From The News “Secularism Debate”

Secularism Debate 

Separation of church and state is not just the right thing to do but it is the only thing that will help build a progressive and democratic stateOther participants in this debate have already informed the reader of the history of the idea of separation of church and state which is rooted in the power struggle between temporal rulers and the church in largely homogenous nation states of Europe and America. The history of Europe, especially the period that is referred to as reformation and renaissance, is also significant as being the history of Protestant and Catholic sectarian conflict.

It is, therefore, not a surprising paradox that secularism in its purest form emerged from confessionalism that was often at the root of the European nation state. England was the bastion of protestantism, even though protestantism itself was rooted in a rebellion against papacy.

Similarly, Spain and other continental powers were self-consciously Catholic. England’s adoption of the Protestant creed, followed by a fanatical purge of the Catholics, was itself the state’s attempt to establish the primacy of the state over religion. The binary thus is not a false one nor can this binary be reconciled. Secularism is the state’s struggle to liberate itself from the burdens of established church and dogma. Multiculturalism comes only later and is at best a desirable by-product.

So what is the relevance of this term or idea in a conservative Islamic society such as ours which is organised under a constitution that defines itself as Islamic and blends religious ends with secular ends?

There is to start with, of course, the burden of Pakistan’s founding myth i.e. Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, which gives our priestly class a veto on any progress towards secular equality in Pakistan. This is stemmed in confusion regarding the events that led to the partition of the subcontinent. What is clear, however, to a historian is that Pakistan’s founder, Jinnah, expected the new nation to follow Europe’s example when he said that “in due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual, but in a political sense as citizens of the state”.

Quite appropriately the nation’s father quoted the example of Great Britain where Protestants had long persecuted Catholics but had ultimately come to see themselves as one nation, Protestant and Catholic. Ten years before this famous speech, on 20 September 1937, he had spoken in the Indian legislative assembly of a “distant ideal to mould the whole of India into mere citizens when the Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Musalmans Musalmans politically” but had argued for a solution to “the problem of minorities first” instead.

The point here is that Pakistan’s creation was the result of the inability of the representative parties of India to agree on a constitution. The myth of Pakistan being founded in the name of Islam, thus, is a sham and the more we insist on it the more we will prove it a white lie.

The recent debate on blasphemy law has once again brought out our internal contradictions to the forefront of the debate. I do not need to remind the reader that the rot started when our leaders, beginning with the framers of the Objectives Resolution, chose to demarcate a definite role for Islam, in letter and spirit, in our constitutional documents. Having thus opened the door, the slide down the slippery slope was a matter of time.

With the separation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the worldwide conservative Islamic revival of the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan chose to underline its Islamic identity and in doing so became a state intolerant of diversity. Just as multiculturalism is the consequence of secularism, shrinking of dissent and tolerance is the consequence of theocracy. The most devastating impact of a deliberate detour from normality that our leaders took from 1949 and the consummation of the marriage of religion and state in 1973 has been a breakdown of civil discourse in our society. In our quixotic quest of fusing the temporal with the eternal, we have denigrated the faith and destroyed our government.

The human march towards progress is irreversible and trying to march against it means sure destruction. The attempt and the abject failure of Muslim societies in reconciling the binaries will mean that Islam, unfortunately, will have to face a greater reversal in the Muslim East than Christianity has faced in the Christian West. It is unfortunate because Islam’s legal and civilisational traditions provided for an internal mechanism of ijtehad which was abandoned over time. Religion would still have a place in society but chains are meant to be broken not worn like ornaments. The Church in the West realised it gradually but at the time it did not have any other advanced civilisation breathing down its neck.

In the information age a country such as Pakistan cannot sustain itself on religious dogma and if it tries to, it becomes an unreliable factor in global politics. The international community is mortally afraid of a nuclear armed nation which has its top nuclear scientists people who believe in miracles and whose enrichment experts have been known to write papers on how to harness the power of the Djin to produce electricity for Pakistan’s power needs. And the world is also not too impressed with a commitment to religion that leads to death sentence for a poor hapless woman whose only crime was to be born in a Christian household in Pakistan.

Contrary to the propaganda drummed against secularism in Pakistan, the-self styled “anti-secular” forces can actually be quite anti-people. Just one example: In the landmark Qazalbash-Wakf case, drawing on arguments based on a limited and opportunistic interpretation of Islam, through Pakistan’s premier religious scholar Justice Taqi Usmani, the Supreme Court of Pakistan declared land reforms un-Islamic.

Separation of church and state is not just the right thing to do but it is the only thing that will help us build a progressive and democratic state for 170 million people, a great majority of whom are Muslims. The failure to voluntarily correct our course will condemn all of them to uncertainty and poverty. The choice is ours as well as the responsibility. Let us not confuse our people further by speaking in abstractions and nuances of Islamic interpretation when we need to simply tell them the truth.

By Yasser Latif Hamdani