Secularism & its discontents
In the quarter century since the Iranian Revolution took much of the world by surprise – not least in the way its religious leadership mobilized a genuinely popular uprising – many commentators in the West have been inclined to see the Middle East and South Asia as cultural backwaters, where religion-based politics are overcoming the secular forms of political organization appropriate to modern industrial societies.
But this understanding of recent events is misleading. A comparative historical survey of the rise and fall of successive waves of secularism in the modern era reveals a more complicated and paradoxical picture of trends in Western countries and of the impact of these trends on societies struggling to emulate the economic success of the modern West.
In the survey that follows, I will focus on the conflict between secularist and antisecularist trends in a variety of different states, starting with the rise of secularism in the West. Before I begin, it will be useful to examine more closely the history of some key terms.
Over the centuries, ‘secular’ has conveyed a far wider variety of meanings than current usage may suggest. A term derived in Middle English from the Old French word seculer (itself from the Latin saecularis), the word originally referred to clergy who were not bound by the religious rules of a monastic order. In Middle English, it could also refer to the realm of the ‘this-worldly’ as opposed to the divine – the sacred and ‘other-worldly’ realms historically monopolized in Western Europe by the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the evolving use of words based on ‘secular’ reflects, among other things, a long and contentious history; ‘secularism’ and its militant Latin sibling ‘laicism’ emerged in Western European countries that were once, if not still, dominated by Roman Catholicism.
It was only in the nineteenth century that the word ‘secular’ came to be associated with ‘secularists’ who espoused a doctrine of ‘secularism’ – that is, the belief that religious institutions and values should play no role in the temporal affairs of the nation-state. These terms were coined in England in 1851 by a radical atheist, George Holyoake, who was looking for respectable euphemisms to replace ‘atheist,’ ‘infidel,’ ‘freethinker,’ ‘unbeliever,’ etc.1 Holyoake and his successor Charles Bradlaugh led a national network of secular societies that some have seen as an alternative church – certainly these societies served social and political as well as ideological functions.
Appealing largely to skilled laborers from the upper working classes, the secular societies advocated an end of privileges for the Anglican Church, and the extension of equal rights and freedoms to all religious and antireligious persons and institutions. They convinced Parliament to abolish disabilities for nonbelieving witnesses, helped discredit (though they did not succeed in abolishing) blasphemy laws, and, after Bradlaugh was elected to Parliament and refused to take the religious oath, made it possible for an avowed nonbeliever to hold office.2 Apart from Bradlaugh, the organization’s most effective speaker and writer was the young Annie Besant, best known for her later association with the theosophy movement, with its Hindu and Buddhist overtones.3
By the end of the nineteenth century, the political aims of secular societies had been largely achieved, in part because they were in tune with other social and cultural trends. After the death of Bradlaugh and the defection of Besant, the movement, never large, faded away. By then, Darwinism and socialism had replaced secularism as fighting creeds, and Thomas Huxley’s late-nineteenth-century coinage, ‘agnostic,’ had largely replaced ‘secularist’ as a term for religious skeptics.
The older noun ‘secularization’ underwent a somewhat analogous evolution. For centuries, the term in Latin and French referred only to a change in clerical status – for example, when a monk became a secular priest. A broader meaning was documented only after the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the term was used to describe the process whereby Brandenburg was granted church land within its borders. In the decades that followed, ‘secularization’ was often used to describe the confiscation or conversion of ecclesiastical religious institutions or property for civil possession and use.4
By the end of the nineteenth century, ‘secularization’ was being widely used in conjunction with the terms ‘secularists’ and ‘secularism’ to refer to various state measures that weakened the Church and religion, including the disestablishment of dominant churches, the protection of religious and atheist minorities, and increased lay control of formerly religious spheres.5 By extension, ‘secularization’ was used as well to describe a generalized process of replacing religious with lay values in the character and direction of morality, education, and culture. For many, ‘secular’ and ‘secularist’ (and French variants on ‘laic’) remain associated with unbelief.
Enter the social scientists: only in the early twentieth century did ‘secularization’ become a scholarly category, usually traced to the sociologists Weber, Tonnies, and Troeltsch, although similar concepts can be found in earlier thinkers. 6 In common usage today, ‘secularization’ refers to:
- an increase in the number of people with secular beliefs and practices;
- a lessening of religious control or influence over major spheres of life; and
- a growth in state separation from religion and in secular regulation of formerly religious institutions and customs.
