Dogma Disrupted
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The Truth About Separating Church and State
Secularism portrays itself as a neutral worldview that allowed for open exchange of ideas and way of life outside the laws of the Church. In reality, it has reconfigured the way we think about and experience the world. Imam Tom Facchine invites Dr. Zara Khan back on the show to analyze the history of secularism and where it has left us today.
0:00 - Introduction
1:28 - Roots of secularism in European Christian history
17:30 - Rise of secularism through the Enlightenment
23:44 - How does secularism define religion?
39:43 - Does secularism reduce violence?
48:00 - Does secularism limit political expression?
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. It's been a lot bloodier since they got rid of religion as the organizing principle of life and society. Post-modernity is the child of modernity. It's not really a rebellion against modernity any more than my child rebels against me, right? And ends up being exactly like you once they're in their 30s, right? Salaamualaikum and welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we're talking about secularism. Now, for the proponents of secularism, secularism is just a neutral way of organizing society in which everybody can kind of get along and not come to blows when it comes to having different ways of thinking about things and different beliefs. But today we're going to question that narrative and try to analyze both the history of secularism and where it has left us today. And to do that, we've invited back to the program our esteemed guest, Dr. Zahra Khan. Dr. Zahra Khan is a specialist in secularism and has done significant work in the field. And we're very happy to have you back. Welcome. Salaamualaikum. Salaamualaikum. Salaamualaikum. Salaamualaikum. Salaamualaikum. So the way I've sort of conceived about thinking about secularism and getting into it is talking about sort of secular myths, right? There's a mythology to secularism and it's largely born from the European experience, right? Europe was experiencing horrible religious violence, okay? And in came secularism. It sort of saved the day. It curtailed the powers of the church. It limited it to sort of the private life. And that's what sort of enabled everybody to get along and live in sort of like a neutral society and have a political sort of life that was not dominated by bloodshed and acrimony. So the first sort of thing I want to look at is, is it true that secularism was simply a movement outside of the church
and outside of sort of religious forces that was imposed upon the church? Or is it more complicated than that? Yeah. Bismillah. So we can look at secularism and its political history. And that is very revealing and telling and helps us to understand a lot what we mean today. Kind of like a how did we get to where we are today, where secularism is really an all-encompassing view of the world that tells us about what the human being is. It tells us about what history is, what nature is. It has a specific posture towards God, even though it claims otherwise. And so I guess we'll get to that part after, but it's good to begin with the political history. Secularism as a movement of a gigantic idea is embedded within a bigger historical movement that involves, you know, when we hear words like humanism and we hear liberalism, modernization, naturalism, rationalism, all of these movements of ideas, right? What nowadays we'll call it an ism to make it sound like a very small ideology. But in this case, this was really Western civilization, which had a very intimate relationship with Christianity at the political level, at social level, at every level, right? It was Christendom before it became Western Europe, right? Right. Yeah, that's a, that's an extremely important point. People didn't even have a word to talk about society, which is a sort of a secular concept. They used to think in terms of a body of souls, right? Which was for them Christendom. That's an extremely significant point. Yeah, so the nature of society completely goes through a transformation as well. So what we're talking about is a period in European history that, and you know, there's, it's always tricky to have very neat periodizations where, well, in this period, these were the ideas in the
following period. Oftentimes, these things take a very long time to develop and mature. So we're talking about changes within the church. You have Martin Luther's reformation of the church at the turn of the millennia, and all of the fallout from the Protestant Reformation. And what this does is it takes the idea of salvation within the Christian church, and it wrestles it away from the structure of the church, the ecumenical authority, you know, kind of the hierarchy of offices within the church, which all connect to God, by the way, it goes from God to Isa alayhi salam, to the Pope, in his function down to the bishops and to the, you know, the different officers in your local church. And it wrestles the idea of salvation, the soul's salvation, away from the rites and rituals of the church, specifically the sacrament, right, eating the biscuit and drinking the wine, and this is ingesting the blood and the flesh of Isa alayhi salam in order to walk the path of Christian salvation. And after the Reformation, really, it's the grace of God alone that can save you. And while this was kind of a movement against corruption in the church and money, you know, money going into the church that was perhaps excessive in certain areas. Nonetheless, this was a statement about the human consciousness, and the role of the human being in relation to God. And you have things that are set into motion as early as the 1100s, that by the time you get to Renaissance humanism, two or three centuries later, which is this movement in Europe, a celebration of the arts and the letters of the human being, you have a situation where now God is completely an extra unnecessary accessory, astaghfirullah, to the human quest and to human life. And it's been a steady development, right,
