THE DILEMMA OF THE SECULAR
In our times, one of the most prevailing myths is the idea that secularism is neutral. This narrative is propagated by liberals and leftists in Pakistan who aspire to bring about a secular revolution in the country. This essay aims to draw a brief sketch of secularism: its essence, metaphysics, and implications for the country. Additionally, It aims to debunk the myth that secularism or a secular state is neutral and/or beneficial for Muslims. For secularism, as I argue, will not solve any problem that Muslims are facing today. In fact, if implemented as the basis of a state, secularism will produce tremendous negative results for the Muslims and any religious community striving to preserve its historical culture and tradition.
THE MODERN STATE AS A PARADIGM
Before we delve further in the discussion, it is important that we understand the underlying paradigm within which this discourse takes place. The entire discussion about whether or not secularism is neutral or whether basing a state on religion is good or bad, presupposes the modern state as a given.
The modern state serves as the backdrop against which the entire debate is taking place. It is imperative that we keep this in mind because we will be talking about the modern state: its metaphysics, and branches and institutions, at some length.
Another crucial point to remember is that the modern state is “secular” in its conception and worldview. It rejects any metaphysics that is transcendent in nature i.e., appealing to some higher Divine power. The sovereignty of the state is limited to itself and its conception is reduced to the physical-material world. Therefore, the terms “secular state” and “state” will be used synonymously.
It is important to emphasize that our discussion will primarily be focused on secularism and the secular state, and figuring out whether it is truly neutral as claimed by secularists. Therefore, the scope of the essay is limited to secularism and a paradigmatic secular state.
Moreover, it is an established historical fact that the modern state emerged as a rebellious reaction to the Church and its history of abuses and oppression. It was a secular rebellion against a divine authority. Given the modern state’s preoccupation to the physical-material world, the human subjects, fashioned in the image of the state, are also materialistic. The materialistic subjects, then, work as productive docile citizens for the state. This point should be kept in mind as the discussion unfolds.
Lastly, it is important to note that a full-length discussion on Shar’ia and the modern secular nation-state is beyond the scope of this essay. Therefore, I will discuss the two forms of governance in the subsequent essay.
SECULAR-SECUALRIZATION-SECULARISM
Before we define secularism, we need to understand the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’. The understanding of the two terms is essential to this discussion.
Secular (saeculum), derived from Latin, has the connotations of time and space. It means the present time, this age, or contemporary events. In short, it conveys the meaning of referring to the state of the world at the present time. This also implies that the conception of the world be exclusively limited to the present time.
Secularization, according to the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox,
“is the deliverance of man from his religious and metaphysical overtones over his language and reason.” It is “the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols, the defatalization of history’, the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that lie can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it [he is] man turning his attention away from the worlds beyond and toward this world and this time.” [1][2]
Cox, Harvey. “The Secular City.” Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 2013, p. 2. Also see, Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 17.
Secularization is an open worldview. A paradigm that conceives constant change, evolution or in other words, progress, as necessary. It conceives this change in every domain of human life and values.
SECULARIZATION & ITS DIMENSIONS
Secularization has three dimensions.
1. The disenchantment of nature
2. The desacralization of politics
3. The deconsecration of values [3][4]
The disenchantment of nature was a term coined by Max Weber which means,
the freeing of nature from its religious overtones; and this involves the dispelling of animistic spirits and gods and magic from the natural world, separating it from God and distinguishing man from it, so that man may no longer regard nature as a divine entity, which thus allows him to act freely upon nature, to make use of it according to his needs and plans, and hence create historical change and ‘development’. [5]
Weber, Essays in Sociology chapter III & V and Sociology of Religion, Boston, 1964. (Also see Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 18.)
The ‘desacralization’ of politics means the abolition of sacral legitimation of political power and authority, which is the prerequisite of political change and thus also social change, therefore allowing for the emergence of the historical process. [6] The deconsecrating of values refers to rendering all religious and cultural values as relative and subject to change. This relativism of values is a prerequisite for the eternal change and evolution of values that secularization promotes. [7]
Secularism, on the other hand, shares two components with secularization: The disenchantment of nature and desacralization of politics. But secularism, since it is based on some foundational values, does not conceive of any change in the domain of values. Secularism, therefore, is a closed worldview. In this sense Secularization and Secularism are in conflict. In fact, Secularism is considered as a menace to secularization. [8]
Secularism disenchants nature and desacralizes politics. As for values, they are based on certain assumptions which are non-religious i.e., they are not derived from Revelation but are the product of man’s rational faculty alone. Secularism is antithetical to religious values since the former is derived from the rational faculties alone, while the latter is ontologically based on and derived from Revelation.
