern development universally. As the non-western
countries formed their own nation-states, they blindly replicated the western
notion of keeping religion ‘confined’ without reflecting on the cultural
particularities of these societies.
A glaring example of this orientalist
perspective would be Turkey, where the founding fathers of the country branded
Islam and decreed that Islam needed to be contained in order to build the
modern state of Turkey.
The Cold War period, dominated by
superpower rivalry saw the non-western countries follow the path of
industrialization, as Jawharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India
proclaimed in parliament that ‘catching up’ with both the United States and
Soviet Union was the main imperative, “These two types of development [the US
and the Soviet Union], even though they might be in conflict, are branches of
the same tree.”
Identity issues assumed a backseat as
nation-building took the route to being modern, which was considered as
synonymous to being industrialized. One can of course argue that identity issues,
although multi-layered, were always present as the newly developed countries
attempted to establish their ‘distinct’ identity vis-à-vis the other through
projecting a ‘national’ narrative.
However, the end of the Cold War and
particularly the ‘war on terror’, resurfaced the debates on identity—should all
modern nations be ‘western’ in all senses or revive and retain their own
cultural distinctiveness, often imbued with religious practices and symbols.
The rise of Islamism and the Arab Spring
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| Anti-Islamists protest in Cairo, Egypt (2013). |
The resurgence of Islam in the
political arena is traced to the defeat of the Arabs by Israel in the Six Day
War, the 1973 oil crisis and more infamously, the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
The Arab Spring, which started to rock the Middle East from December 2010 onwards,
was at first seen as revolt against long-standing Islamic autocrats in the
Middle East.
The subsequent fall of the regimes and
return to democracy left the world amazed as governments in Tunisia and Egypt
were formed by popularly elected Islamist groups. Many now asked what the Arab
Spring was all about?
The Arab Spring had been considered by
many commentators as a way of rewesternizing the world through the embrace of
western ideals of democracy; instead, those democratic options paved the way
for Islamist political parties to come to power peacefully.
Before the onset of Arab Spring, the
same happened in Turkey where the AK Parti was re-elected by popular mandate
twice, and consolidated its political hold on power. This re-emergence of
Islamists and their popular support might instead suggest that the people of
these countries, and maybe more generally, are interested in a gradual return
to their ideological roots and an amalgamation of these with the modern forces
unleashed by democratic ideals.
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| Secularist women protesters in Turkey (2013). |
For example, the projection of
Malaysian identity in the wake of 9/11 by Dr Mahathir Mohammad, as Shanti Nair
has commented, spelt out, “Malaysia's status as a powerful, disciplined and
learned nation that could defend itself and Islam.” Malaysia’s active promotion
of ‘Asian values’ also reflected the nationalist aspiration of postcolonial
countries to project their cultural distinctiveness over and against that of
the west.
This process of modernisation allowed
space for the creation of identity internally. As Stephanie Lawson has pointed
out, the promotion of Asian values, “operates to produce a unified,
nationalistic rallying point—and it differentiates the unified ‘us’ against the
external ‘them’.”
This call for a unified ‘us’ appears at
a clear juncture in the career of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim,
who developed from being a “charismatic fundamentalist” in the 1980s to a
“globalist liberal advocating for reformasi (reform)” in the late 1990s.
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| Bangladeshi Islamists rioting (2012). |
The responses that emerged especially
from Southeast countries with Muslim majority populations in the wake of 9/11
championed this creation of commensurability between modernity and Islam, an
important feature of which is embodied, as Lily Rahim has argued, in the demand
for, “the equal treatment of all religions by the state and freedom of religion
and conscience.”
Such views reject orientalist
perspectives on Islam as a hindrance to modern development. Lily Rahim argues
that such a shift in the Islamic countries was much evident during the Arab
Spring in the Middle East and has termed this unique assertion of post-Islamism
a ‘refolution’—a mixture of reformist and revolutionary zeal.
In her analysis of post-Arab Spring
political developments, Rahim has argued as research seems to show, that these
countries have equally rejected authoritarian Islamic state systems and
authoritarian secular principles in the conscious effort to blend modernity
with cultural specificities in Muslim societies.
The cases of Turkey, Egypt and Bangladesh
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| Turkish police pepper-spraying a protester. |
The elites in these three countries
seem quite oblivious to the fact that Islam can co-exist in the public sphere
as long as it is not used as a political weapon. What started out in Turkey as
a protest against a proposed development project at Gezi Park soon escalated
and turned towards blaming the Islamist government for hijacking Turkey’s
secular identity.
What began in Bangladesh as the trial
of the war criminals soon turned ‘secular’ with the so-called progressive
elites ridiculing Islam. A democratically elected government was ousted in
Egypt on the grounds that it wanted to establish totalitarian control of the
society.
While the political situations existing
in these three countries may seem politically unconnected, at the bottom of all
three scenarios lies an intense desire to contain Islamists and thereby to gain
‘modern’ credentials by reorienting Islam according to an essentially western
perspective.
Marxist writers have attributed the
recent political turmoil in Greece and Turkey to protest against the
elimination of ‘public spaces’ by capitalist regimes. But the underlying cause
remains related to the ‘recognition’ of identity.
Whenever democratic space has opened
up, people have been eager to choose those who not only provide a better
solution for their economic and social problems, but who can also offer them a
recognition of the authenticity of their cultures.
In their response to this, the division
between the masses and their political elites is not only widening, but the
elites have opted to deploy repressive measures to quell the challengers.
The recent moves of the Bangladesh
government against the Islamists was a glaring example of this, leading to the
imprisonment of a renowned human rights activist, lawyer Adilur Rahman Khan,
charged with fabricating the number of deaths that had occurred during these
demonstrations. The actual death toll remains controversial after the Egyptian
military’s crackdown on the Islamists this August.
The basic understanding of secularism
is perhaps ‘lost in translation’ worldwide, both in the west and the non-west,
especially in the Muslim majority countries. Secularism emerged out of the
internecine intolerance between the Catholics and the Protestants that led
towards the mutual accommodation and toleration of religious differences.
But as it has developed, it has turned
out instead to identify religion itself as the problem for the development of
modernity and reason. Such a politicization of secularism has led towards
intolerance and religious feud, which needs to be rethought, not only in the
Muslim majority countries, but also in those European countries where
self-expression through religious attire has been banned in public
institutions.
(Bangladesh-born Australian citizen Lailufar
Yasmin is a doctoral student at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and
teaches in International Relations at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her
research interest includes secularism, IR theory and Islam.)
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| Muslim Brotherhood's Islamists killed by the Secularist Army in Egypt (Aug 2013). |