since the Reformation of abusing the human being's sovereignty. Now, if I could just just tease out and emphasize, because I think for people, especially Muslims, who have such a different ecclesiastical history than Christians, like it's like, I just have to repeat what you said, just so people register it, that the Catholic Church up until the Reformation was basically claimed a monopoly on people's salvation, right? Like you're saying that, like the only way to attain salvation in the afterlife, you had to go to Catholic Mass, you had to get the sacrament from the church. If you don't, then there's no chance for you. Right? That's basically what you're saying. And so the process of sort of one of the many things that was going on, and you're saying it's very complicated, there's a lot of moving pieces. But one of the many things that was at play and at stake in the Protestant Reformation was prying this sort of self allocated authority out of the hands of the Catholic Church establishment, and saying that actually people can attain salvation without going to you and your church and participating in your sacrament, things that have to do with conscience and things that have to do with other things, right. So that's a really, really significant point. And we see, I think, where you're going is that there are forces that secularism isn't just an imposition from these atheist rationalists, right, that are outside of religiosity. It's, it was also had currents that were inside the church that were pushing for it as well. Yes, thank you for, for restating that more succinctly. And this is, it's really it drops into the realm of the individual's conscience. So this idea, by the time we get to the 20th century, and there's still, I still do want to go over the Enlightenment and kind of work through this political history in a little more detail. But by the time you get to the 20th century, where you
study religion in the academia, you know, in the academy, as religious studies, now you have a completely clear and concrete picture of some of those ideas that have been set into motion centuries ago, which is that religion is a purely personal quest, and the individual subjective consciousness is the imperial figure in that equation. And in, you know, each person has their own ad hoc canon that they subscribe to. And really, that's not what religion, you know, the early Christian community, certainly not Islamic revelation, don't follow that kind of a logic or a map. So by the time you get to Renaissance humanism, you have a situation where, take, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli, right? He's a, he's a Renaissance man par excellence. And one of the things he does is in trying to circumvent his Christian worldview of the, you know, the Christian worldview all around him, you have coronations, where the Pope has to bless the sovereign of the land. You have symbolism of Christianity embedded throughout society. So you do have to go to Catholic mass, but you also have to be good to your neighbor, you can't steal, you have to observe the rights to your parents, right? So all of that Christian ethos is very much embedded in society, and he wants to circumvent that. And so he goes back to an earlier time in, it wasn't Italy back then, but in the Italian history, to the Roman period. And he digs up the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome, and he props up a new philosophy of life, of politics, of, you know, society. And he's bringing forward these irrational figures from, from the mythology, like Fortuna, who's supposed to be in charge of half of our destiny, right? And then he tells us what to do with her and how to succeed in life. And that's just one example, Renaissance humanism. You can think of the great painting of
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right? Michelangelo's tribute kind of to the worldview and the changing transformations during the Renaissance, where you have a, you know, a depiction of God, right? Obviously, we don't agree with that. And a depiction of Adam, and Adam is a young man at the prime of his strength. And the figure depicted as God is an old man, who is passing the baton on to Adam. And as such, it's really like God telling the human being, you know, I did what I did, and now it's your turn, right? So you're saying you're putting out that there are, there's a philosophy behind these aesthetic representations, right? It's not just art, someone goes to the Sistine Chapel, they see these images, it's not just, oh, that's pretty, they actually carry ideas, they carry a worldview, and they're symbolic. And part of what it was symbolizing at that time for the Renaissance humanists was sort of, I think, a very optimistic view of human potential. And, you know, let's say, less dependence on a religious apparatus, you know, basically sort of orienting inward towards the human soul or the human nature, whatever it is, that we can find what we need there, as opposed to in the church. That's very interesting. Yes, absolutely. The philosophy of life is what's changing at this point. So with this explosion of the arts and the letters of human beings, and the human potential, you know, in music and philosophy, you really have less importance put on religion, and more importance put on the unbounded potential of the human being. And this is the time of the Titanic individual, you know, coming from Titus, and the Greek and the Roman gods at this point, come back, they make a comeback, after Christianity
had kind of brought monotheism to the Western world. And from there, you have also a naturalism that gets put into place. So you're correct to say that it was a turning inward. But it was also an unbridled domination of nature turning outward, which by the time we get to the Enlightenment, that really becomes the key feature or the characteristic, the paradigmatic characteristic of the Enlightenment is the idea that the human being not only can, but ought to dominate the natural world, which has been separated from a spiritual meaning. So Sayyid Muhammad Naqib al-Atas tells us that secularism has these three fundamental features to it. The first one is the desacralization of politics. So politics no longer has to have a sacral legitimation. As I mentioned, in the Christian world, the Pope used to coronate and bless the political rulers, right. And there was an idea really that the king or the queen, yeah, was operating under an amanah from God. We could almost liken that to maybe like the khutbah, right, the Jumu'ah khutbah, where there's maybe dua for the ruler or something like that, just trying to shoot off the hip for an analog that we might have in the Muslim world. Right. And the mandate of heaven that we find in the Far East, right, where the emperor rules by the idea that, you know, heaven is pleased with this choice. And at the same time, there's an accountability and responsibility. And by the time, you know, so desacralization of politics means that number one, you no longer need that legitimation for political rule. And number two, we can really, there's a very rich work by a historian, Ernst Kantarowicz, which is called the King's Two Bodies. And what he does is he looks at Bible covers, the artwork, the relief, you know, this was a very famous, this was a very important feature of the proliferation of Christian holy