Secularism and secularization, regardless of their internal tension, both aim to undermine religious understanding of the world and aim to eliminate religion from the social, political, moral, epistemological, and legal landscapes. Secularism is a reductive force that reduces religion to the private sphere.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERE
As previously stated, secularism is a reductive force that confines religion to the private sphere. Advocates of a secular state will agree with the last statement. Secularism does not allow religion to play any meaningful role in the social, political, and legal affairs. Religion, they believe, should be and must be limited to the private sphere, in order for the proper functioning of a modern state. Furthermore, the state should have absolutely no say in the private (and therefore, religious) matters of any citizen. Every citizen is (or should be) free to believe or disbelieve any religion.
The main issue with this argument is the willful blindness of secularists, intentional or otherwise, towards the secular state and its apparatuses and how they work together to mold, shape, reengineer, control, indoctrinate, regulate and discipline the citizen in the image of the state.
The only reason the private sphere is left as it is without the direct assault of the secular state through the executive (e.g., police) is because the human subject (citizen) is already controlled indirectly, and more systematically and efficiently, through the various institutions of the state (education, mass media, pop culture, status quo, law, bureaucracy, administration, prison, hospitals, etc.)
EDUCATION
Let’s look at education, which is a primary institute of the state, to elaborate what we have just said above. Education indeed stands as one of the various institutions that aims to indirectly control the individual subject. Though it is argued that in the private sphere, the state has no influence, however, the reality is quite contrary to that. Because even in the private sphere, due to the prevalence of “secular” education commissioned by the secular state, the religious paradigm is suppressed. This is achieved by controlling and, more importantly, molding the individual’s psyche, language and reason according to the secularized framework. Language is an important instrument in the formation of the individual’s subjectivity. If you control a man’s language, you can control his thoughts. If can you shape the structure of his thoughts, you have essentially enslaved him.
Language is not just a vehicle for expressing thought, nor is it just a means of formulating ideas; rather, language constitutes thought. It is never neutral.[9]
Hallaq, Wael. “Reforming Modernity.” Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha, 2020, p. 28.
In the modern state, education of the human subject begins at an early age, often when the person is still in his or her infancy and their minds are in the developmental age. This provides the perfect opportunity for the state to indoctrinate, mold, and give whatever shape or form to the human subject in any way the state desires. The parents are required by the state to send their children as young as two years old to school. The parents also have no choice but to comply with the state, partly because they are also subjects of the modern state who have been engineered to become obedient citizens by the various institutions of the state, and they are also well aware that if their children do not attend school or college, they will end up jobless and poor.
In Western Europe, during the early stages of the formation of the modern state, not sending the kids to school was punishable by imprisonment and even death. This, for the very first time, symbolized the state’s control, authority and ownership of the individual subject, which was later further strengthened, legitimized and normalized. In fact, looking at the genealogical history of state institutions, we find that police, prisons, schools, healthcare, and social welfare system, all emerged organically around the same time. All these institutions emerged for the control and domination of the human subject.
As Hallaq says,
On an epistemic level, the institutions ofcoercive surveillance, education, and health (prisons, schools, and hospitals) were neither distinct from one another nor neutral in any sense. They each worked in a specialized domain, but they worked together, having come into existence in the wake of a pervasive bureaucratic machinery that possessed distinct ideological claims. Schools, armies, hospitals, and prisons constituted systemic manifestations of an
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 100-101
elaborate and highly specific way of doing and ordering things, which explains why the techniques used to implement them were rapidly circulated from one institution to the next and,
in fact, from one European country to the next. [10]
This extreme disparity in economy and systematic exploitations of the poor, who were also the majority, led to many riots. In response to the riots the monarch deployed his army to maintain social order. This further led to the formation of a specialized military group that would later become the police. To aid the police, prisons were erected everywhere. The police and prisons were spread everywhere in the urban centers and sooner the rural regions as well, which were not formerly under the radar of the state. But the educationists and reformers of the 19th century Europe realized that order cannot simply be maintained through the use of brute iron fist. The subjects had to be educated and trained to live and act in total conformity to the state and the ruler. Hence, education institutions were introduced. In addition to this social security and healthcare were also provided to the citizens so to allow for easier imposition of the state’s absolute law in the society.