These phenomena are to a degree logically independent, and also often independent in practice. Trying to measure the extent of secular beliefs and practices through church membership may not yield accurate results; in Europe today figures for religious belief as measured by opinion polls are considerably higher than those for church attendance and membership. Nor does the extent of belief or unbelief necessarily correlate positively with the extent of state separation from, or control over, religion.7
In addition, all of these phenomena vary widely in scope and intensity, and all of them can be paradoxical in their implications. Instead of a separation of church and state, secularism has sometimes been used to justify and enforce aggressive political control over religion and its institutions. This has been true in modern Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, Bourguiba’s Tunisia, and the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe, whose governments have mostly seen such control as a necessity for their states’ rapid social and economic modernization.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most scholars and writers, Western and Eastern alike, saw the growth of secularism as a one-way street toward modernization – a wholly positive process according to Comte and many subsequent theorists, or a dialectical process synthesizing positive and negative moments, as hypothesized by Hegel and Marx. In the social science literature, the growth of secularism is often interpreted as a natural concomitant of the spread of science, education, and technology – all of which seem to undermine the need for religious explanations of the world and, ultimately, for powerful organized religions in modern society. Theorists with a progressive view, whether straight-line or dialectical, have also tended to imagine that people will enjoy ever greater levels of material well-being, thus diminishing the collective need for religious consolation. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, a certain imbalance in scholarly accounts: most scholars who write about secularization consider it a rational, even natural, point of view, while most scholars who write about fundamentalism are skeptical about the value of religious politics.8) Most of the evidence from the West has tended to bolster this view of progressive secularization, and, despite the West’s crisis of confidence in progress, most modern governments have continued to exercise ever greater levels of control over formerly religious spheres.
At the same time, it has become increasingly clear in country after country that the political struggles between religious and secular forces are far from over – whether in Iran, India, or even the United States. Even though worldwide a great many people think religion should not affect legislation and policy-making, those who disagree are a growing force.
In the survey that follows, I shall focus on parts of the world where institutions of major world religions held power that created significant obstacles to secularization. I will therefore concentrate on areas that had either monotheistic scriptural religions with exclusive claims – namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; or a number of conflicting religions with strong incompatible claims, as in South Asia. These are the areas where important struggles over secularization have occurred. They are also, not coincidentally, the areas that have seen the recent rise in ‘fundamentalist’ movements, which I have termed ‘The New Religious Politics.’9
Before the sixteenth century, religion was a major organizing principle of civilization in most of the world – and certainly in Western Europe. There the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was unrivaled: it may well have been the most powerful religious institution the world has ever seen. From the late eleventh century until about 1300, canon law had priority over secular law, and kings had to perform significant penance if they violated Church edicts.10 Furthermore, the Church played a leading role in organizing Crusades not only in the Holy Land, but also against heretics and non-Catholics in Europe. Later it also played a leading role in dividing the New World into Spanish and Portuguese domains.
The rise of Protestantism initially increased religiosity in Western Europe by provoking intense personal concern about religious doctrines and loyalties, among both Protestants and the reformed and aroused Catholics of the Counter Reformation. Ultimately, however, the proliferation of sects and the exhaustion of the combatants in long, bloody, and inconclusive religious wars led to increasing religious toleration. Governments gradually granted equal civil status to those holding a variety of religious and irreligious beliefs – a key condition for creating secular states. But rulers in Western Europe now had to contend with a great variety of religions.
The political implications of these changes evolved over several centuries, in a series of sometimes violent struggles that pitted rulers against established religious groups. In England, Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) broke with Rome, confiscated church lands, and closed monasteries. In Italy three centuries later, the nationalists under King Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1861–1878) stripped the Church of its control over the papal states and Rome, resulting in a break in relations between the Vatican and the Italian government that lasted into the twentieth century. In France, the struggle between the government and the Church, begun in 1789 during the French Revolution, culminated between 1901 and 1905 in the confiscation of religious property and in a strict separation of church and state. In Spain, Portugal, and many nations in Latin America, analogous struggles followed a broadly similar course.11
Regarding these trends, Western thinkers drew a variety of conclusions. Some thinkers, such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, advocated religious tolerance, while others, particularly in France during the Enlightenment, harshly criticized organized religion. But even some of the harshest critics (Voltaire, for one) believed that religion might be good for the lower classes, keeping them honest, diligent, and peaceful – a proposition that came to seem especially credible after the anticlerical violence unleashed during the French Revolution.12
The French Revolution also made it clear that nationalism – a growing sentiment of shared moral, political, and social attachments expressed through the institutions of the nation-state – might well rival, or even replace, religiosity in the minds of newly self-conscious citizens. Traditional religious loyalties potentially conflicted with the priorities of emergent nation-states; even before the rise of modern nationalism, European regimes tried to weaken religious institutions that interfered with their secular power.
Nationalism created an ideological basis for nonreligious loyalties and also made it easier to extend equal rights to citizens professing different religious beliefs, and possible to encourage national networks of production and consumption. 13 Although in some modern European countries – for example, Poland and Ireland – nationalism has utilized religious sentiments, in most it has been a force for secularization, putting national loyalty above religion and rendering the nation-state stronger than any church, even in the presence of state religions, as in England.
