In fits and starts I have been devoting this blog to the idea that secularism needs to be re-built from the ground up.
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
In fits and starts I have been devoting this blog to the idea that secularism needs to be re-built from the ground up.
One thing that would help bring about this “New Secularism,” as I call it, would be some modicum of clarity as to what the term “secular” actually means.
For at present the word’s semantic range is cripplingly wide and incoherent. Secularism, nowadays, can mean just about any old thing.
Case in point: On Thursday the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress:
The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam
Needless, to say a “clarification” was soon issued by the DNI. In all honesty, this was one doozy of a gaffe. No less of a gaffe has been committed by countless commentators who insist on referring to the repressive Mubarak regime as “secular.”
As a person who has spent the last decade studying secularism, let me assure you that the Brotherhood is the diametric opposite of anything anyone in the field might ever, under any circumstances imaginable, consider “secular.”
That’s not—note this—because the Brotherhood is religious. On the contrary, the concept of New Secularism as I am developing it is centered on the idea that most religious moderates are in fact leading very secular lives.
With their commitment to toleration, public reason, democratic processes, and so forth, religious citizens in the West are often acting more “secular” than the many self-appointed anti-theist spokespersons for secularism who have popped up and snarked off in the past few years.
The un-secularness of the Brotherhood is quite handily summarized in an excellent piece in the National Review Online by Andrew McCarthy.
I have little to add, though I might call attention to the remarks made in the Washington Post by the head of the Muslim Brotherhood Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh.
The piece, “Democracy Supporters Should Not Fear the Muslim Brotherhood,” sounds nice—Islamist parties often sound nice when pitching to Western audiences. But one need not possess virtuosic close-reading skills to detect some troubling doublespeak.
Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh writes: “It is our position that any future government we may be a part of will respect all treaty obligations made in accordance with the interests of the Egyptian people.”
Could it possibly be that Egypt’s longstanding peace treaty with Israel is one of the treaties he is referencing? If so, ought we not be a tad concerned with the line about “the interests of the Egyptian people”?
Does the Muslim Brotherhood really think that the treaty—which has preserved a cold, but efficient, peace for more than three decades—serves the interests of the Egyptian people?
On the issue of Sharia he opines:
While this is not on anyone’s immediate agenda, it is instructive to note that the concept of governance based on sharia is not a theocracy for Sunnis since we have no centralized clergy in Islam. For us, Islam is a way of life adhered to by one-fifth of the world’s population. Sharia is a means whereby justice is implemented, life is nurtured, the common welfare is provided for, and liberty and property are safeguarded. In any event, any transition to a sharia-based system will have to garner a consensus in Egyptian society
I wonder if Secular Egyptian Muslims—and by this I mean those committed to values adumbrated above—will concur that the Brotherhood’s rendition of Sharia law will bring justice for religious moderates, religious minorities, women, gays, and people who just out and out share a different interpretation of what Sharia entails.
In any case, unless we start quality controlling the use of the term “secular”, we are not long for a scenario in which even the Muslim Brotherhood starts extolling the underappreciated virtues of secularism in their dispatches to puzzled Western audiences.
