The other day I was listening to NPR and they were discussing at length the upheavals in the Arab world. Offhand I noted how the discussants would occasionally shift between "the Arab world" and "the Muslim world," and naturally they all took for granted the central role that Islam would play in the Egyptian polity (and likely the Libyan one). There was nothing shocking about any of this, but imagine you engaged in some substitution. Switching from "Western world" to "Christian world" would sound old-fashioned and anachronistic. The European Union famously omitted mention of Christianity in its constitution several years back, from which erupted a controversy between its more religious and secular member nations (e.g., Poland vs. France). Western societies may still have Christianity as the dominant religion, but in most cultures it does not have the same relationship to the broader culture that it once did. This is in part due to some radicals on this continent. As outlined in The Godless Constitution the United States of America was founded with a federal government which did not operate under the explicit umbrella of a religious institution. Nor did that federal government engage in any subsidy toward religion. This was a shocking act in its age, as Western civilization had long been predicated on the favor of the gods, and later the Christian God. Not just Western civilization. Even religiously pluralistic and diverse societies, such as that of Imperial Rome or Imperial China, freely mixed the sacred and the secular, under the presumption that the polity would benefit from heavenly favor. This was not exceptional, it was universal. Church and state have been united for all of human history, and only in the past few centuries has the idea of an explicitly secular political system taken hold. America's peculiar system derived from some structural constraints. Because of the religious diversity of the colonies the convention of having one established church would simply not do. Patrick Henry proposed, and campaigned in favor of, a more modest endorsement of a general Christian religion. Even this was rejected. I don't need to go into the history of this. Though some of the Founders were orthodox Christians, most were not, and some, such as Thomas Jefferson, were only cultural Christians at best and rejected most of the tenets of the faith (at least during this period, there is evidence from correspondence that Jefferson mellowed into a more conventional liberal Episcopalianism in his old age). The American experiment worked. France followed in its wake, though more unevenly, as the forces of organized Catholicism did not reach a modus vivendi with the secular state until the 20th century. In many Western societies where religious establishment remains in place, such as in Denmark or England, it is more a matter of custom and tradition than deep sentiment that God must bless the political nation. Granted, there is diversity in practice when it comes to the relationship of religion and state. Nations such as England and the Netherlands subsidize sectarian schools. Such a possibility is not on the table in the United States because of sanction imposed upon the practice by the legal framework by which the nation is bound. I'm generally somewhat averse to simple 'Whig histories' which posit all societies as ascending up the scales of development to liberal democracy in the Western mold. I don't think that all societies need to have the same set of values, with cultural "differences" being reduced to food, dress, music, and language. But I do think there are some cross-cultural universals which seem to bubble up out of the Zeitgeist. After the end of the Bronze Age all the cultures of the Ecumene rejected the practice of human sacrifice, which was relatively widespread before that period. Similarly, in the 20th century all societies accepted that chattel slavery was a violation of fundamental human rights. This is an attitude which contravenes the consensus of almost all societies before the 20th century. Even if there were societies where chattel slavery was not common, it generally did exist on the margins for selected individuals (e.g., prisoners of war). With that in mind, oftentimes I can't but help think that an 18th century Western analogy is appropriate for the Islamic world, in particular the Arab world + Iran + Afghanistan + Pakistan. There are no trenchant radicals in much of the Islamic world who revolt against the presuppositions at the heart of the civilization. Rather, radicals must remain within the broader framework, which takes Islamic truths as presuppositions. This was brought to mind when reading this editorial by a Pakistani liberal:
At a time when enlightenment is seeping through the Islamic heartland in the Middle East, jahiliyah (stubborn arrogance) is taking Pakistan by the throat. If the founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, were alive today, he would live in fear, like the millions of others who share his secular ideology.
As Omar at Brown Pundits notes "a period of extreme ignorance and evil called “Jahiliyah” is itself a fantasy created by later Islamic writers to make the advent of Islam look even more impressive." More recently in the West we've become familiar with the term from the writings of Sayyid Qutb, in some ways the intellectual forefather of Al-Qaeda. It is popular in particular with Salafists and their ilk, who idealize the first years of Islam, and denigrate what came before as darkness. An analogy might be the more extreme Christian apologists who deny the need for any integration of the thought of the pre-Christian world, consigning it to "pagan darkness" (this has generally been a minority position among the majority of the world's Christians, though it has deep roots, going back at least to Tertullian). What is notable is that a liberal Pakistani who was pleading for tolerance, pluralism, and rejection of fundamentalism, still had to operate within the verbal parameters set by the fundamentalists! This is probably function of the fact that these ideas are so ingrained in the audience, their truths are taken so much for granted, that the only leverage one has is to turn them against one's antagonists. But it does say something about a society that a naked rejection of such exclusive axioms is not possible. This is all a preamble to the recent controversy over a Muslim imam in London:
