Skip to main content

The myth of the 'neutral' state

The liberal project frequently invokes state neutrality as the argument against ‘moral policing’ presumably on the ground that morality is a private matter. This claim is weak on several fronts. The state cannot possibly be morally neutral. Nor does it make sense to argue that the secular state model is the best example for the negotiation of ‘competing’ claims. One should aspire towards a state based on shared values. The slogan is often quoted that in a plural society, the secular state represents the best model for society. The issue is especially relevant in the context of countries with significant Muslim minorities.

Philosophically speaking, the neutrality argument represents a challenge to the Aristotelian view. The liberal philosopher Joseph Raz even questioned its basic postulate. Raz affirms the view that … Perhaps deeper than this is much more epistemological and spiritual: no believer can ever think of doing anything to be outside religion. The qur’anic sacralisation of the whole world as a matrix of ayat (signs), the valorization of all deeds as ‘ibadah (worship),The mystic Hugo of St. Victor once said, omnis natura, Deo lognitur (the whole of nature speaks of God). According to the Oxford legal scholar, Sandra Fredman, the illusion of state neutrality should be replaced with effective checks and balances. 

Justification for secularism as a political principle usually rests on the claim that the state should not express preference to any particular religion; it should be neutral in this respect. Yet this argument is untenable because (a) religions are not mutually exclusive, so that the advancement of one does not by default preclude others: there is ample scope for shared values; (b) neutrality is impossible to start with, because any decision made by the state is bound to have endorsers (who are in this case ‘privileged’) and those who object to the decision (who are ‘discriminated against’); (c) social and political disputes between adherents of different religions should not be seen as conflicts between religions per se but rather as disputes between those groups alone; (d) values that are publicly cherished, such as justice, peace and dignity, which the state should be committed to, have religious basis and implications; and (e) citizens, politicians and state officials are individuals with their own beliefs and principles which are derived simultaneously from a variety of sources (including religion), and which influence their decisions whether consciously or unconsciously. The way forward is not state neutrality but to allow religious values to flourish so that it is the religions themselves that will weed out sectarian tendencies within themselves and forge a universal and inclusive approach in their encounter with each other.  
 
It is because of this that the Shariah has been taken by some as a zero-sum game, which has been invariably associated exclusively with corporeal punishments, exclusivism and misogyny. This is despite the gush of writings lately on the higher intent or objectives of the Shari’ah (maqasid al-Shari’ah), an approach that now seeks to adapt the Shariah to changing realities.
A plural society, we maintain, is not served well by the secular model but by a commitment to shared values. Moreover, with the return of religion to the public sphere, it is questionable that the state should be based as such. This cannot be done without recourse to totalitarianism and despotism. Rousseau’s concept of ‘freedom’ was ‘wide’ enough to include forcing people to be free.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Conscience of the Market

When we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity, deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.
Post a Comment
Read more

Al-Attas on 'Islamic civilization'

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s definition of ‘Islamic civilization’: “I define Islamic civilization as a civilization that emerges among the diversity of cultures of Muslim peoples of the world as a result of the permeation of the basic elements of the religion of Islam which those peoples have caused to emerge from within themselves. The process by which such emergence comes about is called Islamization, which is the liberation first from magical, mythical, animistic and ethnic cultural tradition incompatible with Islam, and then from secular control over one’s reason and one’s language. Whatever basic and praiseworthy elements of the pre-Islamic civilization that bind people together and are accepted as compatible with Islam become part of Islamic civilization. It is a living civilization whose pulse describes a process of Islamization, not in the dialectical sense of an evolutionary ‘development’, but in the sense of a progress involving every generation of Muslim towards r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberalism's flaw - the 'contingency' of freedom

One serious error in liberal articulation of freedom and human rights lies in its contingent theory of freedom. That is to say, liberalism posits freedom as the absence of state intrusion into the private lives of individuals: freedom is contingent on such omission by the state, barring which the individual is denied his freedom. At its basic and most fundamental level, it is a recognition that the state has the ability to undermine the freedom of the individual. The state is thus unduly given the power to decide and determine the freedom of the individual. This is grotesquely false for freedom is ultimately secured deep within the soul and it is so powerful that no one save God is able to take it away from the individual. In conceiving of freedom in the socio-political sense, liberal philosophers have practically mutilated it and truncated it beyond recognition such that ‘freedom’ is now given an exclusively narrow and limited province, robbing it off the vastness and richness that ...
Post a Comment
Read more