The period from 1860 to 1914 was probably the heyday in Europe of expansive secularization, just as it was the heyday of optimistic theories of evolutionary human progress, from Karl Marx to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. As Eric Hobsbawm describes the period:
Traditional religion was receding with unprecedented rapidity, both as an intellectual force and among the masses. This was to some extent an almost automatic consequence of urbanization . . . . In the Roman Catholic countries, which comprised 45 percent of the European population, faith retreated particularly fast . . . before the joint offensive of . . . middle-class rationalism and the socialism of school teachers, but especially of the combination of emancipatory ideals and political calculation which made the fight against the Church the key issue in politics.14
These changes were accompanied by a surge in secular control over education and a rise in Marxist socialism, especially among workers. “In many ways Marxism [in Karl Kautsky’s version] . . . was the last triumph of nineteenth-century positivist scientific confidence. It was materialist, determinist, inevitabilist, evolutionist, and firmly identified the ‘laws of history’ with the ‘laws of science.’” 15
In Eastern European countries, where orthodox Christianity prevailed, secularism was also a rising trend between the seventeenth and early twentieth century. Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) abolished the Russian patriarchate, created church government by synod, and installed a government representative as chief procurator of the synod. Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) confiscated much church land, and a succession of nineteenth- century tsars took further measures to control the Orthodox Church.16 In these years, secularization was primarily a top-down affair carried out for reasons of state. While democratic and socialist secularists spoke for parts of the urban intelligentsia, the rural majority of Russia’s people remained devoutly Christian.
After the October 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – committed to Marx’s atheist worldview – disestablished the Orthodox Church and expropriated its assets. Violent nationwide campaigns against the Church, religious belief, and the clergy ensued. These policies changed during World War II, and in 1943 the regime accepted an accommodation with the Church that restored the patriarchate. The end of communism in the Soviet Union enabled the Church to recover considerable property and influence, but levels of religious belief and church attendance remained low,17 indicating that even top-down secularization can succeed in undermining religious belief in some circumstances. (Similarly low levels of church and mosque attendance have been reported in post-Communist orthodox Bulgaria and Serbia, as well as in many other areas of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.)
European Jewry was also affected by a broad secular trend, especially in Western Europe. In countries like Germany and France, middle-class Jews welcomed the separation of church and state and the spread of civil equality. Theodor Herzl and most of the other late-nineteenth-century founders of political Zionism were secularists – but many of their followers in Eastern Europe were not. Among European Jews, secularism and nationalism were not entirely congruent forces: many Zionists, especially on the popular level, were not secularists, and many secularists were not Zionists.
Meanwhile, in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, though secular principles organized political life, a variety of religions flourished, partly because the equal treatment of different Christian churches in America left people free to join or found a religion of their choice. But when religiously minded intellectuals in America moved toward more rationalist and socially reformist interpretations of religion in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it provoked a backlash from literalist Protestant conservatives, who fought the gradual secularization of behavior, belief, and public schooling.
Even in European countries at the zenith of expansive secularization, religious groups did not accept the situation without a struggle. In Germany, divided between Protestants and Catholics, a Catholic party formed and gained considerable strength. And in the past half century, a number of Western nations have experienced a renewal of political claims on behalf of religious values and institutions.
Doubts about the wisdom of unmitigated secularism have been provoked by a variety of developments. One was the devastation caused by the two world wars and subsequent regional bloodbaths. The civilized peoples’ capacity to commit acts of mass destruction, far worse than anything experienced in the nineteenth century, bred pessimism about progress. Another factor was the mixed performance of economic systems, whether capitalist or socialist, that were supposed to ensure the wealth of nations. Although most people living in the West enjoyed a steady rise in their standard of living, the new economic order created new uncertainties: cycles of boom and bust, increasing income gaps, high levels of unemployment. Recent rapid globalization of the world economy has exacerbated many of these problems and tensions and has lowered living standards for many. Working-class solidarity, trade unionism, and indeed the industrial working class itself have all proved weaker than socialists expected.
The new secular social systems have also had mixed success, ameliorating some major problems but often creating new ones. The decline in racial barriers worldwide was a major advance, but was nowhere accompanied by adequate educational, health, and other measures to provide equality of opportunity among racial groups. Ethnic tensions have sometimes worsened. Many parts of Europe have seen growing hostility to immigrants, especially to Muslims. Women have won greater equality, but very few countries have adequate child care and other services for working mothers. Some women, given current difficulties, long for a return to the days of the idealized two-parent, male-breadwinner family, often associated with religious morality.
