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| 25 1 The Origins of Secularism in Europe The impact of the late-twentieth-century rise of political Islam on theories of secularism and religion has been considerable. Reactions have taken shape around two broad responses. The first argues that developing Islamic societies have failed in their efforts to create a viable form of modern secularism, and Islamist movements represent surviving premodern traditions and religious impulses which surface in dangerous reaction to this political failure. The secularization process, this view argues, has been historically weak and inadequate in spite of whatever limited achievements it has made. This might be called the thesis of the “incomplete Enlightenment,” which proposes that only a vigorous campaign for the secularization of civil society and the flushing of religiosity from the public sphere can extend the reach of reason in an Enlightenment-style Kulturkamph.1 The second response, in its crudest form, takes the position that secularism is a fundamentally Western or even Christian contribution, and insists on the impractical and undesirable nature of any effort to force Islamic societies to secularize against their will. Modernity, secularism, and even democracy, the most vulgar form of this view urges, are alien to the Muslim sensibility.2 In their most widespread and vulgar form both these arguments make several dubious assumptions. First, the concepts of secularism and religion are discussed as if they were watertight categories, each containing a distinctive and clearly defined essence. Second, particularly with regard to the first response, secularism and secularization are described as if they were “natural ” or deterministic facts in the modern history of human evolution and not sociological and structural processes that occur within specific historical and social contexts.3 They seem to have a universal and abstract quality, when in fact we find distinctive and different secular traditions within different national settings—for instance, in Britain, France, Turkey, or India. In countries such as Japan, where there is no monotheistic tradition,the question of secularism may not even have substantial meaning. It is, therefore, inappropriate to consider secularism as a universal or objective “reality.” For the 26 | The Origins of Secularism in Europe same reason, it is difficult to maintain the notion of a strict barrier between the secular and the religious. Not only are the terms conceptually interdependent , but in the British Enlightenment religious intellectuals and values contributed to the development of secular ideas and institutions.4 Consequently, a more complex and nuanced view of the question of secularism is required than those offered by the dominant arguments in order to clarify the rise of political Islam and the status of secularism in the societies of the Middle East. This chapter attempts to stake out such a path by providing a history of secularism designed to show the political stakes involved in the question without either yielding to the fantasy that history and modernity are inherently on the side of Enlightenment values or defining the entire world tacitly in terms of the “secularized” categories of monotheism by insisting that the world must be remade in the human image. In tracing the discourses of the European Enlightenment back to their major intellectual roots in the seventeenth century—Deism, natural rights, and social morality—we find that the individuals who conceived of them were often political refugees, victims of long religious wars. These discourses nearly always advocated tolerance of “multiple ways” versus belief in providence as a “single way,” introducing a new religious concept in order to address the political fragmentation of post-Reformation Europe. On the side of tolerance we find, for example, Isaac d’Huisseau calling in 1670 for a belief system large enough to “encompass the universe” and surmount sectarian difference.5 Hugo Grotius, the founder of modern natural rights theory, was a Dutch refugee living in Paris in 1625 during the religious wars. He argued that the supernatural and divine should be replaced by the imminent order of nature. These conceptual moves were linked to “nature” as newly conceived by the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. This concept of “nature” paradoxically contained both a descriptive determinism stemming from Newtonian physics and a normative ideal of subjective agency reflecting new postRenaissance humanist values. Such early articulations of secularism express the universal scope envisioned by the founders, a feature at once inclusive of certain conditions and exclusive of others on “humanist” grounds. For European humanism evolved ideologically through the Enlightenment to have specific normative dimensions beyond the mere biological fact. The emerging secular humanist worldview was moreover embedded in...

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