I will quote Wael Hallaq in order to summarize and give a much more in-depth overview,
Flagrant social and economic disparities, working conditions beyond appalling, and monarchical rule barely emerged from the age of absolutism all gave rise to mob violence and unruly urban populations, which in turn induced the state to introduce an organized and well-staffed police apparatus that not only maintained a presence in these urban areas but extended its sway into the countryside, which had formerly been beneath the radar of rulers. By the later part of the nineteenth century, no village, town, or city could escape the watchful eye of this apparatus. And to reinforce the policing apparatus, an unprecedented, colossal prison system was created. But crude physical force was not enough, and this the European rulers understood. The population had to be educated in the ways of good conduct, and good conduct meant social order and, in a thoroughly capitalist system, an ability to work and produce. Discipline thus translated into a site in which the subject was corralled into a system of order and instrumental utility. The system that was adopted to accomplish this regulative mechanism was the school, which began to spring up everywhere in various forms, and concurrent with the consolidation of the police apparatus, the school became a standard social fixture by the end of the nineteenth century. Legislated as mandatory (literally coercing parents to send their children to schools on pain of imprisonment), primary education forced the great majority of Europe’s children into a regimented system where certain ideas and ideals were drilled into their minds. The days of learning within the family or church were gone forever. Still, policing and schooling were not enough: poverty in the wake of the Industrial Revolution intensified, and social discontent became ever more evident. Vividly remembering the French Revolution and its causes of discontent, reformers, politicians, and rulers quickly realized that poverty could lead to another revolution, one that might snatch both political power and economic privilege from under their feet. Quickly enough, state welfare systems began to be established in all of the European countries, creating a social safety net and, even more importantly, public health institutions and specialized hospitals. [12] [13]
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 100, Also see von Crevald, “The Rise and Decline of the State”, 2009, ch. 4: The State as an Ideal: 1789 to 1945, “Disciplining the People” p. 205-224)
The Israeli military historian, von Crevald in his book The Rise and Decline of the State (ch.4: The State as an Ideal: 1789 to 1945, “Disciplining the People” p. 205-224) also elaborates in depth on the emergence of the state and its institutions in different countries like Prussia, France, England, and the United States. I recommend everyone to read this chapter for more details.
Education began as a tool to dominate and control the masses. Later on, education became a central tool for not just control and regulation but indoctrination as well, so that children can grow up to be patriotic citizens. The children attending schools from a very young age are indoctrinated to believe the state’s nationalized, distorted version of history. History is not taught on its own merit but it is taught in a distorted way in order to make sense within the nationalistic paradigm of the state.
Schools also prepare the subject to become efficient, obedient, docile, individuated, fragmented, isolated, and productive citizens of the state. The education institutes instill the belief in the minds of the citizens that having a job, career, money and wealth are central to one’s identity and happiness. This indoctrination is necessary to empower the individual citizens to prioritize working for the state as opposed to prioritizing family, marriage and community.
School is the state’s school, where young people are turned into state persons. And therefore, becoming into nothing other than henchmen of the state. Walking to the school I was walking to the state, and since the state destroys people into the institution for the destruction of people. The state forced me, like everyone else, into myself, and made me comply with the state, and turned me into a state person. Regulated, and registered, and finished, and trained and perverted and dejected, like everyone else. When we see people, we only see state people. The state servants who serve the state all their lives, and thus serve Un-nature all their lives.
Thomas Bernard
While this statement may be a hyperbole, it does convey the central idea of what the school does as an education institution for the state.
To sum up, state institutions exist to indoctrinate, regulate, and discipline the citizens. They totally eliminate religion from the public sphere. And in the private sphere, they influence to suppress the religious understanding of the world, so much so that religiosity in the society keeps on diminishing, and in the end, the religion and the religious community entirely collapses. An example of this is the declining religiosity among Europeans who are almost completely secularized thanks to the secular state and its apparatus, which has been in full effect for the past 300 years. This secularization is done through systematic indoctrination through the various institutions of the state. It is so efficient and affective that the individual, the subject of indoctrination, is unable to even recognize the systematic operation on him by the secular state.