In short, secularism is nowhere in the West a simple fait accompli. The spread of secular beliefs and practices in Europe and the United States has involved slow change and continuing, sometimes sharp, debate. As a result, it would be foolish to expect that secularist reforms would somehow be accomplished more easily in the Middle East and South Asia. I would argue that the slow ripening of secular tendencies is more important than doctrinal differences in explaining the current strength of secularism in the West. As even a short survey indicates, the West was at first no more open to secularization than are parts of the Middle East and South Asia today. As I have argued elsewhere, the common idea that religion and politics have always been more inextricably intertwined in Islam than in Christianity is untrue. Typically, governments in the Muslim world followed Islamic rules only to the extent they thought it was in their interest to do so.
Secularism as an animating set of political beliefs came late to the Muslim world, as a by-product of the growing influence of Western political ideas. While Christian Europe underwent its epochal series of struggles between church and state, most Muslim countries remained moderately religious in orientation. Throughout the early modern period, the majority of Middle Eastern rulers adhered to Islam, and Muslim religious leaders continue to play an active role in civil society, though without making claims to temporal authority of the sort advanced by the Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation.
Because secularization has progressed unevenly around the world, secularists in the Middle East now face some of the difficulties previously encountered in Western Europe. For example, just last century, secularists in France and Italy were hesitant to grant women suffrage, for fear that the majority of them would vote with the Catholic Church; some secularists in Arab countries today fear the majority of a free electorate will elect religious parties. Similarly, in 1902 the leaders of the French Radical Party issued an election program that proposed that “By suppressing religious orders, by secularizing ecclesiastical property in mortmain, and by abolishing payment of public money to the clergy, we mean to put into practice this decisive liberal formula – free churches in a free and sovereign state”;18 a few decades later, a somewhat similar policy was pursued in Atatürk’s Turkey, in part because Turkish secularists had reasons to fear the socioeconomic, political, and cultural power of their own religious elite.
Western European regimes were inconsistent in their application of secularizing principles – especially in their colonies. While the French and some other colonial powers were suppressing religious schooling at home, they encouraged it in their colonies as part of a wider cultural project. The French colonies, where conservative diplomats and military officers dominated, were exempted from anticlerical laws, as the Catholic orders continued to receive French government subsidies and support for colonial educational institutions by arguing that local nationalists would otherwise take over.19 Colonial policy sometimes favored certain religious groups, thus increasing sectarian strife – but it also introduced some leaders in colonized areas to Western thinking about secularization and modernization. After studying at Western-model schools or returning to the Middle East and South Asia from schools in the West, several of them opted for secular nationalism, which after World War II became a dominant mode of decolonization not only in India, Turkey, and Tunisia, but also in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Iraq.
While some have compared the politico-religious ferment in the Muslim world today with the rise of Protestantism, a closer, though still inexact, parallel is the history of religious-secular struggles in Catholic countries. In both possible parallels, religion claimed power in politics, law, personal behavior, and the regulation of gender and family roles. But whereas some version of secularism has emerged victorious in almost every Catholic country, the past few decades have seen a dramatic growth in the influence of so-called Islamists – Muslims who want to consolidate religion and politics in novel combinations that they present as traditional.20
Contrary to Christian practice, in Islam there has never been a central body to decide religious dogma; even the central institution of Islamic law has never been universally applied. Here my discussion will center on the Middle East and Pakistan, which include the strictest regions of Islam; and it should be noted that in Southeast Asia and in Africa south of the Sahara, where Islam spread late and peacefully, Islamic law and practice has usually been less strict.
Terms like ‘secular’ were never widely used in Muslim countries until the twentieth century. Then, until roughly 1967, secularists, nationalists, and socialists played a growing political role in the Muslim world, coming to power in several countries and carrying out secularizing programs as a concomitant to modernization.
The Ottoman Empire and Turkey, its most central successor state, played a pioneering role in this regard. Under the Ottoman Empire, the state exercised an unusual amount of control over its religious institutions. For example, Muslim scholars, or ulama, were hierarchically organized and sanctioned by the state, and Ottoman sultans often issued decrees with the force of law. The powers of the central government grew after 1826, enabling it to initiate a number of secularizing measures in the nineteenth century, often under Western pressure. These measures included significant government control over vakf (mortmain) property and the declaration of equal rights for Muslims and non- Muslims. Meanwhile, nationalism grew in the army and among the educated middle classes.
The biggest impetus to secular nationalism came after World War I, with the accession to power of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. A war hero, he had led the Turkish troops that repelled the European invaders, forcing the Allied powers to recognize Turkish control of enough territory to constitute a viable nation-state. Since the sultan-caliph had acquiesced in the possibility of an Allied dismemberment of Turkey, there was little internal resistance to Atatürk’s abolition of the sultanate and then of the caliphate, though the abolition of the latter aroused resistance in other parts of the Muslim world.
