05 April 2008
BEIRUT: "We have to refine our notions of secularization," Professor Gudrun Kraemer suggested to her audience at the American University of Beirut (AUB) on Wednesday. "I believe you can oppose secularization but you cannot opt out of it." AUB's Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) sponsored Kraemer's lecture, entitled "Rethinking Secularization in the Middle East." As she noted, secularism is a "hot topic" these days, both politically - as is evident in Lebanon, Iraq and other countries with a substantial mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims - and intellectually.
Just a couple of weeks before Kraemer's talk at AUB, German heavyweight philosopher Jurgen Habermas delivered a lecture to a prestigious Dutch think tank, the Nexus Institute. The talk was entitled "The Post-Secular Society: What does it mean?" Habermas took a critical look at the assumption that modernization goes hand in hand with secularization and necessarily leads to a diminished role for religion in the public sphere.
Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Kraemer has been a prominent figure in scholarship on this region since she earned her PhD in Islamic Studies from Hamburg University in 1982.
She has published extensivly, authoring and co-editing several volumes over the last twenty-odd years - including "Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies" (2006), "Responsabilite, egalite, pluralisme. Reflexions sur quelques notions-cles d'un ordre islamique moderne" (2000) and "The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952" (1989). Her latest monograph, "A History of Palestine," was released at the beginning of this year.
Kraemer explained that this talk was meant to suggest new impulses for thought rather than concrete answers to the question of whether or not secularism was appropriate for the states of this region.
Discussing the need for rethinking secularization in the Middle East, Kraemer said that the traditional concept of the institutional and constitutional separation of church and state is irrelevant to Muslim societies: there exists no "church" as such and the configuration of the "clergy" and the state and social networks is very different from what one finds in the West.
Two dimensions of secularization must be addressed, she argued, referring to the work of Spanish sociologist Jose Casanova. First, the diminishing power of religion to form and inform individual world views and individual conduct. Second, the relegation or withdrawal of religion to the private sphere.
"These ideal types of secularization help clarify our thinking but are not meant to be applied to reality," she said.
Looking at the Middle East, Kraemer identified a very different approach to the concept of secularization and the separation of morals and the law, the public order and the state.
The notion that a person without religious values has no values at all, she remarked, can also be found in the West. In the Muslim world, Kraemer argued, much more significance is placed in religiosity, since conversion from Islam to another religion - or simply abandoning religion altogether - is a public crime. Leaving the community of Muslims, then, becomes equal to leaving the community of citizens.
"To put it briefly," she said, "it's the Sharia that's at debate."
The whole idea of secularization was imposed on the Middle East through Western colonization, she said, and is therefore perceived to be - as foreign domination - alien or bad. That secularization is something "evil" is a claim commonly made by Islamists, she explained, who strongly oppose it and believe it should be combated by applying Sharia, the law of Islam.
"But this notion of the Sharia has been scrutinized by some of the finest minds," she continued, referring to several Western and Middle Eastern intellectuals. The rethinking and refiguring of Sharia has altered its status and function as well as the reflections on ethics, and the law, Kraemer said.
"There is a new way of thinking about general values and morality in Islam," she added.
Kraemer said she does not subscribe to Rudyard Kipling's principle that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."
Instead, the professor said she believes in a meeting and sharing of the two in a process of mutual recognition and interaction that can help to refine our notions of secularization.
Copyright The Daily Star 2008.
