In this, the fourth and final article of the series, Ibn Warraq looks at the flickering flame of secularism in the Islamic world. Thomas Paine once made the brilliantly simple observation that if “something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. [It is] hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.” Thomas Nagel fleshes out that simple formulation, arguing that the reasons given for political decisions must meet a certain standard of “higher-order impartiality” or objectivity, since they must appeal to all members of society, to all citizens who participate in the process of government. One should be prepared “to submit one’s reasons to the criticism of others. This means that it must be possible to present to others the basis of your own beliefs, so that once you have done so, they have what you have, and can arrive at a judgment on the same basis.”

However, that standard is not met when “part of the source of your conviction is personal faith or revelation—because to report your faith or revelation to someone else is not to give him what you have, as you do when you show him your evidence or give him your arguments.” If political reasons fall short of objectivity, political debate degenerates into a mere “clash between irreconcilable subjective convictions”.

As Roger Scruton has expressed it, freedom of conscience requires secular government, and secular law is made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey it. Citizens participate in government, in the making and enacting of the law. In an Islamic theocracy, however, sovereignty belongs to God. One has to obey unquestioningly the dictates of those who interpret the Holy Book. In a democracy, sovereignty rests with the people; freedom is the cardinal principle. As Scruton summarizes, “Without freedom there cannot be government by consent; and it is the freedom to participate in the process of government, and to protest against, dissent from, and oppose the decisions that are made in my name, that confer on me the dignity of citizenship. Put very briefly, the difference between the West and the rest is that Western societies are governed by politics; the rest are ruled by power.”

Freedom of thought demands freedom of expression, and freedom of expression is important in a democracy to enable citizens to criticize the government, to offer alternatives, and to find ways to improve their political lot.

Islam and Secularism
Since 9/11, every journalist has been eager to point out that in Islam there is no separation between mosque and state. Indeed in Classical Arabic there is no pair of words corresponding to “lay” and “ecclesiastical”, “spiritual” and “temporal”, “secular” and “religious”. But what these same journalists fail to add is that the doctrinal lack of a separation of mosque and state did not mean that Islamic history was a chronicle of a series of relentless Muslim theocracies. On the contrary, as Carl Brown demonstrated recently, Muslim history has been marked by a de facto separation of state and religious community.

Many of the modern leaders of culturally Islamic countries were secular in their outlook and approach to the problems of modern industrializing societies; leaders such as Muhmmad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan, Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia. Let us look at two modern leaders, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan, and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia.

It is ironic that Pakistan, created for the Muslims of India, should have as its founder, Jinnah, who was an atheist. Educated in England, Jinnah had acquired decidedly un-Islamic tastes for alcohol and pork. In the last speech that he ever gave, Jinnah clearly envisages a secular future for the newly created state. In his presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, August 11, 1947, Jinnah said:

“We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on, will vanish. Indeed if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long, long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection… You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed… History shows that in England conditions some time ago were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States which discriminate and impose bars against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State…

“Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Habib Bourguiba, barely five months after Tunisian independence, pushed through a radical legal reform in August 1956 that outlawed polygamy and made judgment for divorce a prerogative of the court, withdrawing the husband’s exclusive right to divorce his wife. Although fourteen Tunisian religious scholars issued a fatwa denouncing the new law, it was received with enthusiasm by the modernists and met with practically no resistance. Bourguiba had taken on the Muslim official religious class and won. Modernization and secularization of education followed, including the downgrading of the venerable Zaytuna Mosque University, which ultimately became a faculté of religious studies in the University of Tunis.

Unfortunately, corruption, nepotism, incompetence, pandering to the mullahs, the obscurantist religious scholars, led to the rising influence of the Islamic fundamentalists, who, sensing that their time had come, demanded ever more introduction of Islam in public life.

Since the 1920s there have been many individual intellectuals from Islamic countries who have advocated secularism and state-religion separation as a way out of their intellectual, economic and moral morass. Among the earliest advocates of secularism were Christian writers like Ya'qub Sarruf, Faris Nimr, Nicola Haddad, and Salama Musa. Many of them were Christian immigrants from Syria, looking for asylum from Ottoman rule in British- occupied Egypt. The first Muslim religious scholar to plead for secularism was Shaykh Ali Abd al-Raziq (1888-1966) in his al-Islam wa ‘Usul al-Hukm, where he argued that “Islam was a religion and not a state, a message not a government, a spiritual edifice not a political institution,” a proposition that led to his defrocking by the Azharite Committee of Ulema.

Many courageous individuals and Human Rights organizations continue to fight for political rights in Islamic states, rights we take for granted in the West.

For example, the Kuwaiti Sh’ite activist Dr. Ibtihal Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khatib, an academic and columnist, declared that a secular state is the only way to protect religious rights in the Arab World. When asked by a television interviewer if she had a problem with religion, she replied,

“Of course not. My problem is with religious coercion, when you impose a particular school of religion on a certain country... In Iran, for example, it is the Sunnis whose rights are violated, and they suffer from pressure because they are a minority. If you separate religion from state and have full civil rights... secularism protects religions and does not oppose them. When you treat all religions on the same level, you guarantee everybody's liberty to exercise their religious rights.”

The one redeeming feature of the entire grim farce at the UN recounted at the beginning of this series was the passionate plea to delegations from twenty-one courageous NGOs from the Islamic States, along with nineteen other organisations, to oppose the amendment to the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. They wrote,

‘We, the Undersigned, are deeply concerned that the proposed amendment undermines the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, at a time when it most needs protection and strengthening.

“It goes against the spirit of the mandate… It lacks balance… It is unnecessary… It can be misinterpreted…”

These NGOs are perfectly aware of the implications of living under Islamic Law, and were clearly frustrated that they were not heeded by those delegates who take the freedoms they enjoy for granted.

Perhaps I should give the last word to Sayyid Iyad Jamaleddine, a reform-minded Iraqi Shiite cleric, who has called for an absolute separation of mosque and state in Iraq:

“I am a Muslim. I am devoted to my religion. I want to get it back from the state and that is why I want a secular state….When young people come to religion, not because the state orders them to but because they feel it themselves in their hearts, it actually increases religious devotion….The Koran is a book to be interpreted [by] each age. Each epoch should not be tied to interpretations from 1000 years ago. We should be open to interpretations based on new and changing times”.

Ibn Warraq is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Enquiry.