The need for strong government action to establish a secular state was due both to the residual strength of existing Islamic institutions and the felt need to catch up with a West that had a long head start in centralization and modernization. Atatürk’s secularizing measures included the romanization of the script and outlawing the use of Arabic – and the abolition of religious education and of Shariah. Modeling Turkish law on the Swiss Civil Code, Atatürk granted women almost equal rights and discouraged veiling. His were the strongest measures against religious institutions anywhere outside the Communist world, as he and many Turkish nationalists adopted the French model of militant laicism.
It is not surprising that after World War II there was a backlash against some of Atatürk’s most aggressively secularizing measures. Even secular politicians wanting better relations with the oil-rich Arab world made gestures toward Islam. A dramatic sign of antisecularist reaction was Turkey’s giving an electoral plurality to an Islamist party and the appointment of a prime minister from that party in 1996.21 This in turn produced a secularist reaction, especially within the military, and the Islamist prime minister resigned in the summer of 1997. Mainly because of a deep economic crisis, a new Islamist-based but more moderate and formally secular AK Party won a plurality in the November 2002 elections and has since led the government. Periodic struggles continue over issues like the prohibition of Islamic head covering for women in state localities such as Parliament and universities. This prohibition may eventually be rescinded, but the basic secular nature of Turkey’s government is unlikely to change. This is partly because Turkey has hopes of joining the European community, and partly because the active majority of Turks are still secular, though often willing to allow freedom of dress, and the ruling party is not threatening basic secularism.
As in Russia, much of the population was successfully secularized by governmental fiat and policies. There is not as much religious backlash in Turkey today as in several Arab countries in the Middle East, and Turkey is unique in its renunciation of Islamic justifications for laws and institutions. (Laws on women’s status have been similarly reformed in Tunisia, but there the reform was carried out under Islamic justification.)
In Iran, the ulama had far more independent power than anywhere else in the Muslim world, due to developments in Iranian Shiism after it became the state religion in 1501. Only in the late nineteenth century did nationalism begin to grow in the country: in dramatic contrast to Muslim leaders, early Iranian nationalists blamed the country’s decline on the seventh-century Arab Islamic conquest, and vaunted its ancient ‘Aryan’ (linguistically Indo-European) heritage. Disgruntled ulama allied with merchants and nationalist reformers in a partially successful antigovernmental revolt in 1890–1891. Beginning in late 1905, a revolution produced a constitutional parliamentary regime that continued in power until Russia and Britain intervened in 1911.22
Reza Shah, who governed Iran from 1921 until 1941, imitated Atatürk, though in his less modern nation he could not go as far. He centralized his country – chiefly by forcibly settling nomads, improving education, transport, and communications, and promoting the secular nationalist view of Iran hitherto favored by intellectuals. Simultaneously, he forced his citizens to adopt Western dress, promoted a secular public school system, and so forth. Modernizing secularization continued under his son, Muhammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–1979), and was widely associated with subservience to the United States and its interests, especially after American leadership and British involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the popular (and secular) Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. Modernization, which took place there almost entirely between 1925 and 1975, was much more sudden in Iran than it had been in Turkey. Meanwhile, the suppression of secular opposition opened the way for the rapid rise and 1979 victory of a multifaceted revolutionary movement led by a religious opposition that appealed to widespread anti-Western and anti-tyrannical feelings.23
Other Muslim countries had only partly similar trajectories, which I will describe in brief. By a historical contingency, in the Middle East only Arab countries experienced Western colonial rule. Almost all of them outside the Arabian Peninsula were for a time either colonies, protectorates, or mandates of Britain or France. Western control of Palestine in the crucial years after 1918 culminated in the creation of Israel, which greatly strengthened anti-Western currents in the Arab Middle East. In Palestine and Algeria, the only Muslim countries occupied by foreign settlers, there was a strong counter-assertion of national and religious identities, prompted in large part by efforts to assert local, non-Western cultural values in regions ruled by the West.
Secular nationalists generally led the anticolonial liberation movements after World War II. In Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser participated in a 1952 revolution and survived an assassination attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954, which he used to legitimate a crackdown on religious institutions; two years later, Nasser declared Egypt a socialist state. Popular support for his brand of secularism began to fade with the defeat of Egypt by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and his successors, as autocratic as he, provoked even deeper distrust by instituting ‘free market’ policies that, critics charged, primarily served Western interests. Current Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak has not limited his crackdown to militant Islamists; he has arrested and brought to trial a number of dissidents, including civil rights leaders like Saad Eddin Ibrahim.
In Tunisia after its 1956 independence, Habib Bourguiba instated strongly secular measures that reinterpreted Islam, weakened religious institutions, and introduced virtually equal rights for women. His successor, Ben Ali, however, has autocratically suppressed both Islamists of all varieties and civil rights lawyers and advocates.
