Open issues

Islamists are not primarily militant nor pre-modern.


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They are modernist in the structure of their thought, in their organisation — indeed Jamaat-e-Islami, an influential Islamist party in south Asia, was organised on the Leninist model of a cadre-based vanguard party — and in the categories and political structures that they engage with. Islamism arose in early 20th century at a time when the state was the dominant paradigm for organising political energies.

Political movements of the time from communist to fascist to liberal nationalist, and including the Islamists, were focused on taking over the state to transform society.

Has sustainability become a secular religion? – FreedomLab

The Islamists are vehement in their public insistence on dislodging the idea of secularism as universal, claiming it to be a parochial, European experience — with some justification. Yet, the process of raising these and other questions about the definitions of public and private in the political arena, the fierce competition amongst Islamists to provide a definitive answer and the very structure of Islamist thought that emphasises an individual relationship with religious texts has led to a deep, conscious and critical questioning of the role of religion — a secularisation — in predominantly Muslim polities.

Secularisation is not just the increase or decrease in visible markers of religiosity or in church attendance, but also a fundamental shift in religious belief towards rationalisation and objectification. The Protestant reformers were not arguing for less religion, they were asking for more — for a continuously religious life against the Catholic cycles of sin and repentance. Yet, as Max Weber's influential work suggests, they ended up rationalising and secularising. To say all this is not to suggest that Pakistani Islamists will have exactly the same impact as the German Protestants.

There can be little doubt that they will produce a very different subject and citizen because of the disparity in context. But we can at least acknowledge that we need to understand the relationship between secularism and secularisation more clearly before we can build a universal definition of secularism.


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This undeniable event in our history put the end to a monarchy with divine rights. France established itself as a benchmark country for human rights and the concept of secularism progressively became one of its protective frameworks.

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Secularism crossed a threshold with the Concordat of , which placed the Church under the guardianship of state power, particularly creating civil marriage and the civil state. The year was crucial because it marked the beginning of the separation of the School and the State. The Jules Ferry laws established free mandatory public education and secular instruction. Since this time, the question of secularism has remained closely tied to the sphere of schooling. This law definitively sealed the separation between Church and State.


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  • It was also the beginning of so-called French secularism, which proclaimed the freedom of conscience and guaranteed the freedom to practice religion. Excerpts from the guidance memo created by the Secularism Monitoring Centre in French:. For example, what form of personal union between adults should states recognise?

    Connecting the dots

    Historically, in the UK, marriage was lifelong, monogamous union between one man and one woman. A decade or so ago, that was supplemented by civil partnerships so that state could recognise the union between two people of the same sex but mark it out a different from marriage. Then, a few years later, it introduced the right of same sex couples to enter into a marriage union. Each of these positions contains a view of what form s of union it is proper for a state to recognise, views that were often aired in more intelligent if less noticed debates around the time of the Marriage Same Sex Couples Act in There was and is no neutral position here.

    The debate can be extended. Why deny the rights of the so—called polyamorous who deny that relational exclusivity is necessary for recognising a union?

    The Conversation

    Why, indeed, not extend the right to polygamous arrangements, such as are permitted in certain interpretations of Islamic law, whereby a man may marry up to four wives? Speaking personally, I can think of various reasons to deny these extensions of recognition, but my views inevitably draw on my anthropological, and beneath it, theological and metaphysical commitments.

    Similarly, the state cannot decide on these matters from a position of metaphysical neutrality can. Impartiality is not an option. The secular state, like the humans that inhabit it, is condemned to operate in a contentious ethical landscape, however much it pretends to have transcended it. Lots of people are afraid of the secular state. Certain crimes of history, and certain pettinesses of the present, show they have reason to be so.

    The difference between secularism and secularisation

    Secularism can be a subterfuge, its cause not aided by being most often found on the same lips that dismiss religious commitment as inherently stupid or dangerous. But this, to return to an earlier point, is to less the bad dictate the good. Adhering to soft secularism, with all the caveats above noted, can be a step in the right direction but only a step. The end of the journey is not in sight, and there are good reasons to believe, with our growing pluralism, deep diversity and the hint of incommensurability hovering in the background, it never will be.

    But that would mark not the end of a debate, but the start of a new one.

    Religion and the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda

    Image by aga7ta available under licence from shutterstock. Nick is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, most recently The Political Samaritan: The Origin of the Species Bloomsbury,