THE SUBJECTIVITY FORMATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Let us now address a phenomenon when secularism is elevated to the state level. The prerequisite of a secular modern state is individualism. This is because the state does not and cannot recognize any social group formation outside of its own legal domain.
As Wael Hallaq says,
Kelsen would not have disagreed with Foucault on one essential phenomenon, namely, that society is not to be seen as separate or distinct from the state. Any claim that they are so separate, he argued, “can be substantiated only by showing that the individuals belonging to the same state form a unity and this unity is not constituted by the legal order but by an element which has nothing to do with law. However, such an element . . . cannot be found.” [14]
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, pp. 33–34.
It is important to mention that our loyalty and affiliation to a modern state is not natural. The modern state is not an organic communal structure. The state is a top-down social order, where law is imposed from above by the centralized authority.
In the modern state, if a child is with his close-knit community, he is likely to be loyal and influenced by his community. Consequently, his loyalty to the secular state will be weakened. Since loyalty to the state is not natural, therefore the state requires systematic indoctrination of
the society to socially re-engineer the organic community into a fragmented, individualized, atomized units, efficient productive docile subjects, and patriotic citizens who cannot conceive of any organic communal identity, but the state identity via nationalism that the secular state has given them.
There is no denying that the collapse of the traditional family and community has in part created the disenchanted, fragmented and narcissistic individual, the subject of commentary by many a modern thinker, sociologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher. This collapse was integral to modern projects and is one that defines it in fundamental ways. [15]
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 4
This social fragmentation is necessary to prepare the individual for the psycho-political needs of nationalism. The individual who is robbed of his organic identity becomes a state person. This is the reason secular indoctrination will only work when other subversive forces, such as religion and the organic community of the individual, to whom his loyalty is natural, are eliminated.
Therefore, a thorough systematic indoctrination is carried out by the secular state from a young age, when a child is sent to school: a primary state institution. The state institutions: be it education, prison, mass media, corporate environment, healthcare complex, and the status quo are the apparatuses of the modern state to systematically destroy and then recreate the individual in the framework of a law-abiding citizen whose primary identity and loyalty belong to the state, and not to his spouse, parents, family, tribe or religion.
Michel Foucault talks about the systematic operation carried out by the state on the individual. The state, because it controls education, molds the mind and psyche of the individual from the time when the brain of the child is still in developing age. This is what Foucault has called Bio-power.
the human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. [16]
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 101.
This is essentially the formation of a new subjectivity and a subject to embody it. Instead of being with his parents, his family, and his close-knit community, the child is spending more time in a state institution with a group of strangers who too are simply other state persons, and who have no real relationship with him. This individual throughout the span of his life will spend more time in the state institutions than he will with his organic community.
The individuated individual is stripped from his organic, social, religious, and communal bonds. Then his language, reason, psyche, paradigm, and worldview are formed and woven by the secular education with which he has been indoctrinated from the day he stepped into this world. Such a state of affairs renders any revolt or rebellion against the state to be impossible. It is not wrong to say that the kind of control wielded by the secular nation-state over its subjects is unprecedented in human history. No sultan or monarch achieved such domination and control over their subjects as the modern state.
To summarize, secularism is a hegemonic force/discourse. It seeks to violently eliminate religion from the epistemic, moral, legal, and social landscape and reduces it to the private sphere. The society is socially disintegrated into individual atomized subjects. As for the private sphere, a thorough systematic indoctrination is carried out to determine the psyche, language, and reason of the individual. Secularism and secular state, in short, are a subjectivity formation. It is an attack on God, marriage, religion, community, as well as personal and communal autonomy. It is violent and aggressive. The secular modern state does not see any other sovereign entity other than itself. When secularism is elevated to the state level, it becomes an end in of itself and uses any means to meet its end. Secularism is not neutral.
