Desacralizing Secularism

Abstract

No Muslim endeavor to face the intellectual challenge of the western
tradition can afford to ignore the critical discourse of postmodernism or
fail to recognize the Nietzschean claim about truth's complicity with
power. Secularism as truth, as doctrine, therefore, cannot be separated
from the theory and practice of secular power. As the praxis of statecraft,
secularism claims universal sovereignty, and as the theoriu of history, it
subordinates all religious and moral claims to its own version of the truth.
The secularist enterprise, furthermore, has been immensely successful in
transforming the historical order of our times. But as such, it is a subject
proper to the discipline of (political) history and merits the Muslim scholar's
fullest attention there.
Secularism as a doctrine, as an -ism, on the other hand, falls squarely
within the province of philosophy and the history of ideas. In order to
apprehend. the secularist gospel and its discontents, one needs to contemplate,
as it were, the ideational visage of secularism. It is this aspect of secularism-
the mask of truth worn by the secularist will-to-power-that the
present article intends to uncover. Thus, the secularism that is examined
here is not a sociological theory but rather a philosophical paradigm, not
an empirical fact but rather an ideological axiom. This survey is divided
further into two parts: secularizing theories in sociology and politics from
the focus of the present essay. Secularism in philosophy, theology, and science
will be treated in the second installment.
Secularism or Sacralization?
Secularism, like any darling child, has many names. In contemporary
literature it is presented (either humbly) as a rejection of ecclesiastical
authority, a model for pluralism, a theory of society, a doctrine of
governance or (augustly) as a philosophy of history, a creed of atheism,
an epistemology of humanism, or (even more grandiosely) as a metaphysics
of immanentism that corresponds to the ultimate scheme of
things. Within the academic discourse, it is also customary to accord it
an almost Socratic definition and to distinguish its various manifestations
as a process of history (seculurizution), a state of mind and culture
(secularity), and a theory of truth (secularism). (One may note the close ...