In Algeria, governmental suppression of the 1992 elections that Islamists were poised to win led to a bloody civil war, but also to a significant decline in militant Islamism.24 Jordan and Morocco’s recent histories are more moderate; Saudi Arabia is ruled under a strict Islamic creed that dates back to the eighteenth century; Syria and pre-war Iraq have simultaneously suppressed Islamic and non-Islamic opposition. Militant Islam is still a strong force in much of the Muslim world, but I would agree with those who point to its weakening in recent years in key centers including Iran, Egypt, and Algeria. Despite the bin Laden phenomenon, it seems unlikely that militant Islamists will take over more Arab governments in the near future.25 On the other hand, recent U.S. policies toward the Arab-Israeli dispute, Pakistan, and most recently, Iraq, have led to a growth in both Islamist and non- Islamist hostility to the U.S. government in the Arab world, Turkey, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia that could be expressed in further violence against American and Western targets.
The fatal association of secularism with autocratic rule and Western influence helps account for the general trend against secularism in the Muslim world;26 when people want to be free of Western control, they don’t generally envision the path to their salvation in the secularist ideas sovereign in the West. The creation in recent decades of modernized and highly political versions of Islam encourages mobilization of the still-religious masses and provides the elements of an ideology that seems familiar, powerful–and untainted by Western influence.
In recent years, Islamist Muslims have introduced antisecular elements rare in past Islamic history, like the total intertwining of religion and politics and the political primacy of clerical and lay Muslim leaders. The idea and practice of codifying Islamic law and making it the law of the state is also distinctly modern. Still, most people attracted to Islamist ideologies do not envision a violent overthrow of their governments; they rather wish to establish political parties and participate in free elections. Several Islamists today champion values long associated with secularism in the West, including democracy and respect for modern science, technology, and education. Anti-Western terrorism, while of natural international concern, involves a very small minority of Muslims, and has thus far spread far less than many feared after 2001.
Paradoxically enough, the Islamic country where forms of secularism are most popular today is probably Iran. Reformists have won repeated electoral victories in the country since 1997, demonstrations against the hard-liners who control the government are increasingly frequent, and there is a healthy ferment in the arts. Just as the Iranian revolution was briefly seen as a model in much of the Muslim world, so Iranian reformism and activist opposition to clerical autocracy are now models for many outside Iran.27 Furthermore, in Iran as elsewhere, a number of writers, mostly women, have undertaken the difficult issue of interpreting early Islamic traditions as implying equality for women, and there have been a few legal and many social changes in the direction of greater gender equality, though laws are far more unequal than they were under the Shah.28 Women now comprise 63 percent of university entrants, as health, education, and family programs have brought birthrates down from seven per woman to two.
Some intellectuals in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world think that advances associated with secularism in the West can be achieved via reinterpretations of Islam without renouncing the ties between state and religion. The economic failures and cultural repression experienced under Islamic rule have disillusioned most Iranians, whose anticlericalism is exemplified by the pervasive refusal of the country’s taxi drivers to pick up clerics. Many Iranians are speaking not only against clerical rule, but also explicitly in favor of the separation of religion and the state. The failures of the Islamic Republic have also dampened enthusiasm for Islamic revolution and rule elsewhere.
The dynamics of secularization in South Asia and Israel, where religion and nationalism have been closely intertwined for decades, have been somewhat different from those in the West and the Middle East. In Pakistan and Israel, religious identity spurred movements to create a nation, movements chiefly based on religious nationalism. And in both countries religion-based parties have grown since the states’ formation, and constitute a significant element in political life.
The early leaders of Israel’s Zionist movement were, however, secularists, as were a number of Pakistan’s founders, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah.29 And secularist intellectuals continue to be stronger in these countries than in much of the Islamic Middle East. As a result, there is no consensus that being a Jewish or Muslim state requires any further strengthening of religious laws.
Pakistan differs greatly from Israel, however; it trails Israel in modernization and education programs, and must also contend with widespread poverty and persistent tribal and regional power centers. Having enacted, under General Zia ul-Haq in the 1970s, ‘Islamic’ laws that discriminate against women and religious minorities, it is also substantially different from Israel on the social front. Current Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has secular aims, but by his acts he has alienated many Islamists and democratic secularists alike, and he is having trouble in his efforts to introduce secular education into the far-flung madrasas. Ultimately, Israel’s government and society, despite all the privileges granted to Jews and the religious parties, are more secular than Pakistan’s.
The case of India, where Hinduism is practiced among several other major religions, is more complex. Hinduism, it has been argued, did not originate as a single religion, but rather was ‘reformed’ into a unity of doctrine and practice after the coming of the British and the development of clearer Christian and Muslim identities within the country.30 Reform movements that incorporated Western influences first emerged in India during the early nineteenth century and developed earliest among Hindus, who occupied more middle-class positions than Muslims.
