Secularism today
IN reviewing Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age, Professor Richard Madsen explored three meanings of secularism. The political arrangement that makes the state neutral with regard to religious belief and the government's legitimacy does not depend on religion or the blessings of any particular religious community. The second, according to Madsen, was sociological, reflected in the widespread decline in religious belief by common people in any country. The third was cultural, "a move from a society where belief in God was unchallenged and indeed was unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among other, and frequently not the easiest to embrace."
In this age of globalisation, competition for excellence is the key word for success, and the Aristotelian pursuit of excellence, calling for transcendence of the initial state of the self into a better one, may not necessarily mean an abandonment of religion. Then, there is no reason to believe that Asian societies can be accommodated into Charles Taylor's picturisation of a North Atlantic secular image. Even in Asian communist countries, suppression and/or co-optation strategies resorted to tame local religions had to be loosened to permit economic reform and integration into the global market. Besides, says Madsen, Asian religious practices are less individualistic and more communal, socially embedded, and locally particularistic. NYU Professor Craig Calhoun saw in Charles Taylor's exploration a contrast between immanence and transcendence immanence, located in our senses of reality and good within the world around us, while transcendence gives us a sense of something beyond.
Apart from the Northern Ireland conflict, the West has more or less seen the end of religious war since 1948 when the Treaty of Westphalia was concluded. In the East, however, inter-faith and intra-faith conflicts are continuing and growing. This conflict is not Islamic in particular. The brutal Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, albeit shrouded in political terms, was due to the refusal by Hindu Tamils to acquiesce in the alleged discrimination by the Buddhist Sinhalese, as are the occasional riots between majority Hindus and minority Muslims in India.
It would be wrong to assume that religion has declining influence in political and economic affairs, just because of modernisation taking place in the world. Yale Professor Paul Bloom ("Is God an accident," The Atlantic, December 2005) wrote that the US was a poster child for supernatural belief, as just about everyone -- 90 percent in one poll -- believes in God. He quotes sociologist Steven Waldman that 51 percent of the Democrats -- the Republicans are no exception -- believe that God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second coming of Jesus. Bloom suggests that religion is bred in the bone. This thesis is just as debatable as how far Thomas Friedman's flat earth has been achieved just because of lowering trade and political barriers and exponential advances of the digital revolution that have been torn down between the first and the third worlds. Then, however, Friedman admits that much of terrorism is driven by the humiliation that societies, from which the terrorists come, have suffered. He suggests that one of the ways to fight terrorism is to ensure that those areas of the world not flat enough should be made flatter to defuse the anger that causes deprivation in their societies.
A case in point would be the outburst of the Brazilian President Louis de Silva that the global economic meltdown "was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing." Despite IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn's projection that the worst of the recession is over and the possibility of "double dip" recession has receded, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has predicted that another global financial crisis is inevitable due to "unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long period of prosperity to presume that it will continue." Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps feels that the massive debt incurred by the US to exit recession will thwart growth for decades and will also fuel inflation. On top of that, the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, despite the disappointment of non-G-20 nations, had the positive aspect in the formalisation of G-20.
In this evolution of a new global architecture, it has become difficult to discern the religious factor in al-Qaeda-sponsored and Taliban-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan is now virtually fighting for its life. Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, traced the growth of Talibinisation from a loose knit group of pious, well meaning Muslims wanting nothing more than to live according to Sharia law to the brutalisation of Swat and Malakand areas. The terrorism at Bali testifies that the Taliban did not spare the largest Muslim country in the world. The argument proffered that Taliban terrorism in Muslim countries is to establish the pristine spirit, and practice of Islam does not hold water as the victims of terrorism are often innocent and pious men, women and children who by no stretch of imagination can be termed as "degenerates." It would have served the world better if the end game of the Taliban were clearly understood and forced to desist from the madness rocking the peaceful global order.
Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and ambassador.
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