How to engage political Islam (II)

The second area in which religious revival bears on the new frontiers of the political sphere is the process of secularization. Today Eastern and Western societies are witnessing the emergence of new religious identities and spiritual spaces. The return of God to the modern world means a major revisiting of the meaning of the secular as a grand promise of Western modernity. As Peter Berger and others have argued, the “de-secularization” of the world in its countless forms is not a simple “re-sacralization” of it. Secularization is too complex to be treated as a unidirectional process. Yet the fact that it is losing its discursive power confirms the breaking down of the rigid constructions of secular modernity and points to the emergence of a post-secular social context for negotiating the relations between religion and politics.

But it must be remembered that a good part of this discussion pertains to Europe and the United States. Non-Western societies have not gone through the stages of comprehensive secularization that Western societies have experienced. While Muslim societies cannot claim immunity, they have followed different trajectories and produced different experiences. The political and economic realities which led to an inevitable collision between the Church and the new bourgeois classes in the 18th and 19th centuries never existed (and are still absent) in Muslim countries. The political economy of European secularization had to push the clergy out of the political and economic decision-making processes to ensure the expansion of European capitalism. The 19th century bourgeois revolution was anti-clerical and had to be so to protect its new interests. The ideas of liberty, democracy and individual rights, which we take for granted as universal values, were promoted by the new bourgeoisie to hem in its main political competitor, the Church. None of these developments have their equivalent in the Muslim world.

By contrast, the mainstream Islamic tradition has not developed a radical distinction between the spheres of religion and politics or between the religious and the secular. Attempts at finding traditional equivalents in Muslim societies to modern institutions of secularism are anachronistic readings. While secularism has become anti-clerical but not necessarily anti-religious in the West, it has become anti-religious in most Muslim countries for reasons that need further explanation.

Be that as it may, the rise of social activists and political actors with Islamic credentials and/or claims is certain to have a transformative impact on the state of secularism in most Muslim countries. As the Muslim public space becomes less oppressive and more pluralistic and the forms of militant secularism supported by autocratic regimes lose their political legitimacy, non-secularist social imageries are likely to assert themselves more openly. But given the realities of globalization and the indigenous realities of Muslim societies, which are more vibrant and decentralized than many realize, the process of de-secularization will transform Islamic political groups -- even the most conservative ones -- to fight for legitimacy in the open market of ideas. It is in this fight that Muslim societies are likely to rediscover the legacy of cosmopolitan Islam.

The third area in which political Islam demands our attention pertains to the transformation of the political sphere. The emergence of new social and political actors has changed the way the realm of the political is defined and negotiated by an increasing number of small and big actors. Nation-states are no longer the sole agents of international relations. Public intellectuals, community leaders, the media, public opinion, the virtual communities on the Internet and the dazzlingly diverse world of the NGOs around the globe have changed the parameters of politics as a way of managing public interest. In most cases, Islamic political actors are part of this huge network of social and political agents, a network no single source or authority can control. Such Islamist political parties as Hamas, Hezbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood are known for their social services and community organizing.