books throughout Christendom and the two empires. And he's looking at how they've evolved, right, the iconography on these and these artworks and within the pages. And he shows us through this historical kind of study, that in Christianity, you had God used to be what we call the Godhead, in like anthropological studies, was at the top of the hierarchy of religious belief. And as far as creation is concerned, and then you have a moment where Prophet Isa becomes the vicar of God, which is like the khalif of God or the representative of God. And that by the time, you know, 1100s to the 1300s becomes that the Pope is the vicar of Prophet Isa. So God begins to recede within these religious kind of depictions. That turns into an age of the legalists after the Tudors in England, where the legalists become the vicar of the Pope, right? And then, you know, the King just becomes in the service of justice, no longer in the service of Isa alayhi salam, or the Pope, or the ecumenical structure of the church. And this is a specific historical reality that Western, the Western world, Christendom, what would later become Europe, underwent. So even though it produces this universal metanarrative called secularization, everyone must secularize, still, it's bound within a very specific historical moment, and it doesn't apply to the rest of the world in that sense. Something just occurred to me, and this is completely off script, but I wonder what your thought is about it, because the longer I live, the more I keep digging up negative consequences of false revelation, right? We don't believe that the Bible is a preserved religious text, right? And we believe that the doctrine of the Trinity, right, is a forgery, okay, and among
other things. And what occurred to me when you were just mentioning this sort of history and giving us this bird's eye view is that we have perhaps a consequence of the doctrine of incarnation playing out in front of our very eyes, right? The transition, if one is to ask, how did we get from, and obviously, you know, both of you and I read Halakha, and you're making one of Halakha's points, which is that the difference between the pre-modern and the modern is maybe the sovereignty has flipped, right? So the sovereignty being the religious or the divine, divine sovereignty at the top, and even if you have kings and even tyrants, et cetera, they still are below that in sovereignty. And in the modern era, it's flipped so that what becomes the state or at least anything within the material world is the real sovereign, but we had to get from one to the other. And one thing that, you know, just popped into my head when you were describing that journey is that almost one of the vehicles for getting from one to the other, the idea of incarnation, that the divine can be embodied, right? Walk on earth. We get from the sovereignty of, as you said, the Godhead or the sovereignty of the divine to a man-like representation, you know, according to obviously the Christians, which we reject, you know, nature of man and nature of divine. And then the Pope, something below that, which is, again, one degree more removed from that, and then further and further and further, perhaps paving the way for the eventual enlightenment turn towards everything except up, right? If the enlightenment is not just turning inwards, but also turning outwards, maybe it's turning everywhere but up. Do you think that that has any merit that the, we could maybe look at incarnation as playing a role in this? That's fascinating. And it definitely is a horizontal spreading out, you know, where
you said anywhere but up. So it was kind of the change from a vertical worldview to one that was just terrestrial. Unfortunately, I don't know much at all about the Christian church and the history and the doctrines and the Akita of the early Christians and how they schismed and split. But I do think it's worth exploring because for sure, by the time you get to the 1700s and you've gone through political, philosophical permutations, where the Renaissance has played its course, and has opened up new doors, has opened up new spaces where one's religiosity and reverence for God used to reside, what fills those spaces now, I would agree with you that the human being wants to experience transcendence. And if we are fully natural beings, and there's no definitive answer about what happens after we die, then the human being comes up with interesting and creative answers to well, then how is it that we transcend? Because we know there's something internal inside of us, no matter how much rubble we've heaped on top of our fitra, right? Perhaps there's still an indication that our soul will transcend. So if we follow an Enlightenment naturalism, and by that I mean, that the Enlightenment fathers really what they're, they were obsessed with rationalization, and taking away, this was really an epistemological shift, where what is the true source of knowledge, right? It can't be revelation. It can't be religion, right? It can't be God. It can't be the true report of, you know, a prophet of God. No, it's our observation, and it's our rationation, our akal, right? But akal in a way that's divorced from any intuitive spiritual matter. That's not akal the way we understand it, right? It doesn't reside in the club of it. This is something that is purely the reordering, and the higher order
thinking based on sensory knowledge. And so the Enlightenment really put the nail in the coffin of religious language and thinking for society, and it said, no, the only thing you can know to be true for a fact is that which can be sensorily observed, and then rationally explained, and observation and experimentation, you know, falsifying, and all of this. So that method becomes the new exclusive way of knowing, you know, how do you know what's true? This is how you know what's true. And the Enlightenment Fathers kind of put into motion this idea of evolution, right? And I don't only mean it in a genetic sense. The idea of evolution took over every sphere of human sciences, because even in my area, which is political theory, you can see this idea that in the past we were very immature, we were childlike, and now we've matured and grown up. And it's really, it's change and dynamism and the unknown future, which is what directs our movement. And this is very different from our understanding. You know, Allah tells us in Surah Al-Baqarah that our religion was perfected and completed. So the limits of development are, there are limits to what develops and what doesn't develop. Even our view of history, really, we know that civilizations before us rose and fell and were destroyed. We know that some of them endured. We know that time moves differently when Allah tells it to, like the people of the cave. And we know that we are moving. Towards the end of time. And we know that everything that leaves Allah eventually returns back to Allah. And some have called this expansions and contractions, right? We're all headed back to God. And that's what we say when someone passes away, right? That everything goes back to God. This is very different. The Enlightenment said we are on a trajectory of infinite progress.
