SECULARIZATION

It is often said that secularization is intimately related to the process by which the Christian West split religion from politics. The origins of this process are traced to Christ's oftquoted words: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." Muslims, in contrast, have fused religion and politics in an attempt to maintain their unique cultural identity worldwide. This approach has endured a checkered history: a period of decline and external domination followed by a recent reassertion of civilizational vigor. Muslim leaders and ruling elites have been preoccupied with the exact nature of state and nation-building, the absorption of social change, and the adjustment to, or backlash against, the processes of secularization by which property, power, and prestige are passed from religious to lay control. Today, the term secularization refers to the overall process by which religious institutions have been deprived of their economic, political, and social influence.

It is important to realize, however, that the great achievements of the West in the economic, scientific, and technological realms, culminating in what is known as globalization, have spread the secular life throughout the world. The opportunities generated by enhanced higher education and mass communications have had profound impact on both women and men of the Muslim world, fostering an awareness of and a debate over new religious rethinking, public life, civil society, religious and ideological tolerance, and individual rights and responsibilities. To small but growing numbers of Muslims, human rights are the expression of the process of secularization.

The secularization process has also led to a religious revivalist backlash in both the Christian and Muslim worlds. In the Western tradition, religious revivalist movements did not necessarily conflict with secular orientations. In the Muslim world, contrary to the expectations of the first generation of modernization theorists, there has been an upsurge in antisecular movements even in those societies long exposed to modernization (for example, Turkey). Muslim experts have argued that modernization does not have to result in secularization and that modernization is a universal concept over which no single civilization or culture has monopoly. The premise that Muslim countries will inevitably grow more secular as they are exposed to Western notions of rationality and progress is not axiomatic. The secularization process has failed to permeate all aspects of life in the Muslim world; instead, reaction to it has become a major contributor to the social and political resurgence of Islam. While a small group of leaders has adopted a Western secular worldview, the vast majority of Muslims have not adopted secular perspectives.

Islam has not experienced a reformation analogous to that of Protestantism in Western Christianity. Islamic movements have sought to purify Islam of worldly and heretical accretions by reinforcing Islamic authority over society and law. In Western Europe, the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century led to secularization and decreased religious influence. Muslims, instead, gave allegiance to the umma, the community of the faithful as defined by common adherence to faith rather than by political or ethnic boundaries. The notion of the nation-state did not take shape in Muslim thought until the late nineteenth century. Whereas in Europe the secularization process was gradual and proceeded in tandem with socioeconomic growth, in the Muslim world it was treated as an externally imposed blueprint reflecting European imperial interests. While in the Muslim world secularization preceded religious reformation, in the European case it resulted more or less from such reformation.

To understand the secularization process in the Muslim world, it is important to examine the extent to which religious institutions and norms are pervasive in all areas of life. In the majority of Muslim societies, there is not a distinct separation between religion and other aspects of people's lives. Islam is both din wa dunya (religion and the world). The basic conflict here is not necessarily between religion and the world, as was the case in Christian experience; rather, it is between the forces of tradition and the forces of modernity.

In the Muslim world, secularism resulted entirely from European contact and influence. Many Middle Eastern countries adopted secular legislation, inspired mostly by European models, on a wide range of civil and criminal matters. These laws are now the target of the Islamists' attack. While conceding the value of Western technology, Islamists question those values and practices associated with modernization, including materialism, consumerism, individualism, and moral laxity. Contemporary reformists in the Muslim world vehemently resist any institutionalized control by religion over human life, arguing that such dominance fosters absolutist tendencies, destroys the existing intellectual life, and promotes less tolerant and antidemocratic forms of social and political control.

Since the 1970s, as a result of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the key question has become, if the struggle between Islamic reformists and Islamic conservatives is legal or political. Arguably the struggle between the two is both political and legal. Both reformists and conservatives have governed most Muslim countries since they gained independence from Western colonial rule. Emphasizing the separation of religion and politics, these leaders extensively secularized their legal and educational systems. Some nationalists, such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Turkey, 1881–1938), Jamal Abd al-Nasser (Egypt, 1918–1970), and both Reza Shah (Iran, 1878–1944) and Mohammad Reza Shah (Iran, 1919–1980), adopted aggressive secularization methods and programs; others, such as Anwar al-Sadat (Egypt, 1918–1980) and Zulfaqar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan, 1928–1979), manipulated Islamic symbols and pursued a more subtle and circumspect approach to secularization.

A variety of governments—including monarchies, military dictatorships, and liberal authoritarian regimes—ruled Egypt for most of the twentieth century. They faced occasional challenges and threats from the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organizations. In both Iran and Turkey, the imposition of a secular state from the top has backfired, resulting in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and by the brief takeover of political power by an Islamist prime minister in Turkey in 1996. In Algeria, nationalist rule since independence in 1962 has resulted in a bifurcated society like Egypt's. A secular society and culture for the urban bourgeoisie and intellectuals exist alongside an Islamic culture in the countryside and the urban slums. The abrogation of the 1992 electoral process, which prevented Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Party or FIS) from controlling parliament, has plunged Algeria into a civil war. Secularism is now violently challenged by Islamists.

Since Pakistan's creation in 1947, that country's leaders have faced different forces vying with each other for political power. In Muslim countries where Islamists have ruled (e.g., Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan), they have failed to find long-term solutions to many contemporary ills. In Afghanistan, the Wahhabist Taliban regime immersed the country in a civil war as well as in a foreign war as a result of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

Recent trends throughout the Muslim world point to the emergence of an intense debate over reforming Islam. Women in the Muslim world are beginning to demand greater freedom and to question the restrictive status that cultural traditions have imposed on them. Some Muslim leaders, such as the Tunisian Shaykh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, have demanded an Islamic constitution and resistance to "Westernization." Others, such as ?Abd al-Karim Sorush, an Iranian political philosopher, have called for an inward-looking approach to consider the Muslims free and responsible individuals, capable of using their independent judgments. Sorush's views are capable of revolutionizing Muslim theology and mass religiosity. Neither the lay modernism of the ruling elites nor the rejectionist populism of traditional leaders has been able to offer a sustainable course for the future of the Islamic world. Sorush's synthesis may stand as a viable alternative. The Muslim world has increasingly become the site of an emerging cultural conflict over "who" controls the process of social change as well as over "whose interests" are really served by change or resistance to it.

See alsoPakistan, Islamic Republic of ; Reform: Arab Middle East and North Africa ; Reform: Iran .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Esposito, John L. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Falk, Richard A. "The Monotheistic Religions in the Era of Globalization." Global Dialogue 1, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 139–148.

Filali-Ansary, Abdou. "Islam and Liberal Democracy: The Challenge of Secularization." Journal of Democracy 7, no. 2 (1996): 76–80.

Monshipouri, Mahmood. Islamism, Secularism, and HumanRights in the Middle East. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998.

Sadri, Mahmoud, and Sadri, Ahmad. "Let the Occasional Chalice Break: Abdolkarim Soroush and Islamic Liberation Theology." The Iranian, 26 (October 1998).

Voll, John Obert. Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World. 2d ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

Mahmood Monshipouri