Founded in 1885, the Indian National Congress was predominantly liberal-secular, and officially neutral regarding religion. Such religious neutrality seemed necessary if the party was to enlist both Muslims and Hindus in the struggle for national independence. On the other hand, some leaders’ emphasis on Hindu issues (for example, the movement against cow slaughter) as advocated in the early twentieth century by B. G. Tilak attracted mostly Hindu support and alienated some non-Hindus.
In the first years of the twentieth century, divisive communal issues came to the fore with the abortive partition of Bengal, favored by Muslims but broadly opposed by Hindus. The dispute over Bengal led to the formation of the Muslim League and to the granting of separate electorates, at first for local bodies, based on religion. Congress and the Muslim League cooperated in the Khilafat movement of support for the Ottoman caliphate during and after World War I, but this became a nonissue with Atatürk’s abolition of the caliphate, and the cooperation broke down.
The Congress Party attracted a number of Muslim politicians, most prominently A. K. Azad, at a time when the Muslim League was far from securing the majority of Muslim voters. Congress secularism had unacknowledged contradictions, however, and the successes of the party’s outstanding leader Mohandas Gandhi were partly due to the mass appeal of his spiritual themes such as nonviolence and asceticism, which were closer to certain Hindu and Jain traditions than to Islam. On the other hand, the religious Gandhi and his agnostic fellow Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru were in agreement that the national movement and ultimate national government of a united India should be secular in its policies and treat all religions equally.
In elections for provincial legislatures in 1937, the Muslim League did not get the majority of Muslim votes, but subsequently many Muslims found the performance of the Congress-dominated legislatures pro-Hindu and discriminatory. In the 1940s, after the Muslim League’s determination to make Pakistan a Muslim state further aroused communal-religious feelings, most Muslims actively supported the creation of a separate Muslim state. While partition might have been avoided–especially if Nehru had accepted proposals for substantial autonomy for Muslim regions– it instead took effect with brutal suddenness after the hasty departure of the British in 1947. Large-scale massacres occurred on both sides.31 And in the decades that followed the partition, three major Indian leaders were assassinated for religio-political reasons: Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist; Nehru’s daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in 1984 by a Sikh militant; and her son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991 by a Hindu adherent of the Tamil Tigers.
In India after the partition, maintaining state secularism and religious neutrality proved difficult, and the Indian constitution did not establish a uniform civil code. In 1985, a crisis ensued when a branch of the Indian supreme court ruled that an elderly Muslim woman, Shah Bano, was entitled to maintenance by her ex-husband under a section of the Indian Criminal Code, and went beyond this in advocating a uniform civil code. This led to significant Hindu-Muslim conflict, though some Muslim women and liberals agreed with the judgment. Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress (I) government backtracked, however, successfully pushing a 1986 law exempting Muslim women from the law of maintenance. A Hindu nationalist backlash was a factor in the ultimately successful campaign to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. 32 Other governmental acts that encouraged communal reactions included affirmative action policies for Muslims and for disfavored castes and tribes at a time when educated Hindus were experiencing high unemployment.
In recent years, Hindu nationalism has grown in power; its party, the BJP, currently leads the government. A number of intellectuals, including Ashis Nandy, T. N. Madan, and Partha Chatterjee, have questioned either secularism itself or the particular secularist policies of past governments. Some Indian intellectuals defend secularism, but criticize its application, arguing, for example, that Nehru and his followers adopted a top-down policy, doing little to negotiate with religious people before handling problems with insensitivity. Others criticize the government’s conformity to public opinion. As a result of these ongoing controversies, contemporary India has produced perhaps the world’s largest contemporary body of publications debating the merits of secularism.33
The conflict between secularism and religious nationalism has been a recurrent theme of recent South Asian history not only in India but also in Sri Lanka. In reaction to Hindu and Muslim versions of religious nationalism, Sikh and Buddhist nationalist movements have emerged in South Asia. In India, Sikhs and Muslims have clashed with Hindus; in Sri Lanka, Buddhists are battling Hindus. All of these religious nationalist movements have contributed to a weakening of secularism in the region.34
The Indian situation differs from that of the Muslim world in that it involves reactions against a longstanding secular government with democratic elections. At the same time, Western political hegemony is less of an issue in India. India and the Muslim world are similar in that secularism developed there much more rapidly than in the West–imposed top-down on populations that have not yet embraced a secular outlook.
Another area where secularism has been on the defensive, and religio-politics on the rise, is a very different country, neither third world nor newly established: the United States. The United States has little in common with the countries surveyed so far, and very possibly most of the reasons for the attacks on secularism in the United States are different from those elsewhere, even though its antisecular forces became strong almost simultaneously. There do, however, seem to be some similarities.
