I think Ahmed Rashid, much as I value his work, is over-optimistic about what is possible.
Taseer’s death has unleashed the mad dogs of hell, inspiring the minority of fanatics to go to any lengths to destroy the democratic, secular and moderate Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
How can there be such a thing as a secular Islamic Republic of anything? Or a secular Christian or Hindu one either?
I don’t think there can. That’s where Jinnah went wrong, and it’s where the whole idea falls apart before it takes its first breath. People who think there can be such a thing don’t grasp what “secular” means. An Islamic Republic is, obviously, an officially religious state, and that is the very thing that a secular state can’t be.
The idea must be that you can do both…but how could you? If it’s Islamic it’s Islamic, and then it’s not secular. You can’t do both. And that’s exactly why Pakistan is so fucked up, and getting more so every day.
Comments
30 responses to “You can’t do both, chapter 297”
There is a common theme running within all Muslim countries: they’re all turning radical and barbaric. Why is this? We know why, but ‘liberal’ Muslims and accommodationists delude themselves believing that Islam/Christianity and the modern scientific and liberal world can co-exist happily together.
Pakistan was fucked up from the start. As a kid I watched it happening. As someone said earlier, the partition of India was a tragedy, and it is unfolding with the desperate inevitability of all tragedy. I hold out no hope for the region. Religion, you know, really does poison everything.
I thought, years ago, that liberal religion was a possibililty, and that the traditions that I thought so valuable were worth preserving, and liberal religion would provide the way. I really no longer think this is possible. I am reading of Philip Kitcher’s three papers in which he explores this, but I think it is too late. There is no way to save the aethetic traditions of religion from the belief traditions before the belief traditions themselves have brought about catastrophe.
I may, of course, be wrong, but at the moment that is the way my thought is trending. There might have been a liberal understanding that could have made Pakistan both secular and in that marginal sense Islamic, as England, for example, is secular and Christian. But Islam will not be moulded to secular realities, and neither, we must admit, will Christianity. Time to say goodbye to religious traditions, and try to make something better. Kitcher thinks there are not enough of the kind of secular institutional realities that can provide the kind of surrogate community that might replace the loss of religious institutions, and that a transition to secularism cannot work until there are. That may be so, and it may be a pipe dream anyway. But I don’t think, given the time table that religions seem to be on, that there will be time to create them before we are in the midst of some kind of religious cataclysm. Perhaps I am just a apocalyptist manqué?
I’m not embarrassed to admit that, like many, I keep my own little book of quotations. These range from extended passages from essays down to Stephen Fry’s <i>So you’re offended. So fucking what?</i> This is a keeper.
It’s something that so many people have yet to face. Including me, perhaps.
Pankaj Mishra argues in the Guardian and the Age to the effect that Islam is not a dead weight like a cast iron anchor, but more like a sail.
I remain unconvinced.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/look-past-muslim-rage-20110109-19js7.html
England is secular and (officially) Christian…but Eric, as you know, that’s not entirely benign, or in fact secular. You know all about the role of the archbish in interfering with secular lawmaking…
And we get it here in the US, too, with even less constitutional justification. The Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote parts of the healthcare bill. We don’t have a fully secular government.
So OK if I replace Pakistan, Islamic and Jinnah with Israel, Jewish and Ben-Gurion is this statement equally true?
I am a strong supporter of Israel myself – but one can’t easily take this moral standpoint without positioning Israel on the same spectrum.
How can there be such a thing as a secular Islamic Republic of anything? Or a secular Christian or Hindu one either?
You’re living in a secular Christian state, one in which gov’t retains a wash of cultural Christianity ( ie a Christmas tree at the White House)
I live in one as well.
The same situation can never be repeated in a Muslim majority country because unlike both Judaism and Christianity, Islam’s ideological foundations can broker no gap between the spîritual and temporal.
I disagree with everything in this posting, and dare not say any more.
Roger, I think Israel is in that sense a terrible idea. Really really terrible. I think exclusive ethnic or religious states are a terrible idea. I didn’t include “Jewish” with Xian and Hindu because “Jewish” is ethnic as well as (including instead of) religious, so I kept it simple. I don’t like to say that I think Israel is a terrible idea in that sense, because there are other senses, and I don’t want to get into it.