There's no end and there's no limit, right? Now that changes how society conceives what life should be, what the human being is. And it gets embedded into cultural articulations and it really affects social relations as well. So going back to Al-Atas, if I may, for a moment, and feel free to. Yeah, sure. No, let's tie that. But the other two aspects, I said that he said, you know, secularism is the desacralization of politics. And he talks about that a little. But it's also the denuding of nature, right? The disenchantment of nature. And it's also the deconsecration of values. So those are big words, but what it means is that God and faith and religion no longer have anything to do with our values. That's the deconsecration of values. And what this really allows is the relative truth. This was kind of the prerequisite to a postmodern way of being in the world where every truth is relative. And therefore the meaning of truth has now changed, right? And can't be depended on. Where people will say secularism is not anti-religion. It's, and I understand what they're saying when they say that, but secularism says that religion and not religion are twins and enjoy equal value. And when you say that, you're saying something anti-religion. Yeah, sure. At the very least, that's a metaphysical position, right? And it can be critiqued. It's not a neutral space to say such a thing. And you started by saying that secularism purports to be neutral worldview, but it's actually quite programmatic. It actually is very prescriptive and changes the values that we put and the same with nature, right? This idea, if you look at a Francis Bacon and you look at how these, some of these enlightenment fathers, Ernst Haeckel, how they talked about nature.
We must torture nature until she gives up her secrets. There was no, there was no. Brute matter, right? Dumb, the things that the descriptive terms that they used is not just of separation, but of valuation and demeaning and insulting, honestly. And how does that relate to us where we believe that on the day of judgment, if we were not kind to our dog or our cat or our camel, that Allah is gonna give speech to that creature to speak against us on the day of judgment. So the spiritual meaning in all of creation for us is very incommensurable with a secularized worldview. Yeah, that's the perfect segue to the next myth, right? So if we're thinking about secular myths and the history of secularism, the first myth that we kind of dealt with was, okay, well, this is just the rational atheists imposing secularism from outside. No, it was more complicated than that. It was, yes, that partly, but it was also something that was a movement within the church for various reasons. The second and probably more significant secular myth is that secularism entails a mere separation of religion from society. But a lot of the work and reading that both of us have done and that everybody I think needs to know is that it's not that simple, is that secularisms maybe own public facing description of itself, right? Like padded resume, right? We know if people pad their resume and they say, oh, I'm fluent in seven languages, and then you can't really speak very much of any of them, right? Secularism's own padded resume of itself is to say that it came along and separated church from state and religion from society to enable sort of the neutral playing field for everybody to sort of participate from. But what really happened, and this is something that you just said, is that it changed our concepts of those things in the first place. Secularism changed our idea and definition
of what religion was. And it changed our idea of what ethics are, and it changed our idea of what politics are. So I'm hoping to get into, maybe we can take one at a time, like the secular, you're saying that it's not neutral, it's not just a non-religious space or outside of religion, that secularism actually has an idea of what religion is, or at least, or maybe in addition, what religion should be, okay? So what is the difference between the secular idea of what religion is and say, maybe what we feel that we should believe as Muslims? Yeah. So secularism tells us what the human being is. It tells us the proper place of religion in society. It has a very definitive take and posture towards miracles, right? Miracles are a very important part of an enchanted religious outlook in life. And enchanted, I don't mean this in the Disney sense. I don't mean it in a vulgar sense. I mean it, disenchanted universe versus every creature created by Allah has a spiritual meaning, right? So in that sense, enchanted. And we, what is this world? Where did it come from? Where is it going? All of these existential questions that are answered to us by our Islamic faith, by our religion. Secularism provides alternative answers to these. And as we mentioned earlier, being that it's prescriptive and programmatic, it pushes these, right? The outlook is an expansionist outlook like capitalism, right? Modernization and secularization were really the same thing. I started by saying that when we talk about liberalism and modernity, naturalism and humanism and secularism, yes, we can treat each of these
individually and specifically from certain disciplinary outlooks. But we're talking about the same ecosystem. There's an enormous movement. I said, Imam Thomas, you mentioned this to me the other day. I said, call this the project of modernity, right? It's a series of interlinked projects and secularization is one of those projects. So really what, in the 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, this is still with us, even though we've got some postmodern language to kind of ease the pain, is that when we look at other parts of the world outside of the West, what we see is that we're going backwards in time, right? We're going forward in space and backwards in time. You have, John Locke said this in his second treatise. He said, in the beginning, like in the beginning of time, the whole world was America, right? And he's saying this at a moment when the Europeans are looking at the Amerindians, right? The Mesoamericans, the indigenous people of the Americas. And they're saying, oh, well look at these pristine mythological religious and religion, and I'm not going too far off the track here. This has to do with how a secular outlook interprets what religion is, right? It's this idea of some ancient pristine myth and then its applications, which are depleted in different ways, but it's never connected to the concept of an absolute truth, right? From a secularist point of view. And so when he says that, you know, in the beginning, the whole world was America, what he's trying to say is this evolutionary concept, which comes to us from the enlightenment, which was the biggest support to secularization that there has been as far as historical periods go, right? The enlightenment was the impetus that brought this to championship, right? But this idea that human beings, you know, because we were childlike and immature, we needed to fear an unknown deity,
and we invented religion. And in the beginning it was multiple gods, but then human beings became more rational through industrialization, right? And this is Weber on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. And then we ended in monotheism. And for the West and for secular outlooks, you keep evolving past that until you get to a technocratic consciousness, and now you don't need religion altogether. So your question, what is religion good for? Religion is good for subjective creativity, this abstract spiritual nature of the human to be expressed however one sees fit. As I mentioned, Jonathan Z. Smith talks about this, the academic study of religion, that every person in their own subjectivity creates an ad hoc canon. Well, I agree with this, this, and this, but that's not for me, right? So this is the new definition of religion. And even the enlightenment had its responses, right? There was this romanticism movement. And what the romantics said was that because they couldn't bear the elimination of all irrational forms of knowledge, right? Almost dealt with like the extreme and immediate consequences of the desacralization of nature, right? And this is a period when forests were being clear cut and like the earth was being raped, right, and there were dissenters, right? So I find that period very interesting. Yeah, so do go on, yeah. Yeah, and so in their dissent against this violation of nature, they were also, they also kind of turned to totems and mythology. You know what Asad says that now, when we think of religion, we think of all this taboo and myth, and we think of this old world primitive. And again, even that primitive modern men dichotomy is also full of like imperial colonial racist baggage, right, and kind of barbage, right, at the academic level.
