The killing of Islamic secularism

By Brian Whitaker. In the Arab countries, as I pointed out in an article for Cif yesterday, linkage between state and religion is accepted almost everywhere. There are differences of opinion about the degree of linkage, but the principle itself is rarely questioned.Tne reason, Herman De Ley suggests, is that history has led Muslims to associate secularism not with liberation, as Europeans usually do, but with foreign domination: The dismissal nowadays of secularism, at least on the level of dominant Muslim discourse, has its historical roots in western colonialism and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries: Muslims at that time were confronted with a political secularisation that was imposed by western powers. In the European countries themselves secularisation … had clear emancipatory effects (liberating society and man's mind from the ideological and institutional shackles of the Church). In the colonies or protectorates, on the contrary, secularisation was enforced as an ideological weapon – against Islam, that is – in order to suppress national or political aspirations of Muslim communities.