Sonia, I’m not living in “the Christian Republic of the US.” Yes of course there is a lot of de facto Xianity, a lot more than there should be, but it’s not written into the name or the Constitution.
I’m not sure what you disagree with, or why you dare not say any more.
Sonia, are you the sonia who comments at Pickled Politics? I was vaguely assuming you were, but I suspect I was wrong.
Oh I see. You’re Sauder.
Very cute.
I told you, when you lapsed into plain name-calling, that if you wanted to keep posting you were at least going to have to do it under your own name.
Yes, Ophelia, I do know that England is not successfully fully secular, and that is troubling, though, in fairness, I was simply pointing out that a Muslim country could perhaps achieve a similar level of secularity. I don’t think that’s possible with Islam because I believe that Islam is intrinsically theocratic, and that’s where the problem really lie.
As to Israel, it’s only fair to remember that that was a direct result of the Holocaust, and the belief that only a Jewish state could protect Jewish interests, other means having failed so disastrously. That doesn’t make Israel a great idea, but it does explain it and perhaps, to a certain extent, justify its existence. How we move on from there however is a problem fraught with great danger.
Yes, I know, Eric, that’s why I didn’t want to get into it, of course.
Norm Geras published an excellent series of articles on this a few years ago on his blog – written by a friend of his, and all about the nationalist-religious-exclusivist aspect and how unLeft and ungood it is. How unfortunate the whole thing is.
In one sense it seems England is a secular and Christian country but I think it’s really a constant tug-of-war between the two rather than a workable compromise; the state is secular in many ways but when Christians feel like they ought to be able to exert unfair influence they play the ‘well this is a Christian country’ card (few things make me madder than hearing that phrase), always with little consideration of what this means, whether it can be regarded as true in any full and relevant sense beyond a nominal identity, or whether the concept of a country having an official religious identity is even fair or reasonable. It’s that patronising attitude which really irritates: you can have your religious plurality, your secular government, your gay partnerships, but when we want something we’ll smugly remind you that all you non-Christians are, in fact, second-class citizens, and we have the ultimate say.I’ve been trying to get across the unfairness and absurdity of this recently in arguing with my (liberal Catholic) father over council prayers before meetings here in Britain, but he can’t seem to see it. To him, if a majority profess Christianity then he can’t see why it’s unfair to begin council meetings with prayers (in fact even suggesting it was what democracy means). That those who wish to can pray on their own time in their own offices and council meetings should be secular is an idea he can’t seem to fathom, which perhaps suggests something about the default majority really not being able to see how they are automatically privileged.
It appears that many Moslem commentators have absolutely no idea as to what the term ‘secular state’ really means.
Eric,
Israel was not ‘the direct result of the Holocaust’,that’s just a self-serving Zionist myth. Zionists had plans for the creation of Israel and the er… ’emigration of the Palestinians’ long before the Nazis came to power. It’s plausible to argue that Zionism was the product of two thousand years of anti-semitism of course, but not the Holocaust. Zionism was morally bankrupt from its inception. Nothing ‘justifies Israel’s existence any more than the existence of the US or Australia as settler states, what’s done is done.
Russell W. Yes, of course I know that there was Zionism before this. Indeed the Balfour Declaration which spoke about a homeland for the Jews was made in 1917. But I am not sure that, had the Holocaust not occurred that we would have seen the development of a Jewish state. That, it seems to me, would have been a much more open question, so I don’t think if is entirely a self-serving Zionist myth.
Secular governments weren’t created out of respect to atheists. They were created to end the religious squabbling, harassment, murder, and civil war that can occur when the government takes sides. Maybe a secular Islamic Republic just means that the government doesn’t take sides with any particular Islamic sect., although this obviously warps the meaning of secular.
Without going into the murky world of English history, England has of course had many power struggles between the monarchy, parliament/house of lords and the church. But it was the British Bill of Rights that transformed Britain and began all the revolutions around Europe and America. It was this intellectual revolution that lead to the political revolutions, in which we find ourselves today.