But we think of religion as having to do with the wild man in the bush, right? And if you're a modern person, and you're not fully secular, you've missed something, right? And that's kind of the indication. And so the romantics, what they did was they brought in their art and their poetry, they brought out the irrational. And even later, this is what the nihilists and Nietzsche do, right, except they take it in a different direction. They take it in a very Holocaust, a very dark and genocidal direction. Yeah. So an extremely important thing that I like to tease out that what you're saying here is that with the enlightenment, we've gotten certain binaries or certain dichotomies and different types of knowing and different types of living and experience are being put into different buckets, right? So we have truth, right? The bucket of truth, which is empiricism, it's rationality, it's objectiveness, right, or objectivity, or these sorts of things. And in the other bucket, the irrational bucket is being put belief, is being put religion, is being put taboo and myth and all these sorts of things. And so a super fascinating and historical phenomenon that keeps on repeating is that, what you're saying is that there are dissenters, okay, but the dissenters end up re, sort of reifying or assuming as true the categorization and the bifurcation of the people that they're dissenting against, right? So you have the romanticists, and for people who want some names, you know, you're also gonna put in there your transcendentalists, your Ralph Waldo Emerson's and your Thoreau's and your, you know, these sorts of people writing and thinking, protesting against what they see as the bad effects of the enlightenment rationality kind of wrought upon the world.
Yet, they're taking the enlightenment's assumption of these two kind of buckets or these two categories, and they're saying, well, instead of choosing this bucket, we're just gonna choose that bucket. Rather than questioning the buckets or the logic of the buckets in the first place, which is something maybe that we're saying is, first of all, maybe a pre-modern way of looking at it. Second of all, we could say, it's an Islamic way of looking at it. Why would belief be opposed to truth, right? They shouldn't be separated. They should be actually right there in together. Why, what definition of religion do we, have we come upon or are we unconsciously operating with when we assume that this is just my individual canon and we're not talking about reality anymore. We're just talking about things that I think are true, which is more of an English definition of belief rather than an Arabic definition of Iman. So, I mean, these are the types of shifts that we're talking about. Even to talk about our relationship with the divine and our attempting to comport ourselves to divine guidance as religion, many of the terms and language that we've introduced here was language that was introduced around this time in order to secularize it, right? In order to take it off of its pedestal as being something that was actually talking about truth and guidance and righteousness and piety, rather when we make religion as our universal category that somehow is trans-historical from the beginning of time, every single person that was involved in any sort of ritual or symbol, excuse me, or practice, right? This is all religion, okay? Well, we might not agree with that sort of categorization. We might say, well, some of it was Shirk, some of it was Iman, some of it was Ta'a, some of it was Kufr, some of it was, right? This is a non-modern way
and a more Islamic way of looking at it. Whereas once sort of enlightenment has done its work and it's almost, maybe we could say invents or changes the, gives us the category of religion, which is supposedly universal, trans-historical, separatable, right? Substitutable. It's also material. It's like everybody, all y'all, you all have the same things in common, its belief and its ritual and its symbol and its practices, et cetera, right? This is exactly- And it's all equally valid. Yes, exactly. We can all put it on a table and it's all the same thing, right? And that comes back to like Foucault's, like the order of things, right? How do you decide the categories by which you're grouping things? The idea to think through our relationship with the divine as religion is accepting a category that equates all of these things as equal in some sort of fundamental way. Whereas we're saying perhaps we should question that. Perhaps that we should say that, well, no, would I categorize idolatry along with belief in the one true God? A believer's statement would not want to categorize those things together, right? They would say that these things should be separated. And so that's just kind of the idea, again, for the viewer trying to tease things out. What we're talking about, we're talking about the shifts in concepts. How did secularization give us different language, different ideas, different concepts through which we think about things and experience the world. And even now we're trapped by some of these concepts and language in a way that kind of does secularism's work for it, or at least assumes certain secular assumptions about what religion and faith is all about. I'm not sure if you've had any comments on it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And when I mentioned that we're not compatible, our worldview is not compatible with a secularist worldview.