In the end, it should be understood that the propagation of secularism is synonymous with attack on Islam: its paradigm, metaphysics, epistemology, and institutions. There is no point where Islam and secularism will reconcile for they are in opposition at every level. The duality that both discourses embody is that of either/or. Naquib al-Attas beautifully summarizes secularism and its implication for Muslims:
Western man is always inclined to regard his culture and civilization as man’s cultural vanguard; and his own experience and consciousness as the representative of the most ‘evolved’ of the species, so that we are all in the process of lagging behind them, as it were, and will come to realize the same experience and consciousness in due course sometimes. It is with this attitude that they, believing in their own absurd theories of human evolution, view human history and development and religion and religious experience and consciousness. We reject the validity of the truth of their assertion, with regard to secularization and their experience and consciousness and belief, to speak on our behalf. The secularization that describes its true nature clearly when applied to describe the Western man and his culture and civilization cannot be accepted as true it is intended to be a description The secularization that describes its true nature clearly when applied to describe the Western man and his culture and civilization cannot be accepted as true it is intended to be a description. Islam totally rejects any application to itself of the concepts secular or secularization, or secularism as they do not belong and are alien to it in every respect; and they belong and are natural only the intellectual history of Western—Christian religious experience and consciousness. [17]
Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 25.
END NOTE
At the end, I want to share another quote from The Impossible State,
In sum, the supremacy of the Sharīʿa meant a rule of law that stood superior to its modern counterpart, the present form of the Western state that has come to be fused, in the majority of instances, with a claim to democratic legitimacy (or popular sovereignty) that “sits very awkwardly with its practical realities.” For Muslims today to seek the adoption of the modern state system of separation of powers is to bargain for a deal inferior to the one they secured for themselves over the centuries of their history. The modern deal represents the power and sovereignty of the state, which we have seen—and will continue to see in the following chapters—to be working for its own perpetuation and interests. By contrast, the Sharīʿa did not—because it was not designed to—serve the ruler or any form of political power. It served the people, the masses, the poor, the downtrodden, and the wayfarer without disadvantaging the merchant and others of his ilk. In this sense it was not only deeply democratic but humane in ways unrecognizable to the modern state and its law. If the test is “what ought to constitute inalienable rights beyond the reach of any government,” to borrow Robert Dahl’s words,169 then the Sharīʿa passed that test, privileging the rule of law over that of the state. Accordingly, we may now also recognize a certain homonymy in the meaning of the formula “rule of law.” In the Islamic context, the formula acquires a “thick” conception of what “rule of law” means, whereas in the Euro-American context—the location of the paradigmatic modern state—the conception is not only “thin” but also teeming with problems to boot. [18]
Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 72.
I will write a separate essay where I will write in detail on the difference between modern state and Islamic governance.
References
| [1] | Cox, Harvey. “The Secular City.” Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 2013, pp. 2, 17 and 20. |
| [2] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 17. |
| [3] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 18. |
| [4] | Cox, Harvey. “The Secular City.” Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 2013, pp. 21-33. |
| [5] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 18. (Also see Weber, Essays in Sociology chapter III & V and Sociology of Religion, Boston, 1964.) |
| [6] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 18. |
| [7] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 18. |
| [8] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 19. (Also see, Cox, Harvey. “The Secular City.” Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 2013, pp. 21) |
| [9] | Hallaq, Wael. “Reforming Modernity.” Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha, 2020, p. 28. |
| [10] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 100-101 |
| [11] | Karl Marx, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” p. 9. In Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1959). Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Anchor. |
| [12] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 100 |
| [13] | Crevald, von, “The Rise and Decline of the State”, 2009, chap. 4: The State as an Ideal: 1789 to 1945, “Disciplining the People” p. 205-224) |
| [14] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, pp. 33–34. |
| [15] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 4 |
| [16] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 101. (See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 138) |
| [17] | Naquib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Islam and Secularism. 1978, p. 25. |
| [18] | Hallaq, Wael. “The Impossible State.” Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 2012, p. 72. |
Bibliography
-Creveld, Martin Van. The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge Etc.: Cambridge University Press. (2009)
-Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, Vintage Books, 1975.
-Hallaq, Wael B. The Impossible State. Hallaq, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament. New York, Columbia University Press, 2014.
-Harvey Gallagher Cox. The Secular City. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1968.
-Hallaq, Wael. Reforming Modernity : Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2019.
-Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1959). Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Anchor.
-Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas. Islam and Secularism. Kuala Lumpur, Ibfim, 2014.
-Weber, Max, et al. From Max Weber : Essays in Sociology. Abingdon ; New York, Routledge, 2009
