HOW AND WHY IS SECULARISM IMPORTANT?

A poor illiterate young man man who hawks food on pavements in a city helps his teenage wife to complete her school education and train as a software engineer. The wife is eventually hired by a major IT company.

Add to this little story the fact that both come from a conservative community that lives in a slum in an Indian city, and in which the girls are married off early, and are discouraged from continuing their education.

Is it at all relevant to the story that they are Muslims? Is it relevant that they are shown (in the Al Jazeera vignette below) as non-secular (they are shown praying together for continued success once they move to another city) ?

Why, and in what respect, and to what extent is secularism important?

These questions about secularism and religious identity become even more pressing in another story from Al Jazeera. This concerns Rewati the Muslim mother who converted to Hinduism to marry her Hindu husband, and who is consequently incarcerated in an Islamic rehabilitation centre and prevented from rejoining her husband, while her daughter is taken by her parents to be brought up as a Muslim.

Here we have members of a Malaysian Muslim community who reject the secularism of the constitution that allows individuals freedom of religion. Do these individuals speak for the entire community? It appears that in Malaysia, ethnic Malays are Muslim by definition, and are therefore subject to the operation of sharia law which criminalizes apostasy for Muslims. Effectively, this means that the freedom of religion guaranteed in the constitution is only available for people of other religious communities. Yet there are individual Muslims who reject this enforced identity.

I have earlier expressed myself against the kind of secular fundamentalism that criminalizes people or excludes them from public life on the basis of public expressions of religious identity or affiliation such as a head scarf or a beard. The case of Rewati in Malaysia shows clearly how even systems of religious law could have the same effect of restricting individual freedoms and turning oppressive in other ways. The sharia and similar systems of religious law in other traditions either need to be abandoned in favour of secular laws, or need to be reformed to permit people to exercise freedom of religious practice and identity without fearing social ostracism and oppression.

In general, most communities today are multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to identify consistently with all the values and cultural attributes of any one community. Moreover, the values and cultural attributes themselves are in the process of change at an unprecedentedly rapid pace. Laws need to recognize and reflect this pluralism. To have a legal system that criminalizes apostasy is to continue with anachronistic systems of social sanction and control.

To return to the case of Fatima Bi and her husband, their story seems to break all stereotypes common among Hindu Indians about Muslims. Not only that, notice that the recourse to religious rituals to secure worldly success is something that cuts across religious boundaries. The secular-minded might throw up their hands in exasperation, but the fact remains that for most people in the world, the secular and the religious are closely intertwined, not only in their lives as private individuals, but also as members of communities. For most people, the secular - the need to survive and succeed economically, the search for material comfort, convenience and efficiency, the search for pleasure and the good life - is usually embedded, in ways that are not immediately obvious - in the meanings and purposes of life that are provided by religious narratives. Therefore to insist on the relegation of religion to the private sphere, as if it's an embarrassing bathroom habit, is a mistake, and a terrible one, as the Malaysian example of allowing the sharia to dictate the religious affiliation of Muslims so poignantly illustrates.

In the recent past, religion - meaning religious language, symbolism, myths and stories, and systems of belief - seem to have been used mainly to spread homicidal hatred. Would it not be much better to encourage a dialogue between religions, as well as within religions, so that religious resources are mobilized for the political task of building freer and fairer societies in ways that most people understand?

Comments

[FreeStoring]

hay!!
good project :)
senks :)