I'm talking exactly about disentangling our concepts and our understandings of very essential things like the human being, what am I here to do to make history? What are even the parts of me? Because in a very postmodern, 2023 American cultural sense, me is my nafs. And my nafs moves everything that I think and should, right, prescriptively. That's the normal human being nowadays. So this is what makes secularism a worldview. A worldview is a very, it's the broadest framework in which knowledge can be produced and in which the world can make sense. That's from Asim Genc, the Turkish theorist who wrote about Islamic sciences. And all these concepts have meaning within that worldview. So you're right to kind of spell it out that way for our viewers. Secularism as a worldview, as Muslims, we have to be very conscious to disentangle our concepts, right? Can we believe in an afterlife? As a Muslim, it's essential to believe that there's life after this transitory test of the dunya. And from a secular point of view, you have to take an agnostic position towards that. Maybe, maybe not, who knows? We'll find out. And these two views are in commensurate. Like you can't square the circle here. So of course, in the life of society, we let the Sharia be our guide and we are perfectly capable of speaking with people and working with people and finding good in society and kind of example, like making that more loud in society where we find good and trying to diminish what's bad. But in terms of our worldview, we have to take a protectionist and a critical stance and not just let things flood into our consciousness that tells, well, this is what the human being is. This is what our purpose is. This is what the earth is. This is what life and death are. And that'll help us to kind of answer
some of those questions. Now, when you were talking about what constitutes true knowledge, we know that, again, this is coming from Al-Athas, that the sources of our knowledge, for us, the revelation is an ultimate source of knowledge. It's a supreme form of knowledge. It is a criteria by which we filter all the other knowledge that we obtain through our senses, through our rational capacity, through our intellectual spirit, right? Our spiritual intuition and all the other types of knowing. That, for us, is a non-negotiable feature of being alive in this world, right? A secularist outlook can't accept that. So when we're dealing with, let's say, among our neighbors and family members and in academia and at work with people who have a secularist worldview, at some point, we have to agree to disagree and just kind of espouse our belief and say, well, no, the revelation is an ultimate source of knowledge for us. Yeah, mashallah, well said. Another area outside of religion where secularism has sort of changed the way that people think about it and changed the concepts through which they think about it is ethics. And we've talked already about the idea of progress and the idea of moral progress versus sort of what we might call more of an entropy model, right? That exists in Islam. And also in other pre-modern traditions, even Plato, right, when he says democracy degenerates into tyranny, right? Definitely not with the enlightenment when it comes to that. But one of the more sensitive sort of areas that this comes up with, it has to do with violence. There's a popular belief that secularism made the world less violent, that before secularism, it was just religious fanatics killing each other and slaughtering each other, which honestly, it was kind of Europe's experience. That's another story. And then after secularism, secularism reduced the violence.
So what would you respond? I'm interested in your thoughts or your response to that sort of claim. So secularism may have reduced religious battles that resulted in bloodshed on the battlefield, but secularism as an outlook for Western civilization rationalized violence and made it more efficient. And actually the 19th century has been the bloodiest century as far as human history is concerned, according to certain historians and anthropologists who make that claim. Maybe it's not true, but there has been no shortage of deadly violence and unjust violence, genocidal massacres in the post kind of religious moment of Western civilization. So it's been a lot bloodier since they got rid of religion as the organizing principle of life. I do also want to add about dissenters. You know, it's true that certain forms of dissent within the modernist project end up operating the same principles, but like in a new form, like post-modernity is the child of modernity. It's not really a rebellion against modernity any more than my child rebelled against me, right? And ends up being exactly like you once they're in their thirties, right? We'll see. But, but, you know, there has been dissent, for example, to take the 20th century, because like I said, I'm not really well versed on the history of Christendom and some of these figures, but you have a figure like Jacques-Marie Taine, who was an educator and a Catholic theologian, and his writings are very strongly critical of secularization within the church and within society.
You have a playwright, an essayist like C.S. Lewis, right? Chronicles of Narnia and all of his nonfiction work and some of his screw tape letters. And you see how he talks about God and the devil and the human quest. And this is a, this is a protest in a secular society where he's bringing a religious outlook. Now, of course, he's coming from a Christian perspective, but nonetheless, this is a type of dissent, which is not simply replicating the same old secularity. We have Tej Lindbaum, you know, so we have Guy Eaton, who eventually became a Muslim. So in the European context, you have some, you have a tradition of dissent, which was truly trying to kind of enjoy the good and, you know, speak against some of the evils of secularism. We don't believe in determinism, I think, is the key takeaway point. We don't believe, like some postmodernists and some poststructuralists believe that, you know, your identity or the time that you live in or whatever completely determines your outlook. You are able to dissent, but it takes a lot of work in order to disentangle these things that we're talking about. And one who is embarking upon that work should just be really cautious and aware that sometimes they might even think that they are dissenting when really they're actually fortifying something that they've missed. But it is possible. We do believe in the human ability to dissent in a meaningful and a fundamental and structural way against these sorts of things. And this is what makes the revelation, one of the things that makes revelation absolutely necessary to the human life, right? Because it is universal. It is truly universal as the eternal word of God. And we are, you know, the poststructuralists are not wrong to point out that there's so many dimensions of our thinking and perspective that are conditioned by our environment.
