{"id":64,"date":"2015-12-14T17:07:10","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T17:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/?p=64"},"modified":"2015-12-14T17:07:10","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T17:07:10","slug":"is-secularism-sacred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/2015\/12\/14\/is-secularism-sacred\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Secularism Sacred?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his recent piece<\/a> in The Times, Matt Ridley speaks of how Muslims are \u201cturning away from Islam.\u201d In a scathing and passionate article, he chastises jihadism and militant Islam and suggests humanism and secularism as antidotes to the same. I stand with Mr. Ridley in rebuking all forms of extremism and violent jihad and share his views that these must be seriously tackled. However, I take issue with the manner in which Mr. Ridley seems to paint 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide with the same brush. His powerful narrative places militant Islamism concomitant with Islam, effectively disenfranchising the more than a billion moderate Muslim voices worldwide \u2013 that not only condemn terrorism but are in fact victims of it.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s put Mr. Ridley\u2019s claims in perspective. He argues that, \u201cThe fastest growing belief system in the world is non-belief,\u201d adding that the, \u201chumanists are winning, even against Islam.\u201d The gest of his arguments runs something like this: that atheism is on the rise globally, with an increasing number of people turning away from religion, in particular Islam; that this phenomenon is panning out in spite of the fact that atheists do not proselytise; that estimates forecast a decline in fertility rates amongst Muslim populations that have until now determined their increased market share; that atheists are persecuted in Muslim-majority lands; that jihadists are inspired by a desire, \u201cto prevent the Muslim diaspora [from] sliding into western secularism\u201d and that secularism can ultimately win against jihadism.<\/p>\n

Mr. Ridley either intentionally or unintentionally indulges in classic \u201cothering\u201d discourse \u2013 the \u201cthem\u201d against \u201cus\u201d approach \u2013 \u201cIslam\u201d against the \u201cWest.\u201d His account is a quintessential example of partisan scholarship \u2013 one that entrenches misplaced stereotypes within society and paves the way towards a civilisational divide. There is no informed or reasoned analysis on the causes of terrorism, the geopolitical factors that have shaped its trajectory and importantly how Muslims, too, are victims of extremism. Is terrorism really a religious cult? Why do people like Mr. Ridley forget that the Taliban were really a creation of the Americans, known as freedom fighters at the time, and engaged to fight the Soviets during the Soviet War in Afghanistan \u2013 something Hilary Clinton has admitted<\/a> on national television. Clinton sums it up quite well \u2013 you harvest what you sow. Moreover, it is also an open secret that the so-called Islamic State, who took responsibility for the recent attacks in Paris, was a creation of the Iraq War. As such, the motivations of terrorists are not quite religious as Mr. Ridley contends; they are more political than anything else. The Paris assassins shouted<\/a> how France should not have gone into Syria, as they carried out their cold-blooded acts of murder. Karen Armstrong, in her recent talk at Saint Anthony\u2019s College Oxford, outlined how each of the two British men who went to fight in Syria recently, ordered<\/a> \u2018Islam for Dummies\u2019 on Amazon. This alone, makes a travesty of the claim that extremists hold intensely religious passions.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Mr. Ridley\u2019s predictions that atheism will ultimately overtake Islam must be taken with a pinch of salt. His assertions sit in contradiction with a report<\/a> published earlier this year by the Pew Research Center that reveals how by 2050 Islam is forecasted to be the fastest growing religion \u2013 the Muslim population estimated to increase by 73% in the next 35 years. It states how Muslims will grow from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.76 billion in 2050, with Islam being the only religion to surpass the global rate of population expansion. It would also place Islam for the first time at par with Christianity in numbers. By contrast, the study suggests that while the number of non-believers including atheists and agnostics will rise in countries such as the United States and France, the total rise in non-believers is estimated at a 100 million \u2013 rising merely from 1.1 billion in 2010 to 1.2 billion in 2050 \u2013 and by those numbers, this would actually mean a drop<\/em> in the total population of atheists \u2013 from 16% of the total population in 2010 to 13% of the total population globally in 2050.<\/p>\n

While I celebrate the secular values of democracy and the rule of law, these ideals do not suffice on their own if their overriding premise is not justice. Secular jurisprudence testifies to this, John Rawls arguing<\/a> for example that, \u201clegitimacy is only the minimal standard of political acceptability; a political order can be legitimate without being just,\u201d adding that it is justice that provides, \u201cthe maximum moral standard: the full description of how a society\u2019s main institutions should be ordered.\u201d If secular ideals were sufficient on their own, we would not have lost 60 million people in the mass destruction of the Second World War \u2013 a war that was clearly not fought for any religious reasons. Hence, I am not convinced that secularism is as sacred as Mr. Ridley makes it out to be. Such overly simplistic, lop sided rhetoric reduce his scholarship to the ranting of an angry man, which does not behoove a person of Mr. Ridley\u2019s intellect and educational background. When extremists kill, humanity suffers \u2013 not a particular cultural or religious demographic. Since 2003, in Pakistan alone, more than<\/a> 20,000 civilians have perished in terrorism related violence. Similarly, thousands have lost their lives in Nigeria in terrorist attacks carried out by Boko Haram, a group claimed<\/a> to be deadlier than ISIS. Even still, people like Mr. Ridley continue to assert that extremists are somehow more of a threat to the West than they are to the rest of the world. If anything, Muslims themselves are the biggest victims of extremism, and unless we unite against terrorism by considering it a global problem, it will only fuel more extremists on both sides of the religious and political spectra. And if secularism \u2013 the long championed beacon of liberty cannot unite us in this cause, then it is as dogmatic as radical ideology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his recent piece in The Times, Matt Ridley speaks of how Muslims are \u201cturning away from Islam.\u201d In a scathing and passionate article, he chastises jihadism and militant Islam and suggests humanism and secularism as antidotes to the same. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5481,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5481"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aneternityofdiscourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}