Did you say the Secular Age?

If you read the literature on secularization and pay too much attention to its discourse, you cannot help seeing world history as a process flowing toward secularization. For this literature narrates everything like a film in which secularization plays the leading role. In truth, you do not acquire this impression only when reading the history of secularization. You can acquire it in the same way when you read the history of modernization, or the history of class struggles. Modernization theories direct everything that has happened and is happening in the world toward a telos (an aim, a destination) called modernization. There, too, we are watching a film in which modernization plays the leading role.

For Marxists, whatever is noteworthy in world history finds its meaning only within class struggles, and world history operates as a coherent and orderly dialectical process whose direction and course is communism. For this reason, early Marxists could not be made interested in anything in world history other than class struggles.

Seen through a Marxist window, everything confirms Marxist theory, and the struggles of the classes bring humanity closer every day to that magnificent finale. True, because of predictions that never came to pass, the number of those who look from this theory is steadily declining and the zeal of those who insist on looking has suffered a break; but this is the view from the world of those who insist on producing the discourse.

It is worth looking from this point at the impressions that are, so to speak, being pressed upon us that everyday life is becoming increasingly secularized.

That is to say, to a large extent the matter has to do with historiography, with what kind of narrative you build in the process, and with what you place at the center of your narrative

.

When you dive into the pages of Charles Taylor's recently published massive book A Secular Age, you do, admittedly, also see an effort, wrestling with Orientalism and Eurocentric historiography, to show that secularization has unfolded in different ways in different societies; yet in the end you are also loaded with the narrative that the world is in an evolution toward secularization at the center of the whole story. That the narrative is built within a fiction of evolution, and that as a result the secular is portrayed as the victor at the end of history, in fact constitutes, as we have mentioned before, another facet of all modernization narratives.

Yet it is also possible for the same reality to be lived, felt or perceived differently in other social circles or worlds.

What we see when we look from our side is not a

Secular Age

but, for instance, an age that is plunged deeper every day into religiosity. The world is falling every day more into religious fanaticism, and the popularity of right-wing conservative parties is increasing throughout the European continent, where the highest examples of secularity were first seen. This increase at the same time brings with it the strengthening and rising influence of religious identity, even if perhaps not in proportion to piety.

The determining weight of those who look at the events in the Middle East entirely from a religious window and who joined this process precisely with this motivation is not to be underestimated. For instance, there is nothing in the great adventures the US has undertaken for Israel's security that can be explained by America's economic interests or by some other rationality. In the US and in Europe, and of course, from a different standpoint, in the Muslim world too, there live masses of people who see what is happening in this geography entirely as the realization of their own religious future.

Looking from this angle, what you see as the dominant character of this age is not secularity but an utterly determining religiosity

; with its eschatology, its theodicy, its theology, its messianism, and with the practical participation that gives life to all these... That is, with the will of servants resolved to fulfill prophecy by forcing God into the apocalypse.. Such is human being; as is declared in the Surah Yasin, people

"turn into ready armies at the command of the gods they worship so that those gods may help them, giving those gods life themselves."

There is idolatry in this picture, but there is no departure from religiosity; on the contrary, there is an intense religiosity.

It seems unavoidable that the level of religiosity or secularity is measured largely by the amount of visibility. Both the discourses that narrate secularization and those that narrate religious revival or conservatization base their claims on the visibility of religion. Yet when it comes to religiosity, there is no objective criterion that adequately appreciates how important intention, the heart and sincerity are. As a simple example, a prayer performed so that others may see it and so that one may secure a place in society, and which has not the slightest share of piety, is inevitably entered into the statistics of religiosity.

Yet in reality that prayer is an utterly secular prayer.

Conversely, the action of someone who does his work in the best way, doing so with a passion for worship and believing that he will thereby win God's pleasure, is not recorded in any religious category at all. Yet this action, too, is an extremely pious action. That is why a believer does even the most worldly-seeming, worldly-judged action with the basmala and instantly makes it religious. Someone else can do the same action as an utterly secular action, as his own action.

Someone looking from the outside cannot distinguish between these two actions, but in their inner worlds there is an unbridgeable difference between them.

For a Muslim who reads the Qur'an, whose mind resonates with the Qur'an's concepts and whose heart resonates with its verses, everything that happens in the world takes place under God's knowledge, decree and oversight, and God has not withdrawn from this world. What the narrative of the secular age tries to suggest is that God, or in the words of the secular literature "the gods", is no longer in demand among people and has therefore, albeit indirectly, withdrawn from this world. Frankly, this is not factually true, for there is no decrease but an increase in people's turning to religion. To see this, it is enough to change one's point of view.

Those who contribute to the secularization narrative with a kind of pessimism from an Islamist or conservative perspective are also not, in my view, doing the right thing. While trying to defend religiosity against the winds of secularization, they end up contributing to secularity's proclaiming its victory.