Why do many Muslims mistrust secularism?

Some years ago, the exiled Tunisian Islamist leader Rashid Ghannoushi wrote a book on public rights in Islam. He pointed out that there were particular historical reasons why Europe had separated religion and state. The church had misused its powers, had stood in the way of scientific progress, and the state had made religion a tool of oppression. That’s fine for Europe, he said, but in the Muslim world people didn’t share that history; they had to find their own way of doing things.

This is a pretty mild Muslim response to the concept of Western secularism. In sharper versions, secularism is one of a list of unfavorable Western inventions which include materialism, Zionism, promiscuity and imperialism - to mention but a few in no particular order. At the extreme, Osama bin Laden has his own list of evils.

Why is it that Muslims appear to find it so difficult to see anything positive in Western secularism? Are we so different after all?

There are some Islamic movements that are serious in their call for the complete integration of religion and state, with religion predominating in public life as in private. Additionally, in the languages of some Muslim populations, the discussion is made almost impossible by the fact that the word used for secularism translates into English as "no religion" or "without religion." This is the case, for example, in Urdu, whereas the original meaning of the word was simply "that which has to do with this world, as opposed to the next."

Once one gets underneath the surface of the topic, though, things become more complicated. And they differ from country to country. Saudi Arabia is not Egypt is not Iran is not Pakistan is not Syria, and so on.

Certainly, Muslims do not like a lot of what they view as being Western: the loneliness of the individual, the breakdown of the family, the destruction wrought by drug addiction, random violence, recreational sex. Of course, they are not alone in feeling these concerns, and it is natural to conclude that they are the result of the decline of religion. But this interpretation has also been popularized by Western media, especially by American films which everyone can now see on satellite television.

But there are other perspectives. In the mid-1920s, the Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq, a professor at Al-Azhar, published a book entitled "Islam and the Roots of Government." In it he argued that the Prophet Mohammad had founded a religion, not a state, so religion should not determine state structures today. The book was immediately condemned and, we are told by most Islamic scholars, is no longer of interest. But it has remained continuously in print since then and can still be bought in Cairo bookshops. So someone must be reading it.

In a conversation with a group of Islamic scholars in the United Kingdom recently from one of the more conservative movements, we got on to the topic of an "Islamic order." Clearly, it was not enough that a government or economic system should call itself Islamic. It had to be Islamic. But what did that mean? For the scholars such a system had to offer social justice, a reliable legal system, personal liberty, equality, popular participation, accountable rulers and the like. One of them ventured that northern European welfare states were arguably a good deal more "Islamic" than any state in the Muslim world.

If such important values are shared, then why are there such mixed feelings about the idea of secularism in Muslim societies? Clearly the attack on secularism is encouraged by clerics. If religion in its traditional forms is pushed to the margins of public life, what remains for the clergy? But that on its own is an unsatisfactory explanation for the mistrust of secularism. After all clerics have a receptive audience for their views.

On the so-called Arab street, secularism is more often than not seen as a foreign import. It was brought in by foreign colonial powers as a way of limiting the power of Muslim religious institutions which often were at the forefront of resistance against the colonial powers. Many modern Muslim states are regarded as the heirs of the colonial powers by their people. Secular politics are associated with secular military dictatorships that were established during the years of the Cold War, and supported by one or the other of the secular superpowers.

Today, the only effective challenge to this inheritance, many Muslims believe, comes from Islamist movements, and people arguing for a secular perspective run the constant danger of being accused of collaboration with the West. It is this that makes it more likely that many will tilt away from modern, pluralistic secularism toward a religious political system.

By Jorgen S. Nielsen

Jorgen S. Nielsen is director of the Danish Institute of Damascus and a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. This article is part of a series on secularism and Muslim-Western dialogue distributed by the Common Ground News Service.