Ophelia,
when you mentioned Jinnah I googled him since I didn’t really know much about the topic. In the “Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan” section there are excerpts from his speeches that today sound utterly naive and completely delusional:
And in another speech he said this about Islam and Islamic principles:
Now, I don’t know that much about the exact political and religious climate of the time period but even if religious extremism has become exceedingly worse over the last decades I cannot believe that even in Jinnah’s time these statements were anything but dangerously naive wishful thinking.
Eric, #15
Fair comment, it’s a matter of opinion. Whether or not the Holocaust was the critical event in the creation of Israel is open to discussion. My point was also the use of the Holocaust as a ‘justification’ for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians,I’ve heard this bizarre rationalization ad nauseam.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: You can’t do both, chapter 297 http://dlvr.it/Czxxc […]
Right, to the point that it means nothing. To be secular, the government has to take no side with any religion at all; otherwise it’s the opposite of secular, it’s sectarian as well as theocratic.
Roger said:
When did Israel suddenly become a theocracy? Israel has a secular government and guarantees freedom of religion to all. Arab and Christian citizens participate in the Knesset.
When you toss in the ability of military or the government to subvert elections, how long can the government of Pakistan remain nominally secular?
But Christians, Shia, Ahmadis, Hindus (are there any left at all?) and so on are also full citizens of Pakistan and are represented (after a fashion) in its political institutions.
Deplorably this means that in its occasional periods as a semi-functioning democracy Pakistani politics is more representative of all its population (but arguably that’s the real problem…) than Israel which denies basic political rights to millions of people in the Occupied Territories (that many if not most of those people would evidently prefer to be the terrorised slaves of a genocidal theocracy rather than citizens of a real secular democracy is the other problem…)
Remember Israel is so palpably a non-secular state that it cannot even admit the possibility of civil marriage and is AFAIK unique amongst western democracies in enforcing Sharia Law in so far as it applies to families.
It is also AFAIK unique amongst western democracies in paying the wages of numerous bigoted rabbis and imams (and presumably priests as well) to incite its peoples to hatred against each other.
To misquote the J-man himself just because your neighbours eye has a beam in it doesn’t mean that the mote in your own eye doesn’t require radical surgery before it blinds you completely…
I’m not convinced that there are all that many religious institutions that need replacing.
Other than getting a bunch of people together on a weekly basis who actually don’t like each other that much and who sing really, really badly, there is nothing that religion provides to the community (other than a mechanism that allows like minded bigots to re-enforce each others bad behaviour) that already has or can easily be subsumed by existing or new secular institutions for important life events such as birth, marriage and death.
In fact, this argument that religious institutions have any value at all and must be replaced by equivalent secular institutions before secularism can work has the fingerprints of the religious all over it.
It’s been repeated so often that it has attained urban myth status and it is uncritically accepted. I know I did until I read Eric’s comment and something something clicked (snapped ?).
Well, I just wanted to point out one thing, nit-picking really. The country Pakistan was supposed to be secular. The Islamic republic part was added in a few years later after I think Quiad-e-azam and Muhhammad ali jinnah death …
At least, Thats what i remember …
It’s not nit-picking – I want to understand about Pakistan.
But even if that’s the case, Jinnah still conceived of Pakistan as a “homeland for Muslims,” right? That by itself makes secularism…pretty much impossible.
The recent Freedom House report on blasphemy law in Pakistan offers this as background:
But that was fixed in 1964, and that was only the beginning.
oh shit. they’re the same person… i meant Allama Iqbal and Quaid-e-Azam… not Quaid-e-azam and muhammad ali jinnah.
well, the idea was basically that muslims finally realized that they were a minority in india and considered themselves ‘repressed’. I don’t have enough info on the matter yet… but from what i’ve read, it seems that the majority of the muslim population actually didn’t bother to migrate to the claim that they were repressed is kinda hard to believe. anyway, the countries ideology was simply that we should have a place where we can freely practice our respective religions so from that point of view, it was meant to be a secular state by Quais-e-azam didn’t live long enough to see that happen.
But yeah, your point stands. Thats why i said i was just nit picking because pakistan and india’s separation was still religiously driven