[wanita-muslimah] Is secularism that sacrosanct?

 

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\02\22\story_22-2-2010_pg3_5

Monday, February 22, 2010

COMMENT: Is secularism that sacrosanct? -Dr SM Rahman

Science has, unfortunately, given a new form of fatalism. When everything is determined, it robs an individual of the quintessential value of 'choice', which is not possible without some degree of 'free will'

This article is in response to the write-up by Babar Ayaz titled 'Amendments for a secular constitution' (Daily Times, February 2, 2010). He is an ardent advocate of a secular constitution and doing away with the Objectives Resolution. Spiritual democracy together with spiritual secularism is the antidote to the malady we encounter - the crisis of morality. There is a downside to secularism if morality is treated like a fly in the political ointment to be taken out.

Marlowe's Faustus was overly obsessed and infatuated with the seductiveness of Helen - the paragon of Roman beauty - that made him so lustful that he could not resist expressing his hedonistic urge: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss." This typifies the 'Renaissance Man', who thinks of nothing but seeking pleasures of this life as an end in itself. Carried to the extreme, it has horrendous consequences for unbridled gratification, which turned the Western sensibility towards producing libertine characters for whom any sanction against libidinal expression was against the freedom of the individual. Earthly life, full of material and bodily pleasures, is all that matters. The mediaeval Christian thought, however, renounced 'life here' and laid all emphasis on the 'life hereafter'. Sir James Frazer gave a very graphic description of mediaeval Christianity: "The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, become in popular opinions the biggest ideal of humanity...The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the city of God coming, in the clouds of heaven...A general disintegration of the body politic sets in...In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil...This obsession lasted for a thousand years." The innumerable religious wars between Christian sects had made human life miserable. A reaction against Christendom had to set in and the European sensibility reinforced by the forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation against the Dark Ages of Christianity, which Dr Johnson characterised as the Queen of Night, as the laity were expected to send their minds on complete holiday and enjoy the mirth and happiness of ignorance (JW Syed, Islam and Democracy, 1985, Booklet).

The pendulum had drifted towards the other extreme end of the continuum to lay all emphasis on the present life and total disregard for the ecclesiastical. The duality was the concomitant, which is expressed in the words of Christ: "My Kingdom is not of this world and Render Unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." God is banished from this world to dwell and remain supreme only in the world hereafter (God forbid). In his brilliant chapter 'Man without Values' in the book The Tower and the Abyss, Erich Kahler has pointed out the folly of secularisation, which, in essence has "pushed the divine farther and farther behind ever growing scientific technological and economic material, behind the manifold orders of intermediary causations and evolutionary processes...We no longer live our days in nearness to the divine; we do not sense its permanent presence in every form of nature as the ancients did...The divine has been banished into a far removed sphere of vagueness and silence. Such silence and absence of God have been bitterly felt by various modern minds, such as Rilke and Simone Weil, who were only too disposed to listen and respond to the voice of the divine."

Science has, unfortunately, given a new form of fatalism. When everything is determined, it robs an individual of the quintessential value of 'choice', which is not possible without some degree of 'free will'. Human beings do not enjoy absolute 'free will' as that is only in the domain of the divine, but its limited quantum makes one accountable for one's behaviour. Unlike animals, humans discriminate between what is right and what is wrong. It is here that the moral force - the conscience - enables one to make the right judgment in his thinking - as per the Cartesian axiom Cogito ergo volo. Secularism, to the extent that it takes the temporal world and provides the guidance for promoting the spirit of tolerance for diversity, accommodates all faiths and lends them dignity. Professor Hamilton Gibb describes Islamic society as a "fully rounded society on a religious basis which comprehends every aspect of human life". Iqbal, in his profound book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, explains why duality between the 'sacred' and the 'profane', the spiritual and the temporal, the 'ecclesiastical' and the 'secular', the Church and the state, exists in Christianity and not in Islam: "In Europe Christianity was understood to be a purely monastic order which gradually developed into a vast church organisation. The protest of Luther was directed against this church organisation...If you begin with the conception of religion as complete other-worldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe is perfectly natural...Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into the irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter. In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State are organic to each other."

Secularism was wrongly attributed to Quaid-e-Azam by Justice Munir on the basis of his famous speech of August 11, 1947. I have not come across any statement by Quaid-e-Azam in which he mentioned the word 'secularism' to be the guiding principle of Pakistan. Of course the temporal aspect of secularism is inherent in Islam. R Smith in his book, Mohammedanism in Africa, has mentioned: "Islam has given to its Negro converts a status, dignity and self-reliance which are all too rarely found in the pagan or Christian fellow country-men." R C Reddy remarks: "The age long problem of racial equality has not been solved by any system of religion or ethics except Mohammedanism. In every other polity or religion, reason, ethics and spiritual ideas have been broken on the rock of race and colour."

Just one letter that Quaid-e-Azam wrote to Mr Gandhi on January 21, 1940 will clear the notion of how 'secular' was he in the sense the West conceives it: "Today you deny that religion can be a main factor in determining a nation, but you yourself, when asked that what your motive in life was, whether it was religious, or racial and political, said - purely religious. The gamut of man's activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social, economic, political and purely religious work into watertight compartment. I do not know any religion apart from human activity. It provides a moral basis to all other activities which they would otherwise lack, reducing life to a maze of sound and fury signifying nothing."

Rousseau, the great apostle of democracy has made a startling statement. "No state has ever been founded without a religious basis." About Islam he said: "Mohammed [PBUH] held very sane views and linked the political system well together and as long as the form of his government continued under the caliphs, who succeeded him, that government was indeed one and so far good."

To conclude, I would like to stress what Erich Kahler said: "When the individual is supposed to submit unconditionally to the will of the secular powers as instruments or substitutes of the supreme power, then the will of God is stripped of its actual influence on earth." Pakistan's destiny is towards harmonising the 'secular' and the 'spiritual', and discarding the theocratic notion of Islam.

The writer is secretary general FRIENDS and can be reached at friendsfoundation@live.co.uk

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