If Alexis de Tocqueville were alive today to witness the churning unrest and revolutions sweeping North Africa and Middle East in recent years, he would observe numerous contrasts with what he saw in America in the 1830s.\u00a0 But permit me to speculate on one similarity that might catch his eye.\u00a0 Unlike the French Revolution, which pitted freedom against religion, he would notice that forces of religion and freedom, in the early American republic and across the Arabic world today, were and are complexly intertwined.<\/p>\n
As Tocqueville memorably wrote in Democracy in America<\/em>: \u201cUpon my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye.\u00a0 As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from this new state of things.\u00a0 In France I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions.\u00a0 But in America I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil.\u201d<\/p>\n To many intellectuals shaped by the European experience of modernity, recent events in the Middle East\u2013which have included demonstrators chanting \u201cGod is great,\u201d protests scheduled after Friday prayers, and appeals to the Qur\u2019an<\/em> to affirm human dignity\u2013were not the way history was supposed to turn out.\u00a0 Once upon a time, figures such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, among others, gave birth to what in the academy came to be known as the \u201csecularization thesis\u201d\u2014the positing of a tight link between political modernization and secularization.\u00a0\u00a0 But as the sociologist Peter Berger has noted, the secularization thesis was \u201cessentially mistaken\u201d; it was \u201can extrapolation of the European experience to the rest of the world,\u201d leading many scholars beguiled by the prestige of Western social science to underestimate the global staying power of religion.<\/p>\n For much of modern history, the American experiment in religious liberty and America\u2019s comparatively high levels of belief have posed a riddle to the secularist European imagination.\u00a0 As Karl Marx once put it, \u201cNorth America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, but since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of the political order itself.\u201d\u00a0 More recently, David Martin has observed, educated Europeans often view the religious field in America not in light of its own provenance, but as a case of \u201carrested development\u201d when compared to European secularist benchmarks.<\/p>\n When political modernity violently descended upon the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I, it was by and large not the American model of religious liberty that stood at the disposal of political reformers, but what the Turkish political scientist Ahmet T. Kuru has called \u201cassertive secularism,\u201d which took its cue from the French Revolutionary tradition, in general, and the secularist laws of church-state separation enacted in France in 1905, in particular.\u00a0 (This imported modernity often came with a heavy dose of nationalism as well.)\u00a0 The towering example, of course, were the Kemalist reforms in Turkey of the 1920s, which imposed a draconian secularism\u2014cribbed directly from recent French history\u2013on the collapsed Ottoman Empire, which prior to the war exercised suzerainty over much of the Arabic world.\u00a0 The Turkish word for secularism (laiklik<\/em>) comes directly from the French, la\u00efcit\u00e9.<\/em><\/p>\n Moreover, in many countries today, Arab societies associate secularism with postcolonial autocratic regimes that subjugated their populations to the cause of Arab nationalism.\u00a0 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali\u2019s Tunsia and Hosni Mubarak\u2019s Eygpt epitomized this reality.\u00a0 Thus for decades, many in the Middle East, not unreasonably, have felt secularism was joined at the hip with corruption, dictatorship, and nepotism.\u00a0\u00a0 Not surprisingly, many have regarded Islam as an alternative source of personal meaning and political inspiration.<\/p>\n Times change, of course.\u00a0 In Turkey today, the legacy of Kemalism is in retreat as liberals and religion-friendly moderates, such as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, argue for a middle path between militant secularism and militant Islam.\u00a0 (Erdogan, a man not without his shortcomings, has in fact spoken of wanting \u201claiklik<\/em> American-style\u201d.)\u00a0\u00a0 In Europe, too, the American religious experiment\u2014though still often caricatured in high-brow circles\u2014has begun to receive more sympathetic engagement and a variety of more nuanced, \u201cTocquevillean\u201d voices have come on the scene.<\/p>\n In France, challengers to the status quo of la\u00efcit\u00e9 and the 1905 law of church-state separation have recently argued for greater public visibility of religious belief and less hostility on the part of the state toward religious actors in society.\u00a0 The historian Jean Baub\u00e9rot, for example, has argued that the day is long past when one needs to fear a zero-sum game between anticlerical secularists and nostalgics for a Catholic Ancien R\u00e9gime.\u00a0 Present-day realities of immigration and globalization should lead to a loosening of militant secularism and a more fluid, open-ended process of negotiation and dialogue with religious currents in society.\u00a0 Without these, he fears, many Muslim immigrants and some French Christians will be tempted to measure their worth by intransigence and withdrawal, not by their ability to interact peaceably with civil society. \u00a0Similarly, Jean-Paul Williame, a leading sociologist of French secularism, has argued that France today stands in need of a \u201cmore secular secularism\u201d (la\u00efcit\u00e9 plus la\u00efque<\/em>), which would be less \u201cconfessional,\u201d \u201cmodern American,\u201d and more open to \u201ca certain return of religion to the public sphere\u201d than France\u2019s traditional secularism.<\/p>\n Most remarkably of all, the German philosopher J\u00fcrgen Habermas, the eminence grise of European enlightenment values, has in recent years spoken of the reality of the \u201cpost-secular\u201d and the limits of a one-size-fits-all secularism that compels religious believers to articulate their intuitions about morality and the good life in an idiom foreign and often adverse to their deepest convictions.\u00a0 \u201c[T]he democratic state,\u201d he writes, \u201cmust not pre-emptively reduce the polyphonic complexity of the diverse public voices, because it cannot know whether it is not otherwise cutting society off from scarce resources for the generation of meanings and shaping identities.\u00a0 Particularly with regard to social relations, religious traditions possess the power to convincingly articulate moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions.\u201d<\/p>\n To be sure, the legacy of Kemalism\u2014or \u201cMubarakism\u201d\u2013will not vanish immediately across the Arabic world\u2014at least if one understands the term to suggest fear-mongering among old-guard leaders against popular religious sentiment in the public square.\u00a0 And it is not lost on anyone that darker, seductive versions of Islam abound and crave power.\u00a0 (One should not confuse the Muslim Brotherhood with the Methodists!)\u00a0\u00a0 But, historically, these two antipodes\u2014secularist\/nationalist political fear-mongering and Islamism\u2013have only fed upon one another.\u00a0 The challenge of the future\u2014and it is a daunting one\u2013remains to nourish a sane middle ground, deflating extremities by giving religious concerns a more centrist, democratic public voice\u2014and a voice not hostile to minorities, such as the Copts in Egypt.<\/p>\n With the distorting lens of the secularization thesis exposed and the viability of assertive secularism under scrutiny, the American religious experiment; Tocqueville, one of its greatest interpreters; and\u2014surprise, surprise\u2014many among Europe\u2019s present-day intelligentsia stand ready to offer food for thought.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If Alexis de Tocqueville were alive today to witness the churning unrest and revolutions sweeping North Africa and Middle East in recent years, he would observe numerous contrasts with what he saw in America in the 1830s.\u00a0 But permit me to speculate on one similarity that might catch his eye.\u00a0 Unlike the French Revolution, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[500,262,29,305,1],"tags":[668,669,2840,664,662,665,666,667,663],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-religious-history","category-democracy","category-religious-freedom","category-tal-howard","category-uncategorized","tag-france","tag-french-revolution","tag-islam","tag-kemail","tag-middle-east","tag-muslim-brotherhood","tag-secularism","tag-tocqueville","tag-turkey"],"yoast_head":"\n