Notably, the rise of the New Religious Politics since 1970 is in part a reaction to strong and sometimes resented secular measures, accompanied by a rise in government centralization and increasing encroachment in many spheres of life. In the United States there have been a number of secularizing governmental measures, but antisecular opposition has focused in particular on two Supreme Court decisions: the outlawing of school prayer in 1962 and the legalization of abortion in 1973. The fundamentalists’ earlier focus on creationism versus evolution, a matter for local governments and school boards, has expanded to encompass opposition to schools’ teaching about homosexuality – and, indeed, about sex at all.35
Throughout the world, the strengthening of antisecular political parties and movements has been accompanied by some weakening of secular parties and movements, a weakening due not only to political failures but also to popular disillusionment with the old secular ideologies and panaceas. The end of Communism unleashed in some populations a renewal of religious traditions not wholly lost in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Among worldwide behavioral trends are the rise of freer sexual habits, resulting in more babies born out of wedlock and a rise in sexually transmitted diseases and crime rates, and a felt decline in community action and spirit, partly due to atomizing forces like television. Some people find in revived religious ties and morality a partial or complete solution for such problems.
In the past, when religion and government were usually intertwined, it was easy for dissidents to see the weakening of religious powers and the creation of secular states as major steps to solving social problems. Similarly, today, when secularism and government are usually intertwined, it is easy for dissidents to react against secular states and call for an obvious alternative–renewed political power for religion. The same ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ logic applies to ideology. In the past, when secular ideologies like nationalism, socialism, and free market capitalism had not been widely tried, they could more easily be presented as keys to creating a better world. In recent decades this situation has been reversed, and religious groups no longer tied to government have been able to advance religious solutions to intractable secular problems.
A related dynamic is at work in some intellectual circles, in which disillusion with various older secular ideals has opened the door for some to reinstate religion or create new religious ideologies. This goes along with the upswing in identity politics in recent decades, where religion, along with ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference, has become a basis of political solidarity, in part replacing older identities based on class or patriotism, or on universalist worldviews like socialism and liberalism.
In some ways, however, the rise in religiosity and decline in secularism are perhaps less pervasive than they seem. For one thing, all sorts of traditions eschewed by the Westernized educated classes have come to be seen, often erroneously, as belonging to religious tradition. In the Islamic world as in the United States, the religious Right has embraced a romantic view of traditional social relations, projecting a picture of harmony that never, or rarely, existed.36 At the same time, when religious parties have come to power, as in Iran, they have tended to retain, or eventually to reinstate, important components of modern secularism. Not only, for example, did Iran’s Islamic Republic adopt a largely secular constitution using Western models, but its economy, foreign policy, and educational system are also run on mainly secular lines, despite a religious overlay that, as with the U.S. religious Right, concerns mainly questions of gender and sexuality.
The backlash to secularism is likely to produce its own backlash, which is happening already in Iran, particularly among young people and women, who have been able to force some changes in policy. In the United States too, for all the superior grassroots political organization of the religious Right, fundamentalism has so far been unable to win majority support, either in elections or in polling on major moral and social issues, even though it has importantly influenced Republican policies.
Taking the world as a whole, we see that secularism today is not in overwhelming retreat, although antisecular ideologies now have more strength than they did some decades ago. Still, the struggle between secular and religious worldviews is far from over.
In conclusion, I think it is worth stressing two major points that emerge from this brief comparative historical survey of secularism around the world:
First, secularization around the world has been a far longer, more difficult, and more partial process than is usually assumed. It requires a profound change in human outlook: in both the West and the East, the difficulties of establishing stable secular regimes have often been underestimated.
Second, the Western path to secularism, and indeed the Western definitions of secularism, may not be fully applicable in all parts of the world, because of religious differences and the complex impact of Western colonialism. It is therefore predictable that non-Western states that try to establish secularism quickly by government fiat, without marshaling popular support, will experience serious difficulties–and run the risk of provoking a religious backlash. Modern religious rule has not, however, solved the problems that brought it to power. It has increased inequalities between genders and among religious communities and has brought about its own backlash and countermobilizations.
ENDNOTES
6 Dobbelaere, “Secularization,”9.
10 Thomas Renna, Church and State in Medieval Europe 1050–1314 (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/ Hunt, 1974).
12 See, e.g., Chadwick, The Secularization, 104– 105.
14 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 265–266.
17 Freeze, “Eastern Orthodoxy.”
18 Émile Faguet, Le Libéralisme (Paris: Société Française d’Imprimerie, 1903), 121.
19 See Elizabeth Thompson, “Neither Conspiracy nor Hypocrisy: The Jesuits and the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon,” http://www.columbia.edu/sec/dle/ciao/conf/mei01/the01.html.
24 See Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, ed. John Ruedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
25 Kepel, Jihad; Olivier Roy is also writing a book on these questions.
29 See Stanley A. Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
36 See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (New York: Basic Books, 1992).