But like you said, to claim that that's the whole picture and that there's no substrate there, there's no volition and no will, this is kind of, you know, old wine in new bottles. We've seen this before in Western philosophy, this idea that we don't have a spiritual substrate there, the will, right? What is the will of the human or is it just all conditioning and rationality? But for us, we have the vicissitudes of time and space and we understand what history is because Allah tells us and even uses history as one of the types of signs in the Quran to teach us. So it's important to us in a very meaningful way, right? It's coming straight out of the word of God. And then we have within us the fitra, which as we like to cover it up as we grow and kind of get embedded in this dunya and forget. But the revelation allows us to try to dust off and take the rubble heaps off of the fitra so that we might be more constituted in a way that the vicissitudes of time and space don't carry us away to oblivion. So they're not 100% wrong, the postmodernists, but they're wrong to not recognize Allah and the human as a creation of Allah and the revelation as the tether that will keep us steadfast among these changing times. And it fascinates me that without that tether and anchor, human history continues to wildly swing back between opposites, right? So, you know, preceding the sort of postmodernist or poststructuralist sort of over determination, right? If you're a man, then you can only represent male interest. You can't possibly wield your power in a just way over women or your race or your class or whatever it is, it completely determines what you're going to say and the possibilities for your opinions, etc, etc.
Right is an extreme response to the enlightenment self, right, which was basically like, you know, you can do anything, right? There are no limits, you can just you're the master of, of, of all the realms, and you can just, you know, think your way out of it. So, without that tether, and that transcendence, divine communication, right, that is able to cut through all of sort of the human excesses, right on either side, we are truly left to just sort of reaction, reactionary, and antagonism. Yeah, that's a great point. So, okay, so we discussed violence. And I think that's a really important point, because that's a really, really strong secular myth that somehow, the world is less bloody after secularism or because of secularism, whereas in the words of Assad, secularism merely introduced a different pattern of restraint. Not sort of, on total less violent, we could say probably even, even more violent. And of course, that's not even paying any attention to the violence that secularism itself requires, right, which is that every single pre secular or non secular actor in space is the legitimate target of that correct violence, the civilizing violence, the secularizing violence, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq, or anybody within a particular country that sort of, you know, runs afoul of this way of looking at the world, you've kind of signed yourself up to be a legitimate target of violence. And that's something that can't be, it can't be left unsaid, either.
I think one, one final thing, before we run out of time here is to think about how secularization also, in addition to our concept of religion, in addition to sort of concepts of violence, and which violence is okay, and which isn't okay, to talk about the ways in which secularization shifted our sense of politics, and what politics are and how politics should happen. One of the strongest secular myths is that in order to participate in the secular, in secular society, you have to leave your religion at the door, you have to separate out your faith commitments. And if you don't, how often do we hear it today with all the sort of debates that are raging on about schools, then this is just the encroachment and intrusion of religion and religious belief on secular space or education or things like that. How has secularism changed our conception of how we should be doing politics? And are there shortcomings to that, to that framing? Yes, it really prescribes for us the idea that, again, going back to the dichotomy between rational and irrational, you see, because religion is understood to be based on constraint and restraint. And so the understanding is that, sorry, the misunderstanding is that religion is antithetical to freedom and respecting the freedom of others in the public space. Right? That's not true. But, you know, religious people are not going to be out there forcibly converting people in the public space. And Habermas and others have kind of looked at, okay, well, how can we have a more just way of having dialogue in democratic societies so that we respect religious people so that they don't have to check their religion at the door before they come to the table of debate?
But you are correct. Secularism expects the public space to be a neutral ground. So it's similar to what I mentioned last time about how human rights is conceived of as a neutral space above politics, even though it's quite political and has its own program that it pushes. The same can be said about secularism, that it's understood to be a neutral space. So because we've left all of our values out here, we can deliberate without violence towards each other, without imposing restraint on one another. And here, the democratic process can kind of flourish. It's a misunderstanding, right? It's not true. And a lot of people have written against John Rawls, who's the 20th century political philosopher who really codifies this in the theory of justice for the new century. People have written about this and against it because it's not possible to put on what he calls a veil of ignorance and go, you know, forget who you are. And this has to do with religious belief, but it also has to do with some of the things, Imam Tom, that you were mentioning earlier, like our race and our class and our gender, like our positionality. So when we come to deliberate in the public space, we come as embodied creatures, right? And that includes our faith. And this is not to meet at the level of identity politics. I don't think identity politics is the right meeting place to have this conversation, even if it sounds like there's some overlap in what I'm saying. But it's not a reasonable assumption that we can all just show up as blank slates.
