Adnane Mokrani, Tehseen Nisar, “Historical and Contemporary Challenges to Islam and the Secular State”, in: Minorities and Populism, Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe, Volker Kaul, Ananya Vajpeyi (ed.s), Springer, Cham, 2020, pp. 183-198. (original) (raw)

As Western democracies struggle to redefine constitutionally guaranteed rights to its minority populations, amidst populist politics, democratic and liberal constitutional orders are often seen to be struggling to justify the secular nature of their political and social identity. On the one hand, the Post-Arab Spring, combined with the disputed nature of political order in the Middle East, including the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, proxy wars in the Arab World, and hostility and conflict amidst political and strategic confrontation has renewed calls for a just and peaceful order in the Islamic world. On the other hand, issues like pluralism, democracy, participation, inclusiveness, and rights, have emerged on the forefront and have triggered a need to revisit the debate on secularism. This paper deals with the challenges and current debate on the issue of secularism from the Western and non-Western milieu, and debate is raised on the context of societies driven by modernist and postmodernist trends. The liberal secular dimension is compared with the non-liberal secular understanding, and the historical context is explained with a literalist and comparative angle. A major point of reference that has played a central role in the debate on secularism is the overemphasis on state versus the church, with examples from Western history, while no such demarcation exists within Islam. Therefore, the term becomes controversial. From a religious perspective, there have been attempts that have not gone in good faith for the interpretation of the term. This paper makes a reference to the example of many Islamic countries where the term is wrongly contextualized, misunderstood, and misinterpreted.