The crisis of secularization theory and new quests

One of the most powerful narratives to which the modern world has resorted in order to make sense of itself is the secularization narrative.

For a long time it was thought that modernization necessarily gave rise to secularization, and that economic development, urbanization, rising levels of education and the spread of scientific knowledge would inevitably reduce the influence of religion in social life. This idea was not merely an academic theory but at the same time the modern world's own belief, its narrative, about itself.

In this sense, secularization theory expressed for the modern world less an explanation than an expectation, even a prophecy of glad tidings.

Yet the developments of the last half century have seriously shaken the basic assumptions of this grand narrative. While religion was expected to withdraw from the modern world, in many parts of the world religion has returned to public life.

Moreover, this return has taken place not only in the Islamic world but in different forms in the US, in India, in Latin America, in Israel and even within Europe itself. Thus the most fundamental assumption of secularization theory, the proposition that "as modernization increases, religion decreases," has come increasingly to be questioned.

Today one of the most important developments in the social sciences is that the necessary relationship established between modernity and secularity has been dissolved. Some social scientists who were once among the strongest defenders of secularization theory have shown that the modern world actually develops within a far more complex web of relations than was supposed.

These criticisms are in fact also born of a need for explanation in the face of developments in the world that secularization theories could not explain. Today we can see more clearly that the modern world is not a world in which religion has been liquidated, but a post-secular world in which different religious and secular modes of existence live side by side.

As we have been arguing for years, the issue is not a struggle for final victory between religion and secularity. The real issue is on what ground, within all the complexity of modern life, man's search for meaning, his demand for freedom, his moral responsibility and his social solidarity can be rebuilt. For this reason we continue to think that the question of secularization should be evaluated not merely as a problem belonging to the historical experience of the West, but as an ever-reproduced dimension of man's relationship with himself, with the world and with transcendence.

Of course, one of the most important dimensions that confronts us when we historicize secularization is that its development, especially in the Islamic world, even in its idealized form, was not at all a result of modernization. More importantly, in the Islamic world the history of secularization and the history of colonization are closely connected to one another.

The issue of the worldliness of daily life of course constitutes an important aspect of secularization, and this, contrary to what is supposed, has been an important topic not only in modern times but always.

In modern times, the secularization of daily life was unable to prevent the development of religious movements in the same environment. Examples in which religiosity and secularity could coexist at the same time in different segments of society have always existed in the modern period too. But the imposition of secularity on people as a politics and way of life emerged as a result of the colonization of the Islamic world and the separation of religion and state affairs in the Islamic world.

Here, another dimension of the historicity of secularity that belongs to our age and our societies must also be distinguished. Although in the West laicism emerged as a result of, and as a solution to, Europe's long religious conflicts, the model of laicism offered to the Islamic world developed as a model that Europe designed and imposed for the Islamic world. These impositions were constantly sought to be supported by another side narrative: namely, that secularization or laicism, with reference to an experience in the West, always better served religious peace. Yet in the Islamic world laicism turned into an ideological choice no less than the bigoted religionisms of Europe's Middle Ages.

Rather than a model of government or a solution securing peace, laicism has functioned as a religious choice that applied the heaviest pressures on other religions, and especially on Islam. As such, far from serving social peace, it has become the source of the greatest threat against peace.

Secularization has brought the Islamic world neither democracy nor social peace, not even development, and all despotic regimes pursue a largely secular politics. Secularity, which in the Islamic world works like a colonial agent fighting against the people's beliefs, values and traditions, has nonetheless, through the resistance it triggers in society, put a brake on the sociological development secularization was predicted to follow.

Consequently, secularization analyses for the Islamic world cannot remain within a framework in which only religiosity or piety is measured and evaluated. In particular, the relations established between secularization on the one hand and modernization and democratization on the other cannot be understood simply through sociological models.

Just as secularization did not essentially develop in a single model in Europe, religion in Europe never experienced an absolute withdrawal as is supposed. In the same way, the modernization of the Islamic world need not necessarily have brought secularization with it.

Indeed, there are many examples in which piety or Islamism made greater advances under the most repressive secular regimes. The people's clinging to piety as the state becomes more secular is in fact also a result of laicism being seen as an external intervention. Türkiye is at the top of these examples. Examples like Algeria, Syria and Tunisia are each unique instances of the people's response to state laicism by becoming more pious.

Likewise, in a regime repressive in the name of religion such as Iran, this time secularization represents the people's language of resistance.

These examples in themselves show that the situation is more complex than supposed. Here there are enough examples to show that the state's laicism and the people's processes of becoming pious or secularized do not run at all linearly.