And you're right that this is a rebellion against modernity and the enlightenment, which said everything is transparent to our understanding. If we are rational actors with a scientific outlook and we're secular, we will be able to look at any culture, any people, any belief, and it will be transparent to our understanding. And that's an arrogant way of interacting with other peoples and assuming that you can just encapsulate their understanding with your own. Yeah. I think one of the things that that reminds me of is that when we think about a secularism determining a public space or a society, right? If it's the referee, right, then it has to make decisions about who enters and who doesn't and upon what terms the actors enter. And so I think that's a really, really timely and important point for Muslims to consider. Because if you look at the history of especially Christianity, but all sort of the religions within the United States and within North America, you know, a lot of them went through these internal struggles where they were at a precipice of sorts and they had to decide whether they were going to become approved within secular society, such that they would be able to participate in the public sphere and be able to lobby and be able to try to convince to almost like pay your cover charge, right, to get in or not. And so you saw, for example, with the split between the mainline Protestant churches and the evangelical movement, you see how the Anabaptists were just, you know, such as the Amish and the Mennonites were like, forget it, we don't want admission into your public space.
We'll just take our faith as is and we don't care about being legible or having access, etc. You see the Catholic Church after Vatican II and how sort of the secularization of sort of, again, what's the price that you have to pay in order to, right, so the secular state and, you know, we don't want to get too much into state politics, but there is a force that controls those decisions, right, or at least shapes the bounds for what's acceptable and what's not. And that's not neutral, right? Like in order to participate, there's a certain secular understanding of religion that you have to adhere to if you want to be taken seriously as an actor. You can't be the person who's trying to put their public faith all on display and we're not going to submit a bill to Congress that's quoting ayats from the Koran or hadith, right? You know, you have to have – that's your private life. You do that at home. And when you come here, like this is the language that you have to use. You have to use common interest or human interest, utilitarian logic, whatever it is. So there's a process. There's a process and an admission fee. And it's important to just, again, like nobody's saying that you can't play the game, but a lot of people play the game thinking that that's what life is. They don't realize that they're playing a game, right? This is very similar to our point that we ended on with the human rights conversation about internalizing human rights discourse versus deploying it, right? There might be situations where you have to deploy it. There might be certain situations where we – yeah, you have to find a Rawlsian consensus. You have to be able to persuade someone within their hermeneutic of what they value, et cetera. That's just human life.
But if that's the only thing that we're doing and we don't realize the work that's being done on us, we might end up having an Islam that's not really Islam, that is sort of just a secularized Islam that only is looking at our private faith and our rituals. We're not going to pay attention to farqifaya. We're not going to pay attention to anything that really might stand to fundamentally challenge the order, not in a violent way, but in a discursive way, in an intellectual way. And so that's, I think, something that people need to be aware of. I'm not sure if you have any thoughts or responses to that. Yeah. And, you know, alhamdulillah, we have Muslims who are kind of doing the work that you're describing to help others understand where to draw the line between deploying a useful tool and really just being a good member of society, right? Like Allah decided that we're going to be minorities in this land. And so this is where our work lies. And so we're not going to always speak to people in the language of our internal hermeneutic of revelation. It may not make sense, and we should do it when we are able to bridge the gap and let them understand it, right, and be kind of ambassadors of gems from revelation. But at the same time, we will be employing the language that people understand, and hopefully we'll do that intelligently and critically. And you have, like, Abdurrahman Taha's work is now coming out to show an ethical framework, which is completely distinct from a secular modernist worldview, which can be operable in these times, right, in these contemporary times. And you had, like, the work of Sayyid Nursi and of some of the reformers of the Nahda, even though there's, like, modernization and modernity in those writings, there's also what you're describing.
There's this attempt, right, to make sense and to make legible and relevant the traditional revelation-based Islamic worldview in a time and space that is completely alien and antagonistic towards the foundations of that belief. So, alhamdulillah, to say that we have teachers and intellectuals who are doing the work of trying to build bridges, you know, the greatest, the most commonly repeated aphorism of all time, but who are trying to do the work of creating those communicative spaces where we can be authentic to our faith, and at the same time be good members of society, where we say yes to what is good and we say no to what is bad. Alhamdulillah that there's some of that work out there that we can draw from. Yeah, honestly, it's kind of exciting times that we live in. It's challenging times, but it's exciting times because I feel like this struggle, more people are waking up to this sort of struggle. And it's producing a lot of intellectual activity. And people are not just taking society as a given static thing anymore that we have to either run away from or acclimate and assimilate to, but that society itself is in flux. And we can have a say, we can argue, we can propagate, we can sort of advocate for what we think is right. We might have to find a new language or deploy various languages in order to do that.
But this is actually participating and contributing and operating, I think, from the fundamental belief that Islam has the truth and Islam has something to teach everybody and Islam has something to add to society, regardless of a person's individual sort of beliefs. And that's very interesting. Well, thank you so much. I think we're going to draw to a close here. Dr. Zahra Khan, thank you so much for coming on the program for today. It's always a pleasure. Secularism is something that I think we're going to be doing two or three different sessions on. And we have a couple of different guests to tackle it from different angles. But we really appreciate your time today and your contributions. We ask Allah to accept from you and from us and to forgive us for any mistakes. Subhanaka Allahumma wa bihamdika sharafan la ilaha ila anta. Astaghfirullah wa atubu ilaik. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
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