Muslims need a secular state

Discussion of the ideas of Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im

Sudanese thinker Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im has presented his thoughts on Islam, secularism and his own concept of civic reason during the Hivos-Kosmopolis Conference ‘Promoting Pluralism through Civic Reason? Rethinking Secularism’ May 2009, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Feel free to read through the essence of his presentation – reworked for the purpose of this discussion - and provide your comments below!

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As a Muslim I need the state to be secular so that I can be the Muslim I choose to be by conviction and choice. I used to be very sceptical about secularism. For me, secularism meant “hostile to religions”. I derived this understanding from my analysis of those states that were called “secular”. But naming a state “secular” does not automatically make it so. We should be cautious to assume that language has the power to make things happen. The secular state I mean is neutral regarding religious doctrine. It does not take a position on religion.

Let’s look at it from the other side. A state cannot be religious. A state is a political institution that is incapable of having a religion. A ruling elite can try to enforce its view of religion. But that does not make the state religious.

Society can be religious. Also, you cannot take religion out of politics. Because religious believers will vote and act politically as believers. But politics is the government of the day. It is a reflection of the political choices that people make. The state is the institution, such as the Foreign Ministry or the judiciary.

Maybe it helps to give a recent example: During the Bush administration it turned out that the Ministry of Justice had dismissed some federal prosecutors because they refused to prosecute cases that the Republican party wanted to prosecute, in various states throughout the country. Now that was a confusion of his mandate as the Justice Minister of that administration and the autonomy and integrity of the Justice Department. Because when the Minister uses his power as Minister of Justice to promote a political end through the institution, by gambling with the autonomy and integrity of the state institution, that is when you have a dangerous confusion. When you have no distinction between the political institutions and the political process and the state institutions, that is what totalitarianism is.

Secularism is a mediation between the need to keep religion and the state separate and the need to keep religion and politics connected. Those who are not believers might worry about what believers are doing. They don’t have a religious agenda to bring into the state. But those who are believers do. So what we have is an effort to keep the state and religion separate, but religion keeps coming into the state through the back door of politics. This paradox needs mediation. It’s a question of vigilance, a question of trying to make sure that it does not happen by establishing institutional safeguards - which for me include constitutionalism, human rights and citizenship - as a framework within which, what I call ‘civic reason’ has to occur.

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