Is secularization a historical stage or a norm?

It does not escape attention that social scientists who tie secularization to the end of a historical-evolutionary process are increasingly officious in getting it accepted as a norm. In fact, even in its most ambitious form it is something that cannot be realized, because it is nothing other than a narrative that can be sustained only by ignoring the ties, the intertwinement and the interactions of the supposedly secularized world with religion and religiosity. At the same time, the data on the sociological findings that underpin the secularization narrative are not sufficiently solid or reliable either; or at the very least they have been obtained from within a particular social context, exposed to particular social and historical influences, and often from Christian or Jewish segments of society.

Let us proceed by questioning two important pieces of data on this subject today.

WHO IS WEEPING OVER THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD, AND WHY?

For the renowned German sociologist Max Weber, secularization, as the religious culture of modernity, is explained by a rationalization in which nothing that happens in the world is sought to be understood through an otherworldly factor and everything is attributed to visible causes. The name of this process is given as

the disenchantment of the world

(disenchantment). This points to a transformation of mentality that is thought to give the rational modern world its character. The disenchantment of the world is, in the end, a matter of perception. The world was never enchanted, but there was a belief that it was enchanted, that everything that happened in the world was governed by certain invisible forces.

In the modern world, however, the identification of these factors has given way to rational scientific research.

The crux of the matter may be this: since, for Muslims, the world was never enchanted in this sense to begin with, and indeed Islam is even opposed to magic,

the difference between the consequences of the secularization experienced in the West and the secularization experienced among Muslims is worth dwelling on.

Frankly,

whenever one sees Muslim intellectuals who oppose secularization "because the world is being disenchanted," one cannot help marveling at the mechanisms by which the secularization narrative manages to find defensive ground for itself.

Muslims of course believe in prayer, in the noble recording angels (kiramen katibin), in the existence of other angels around us in the world, and in everything unfolding according to a plan of divine decree and destiny. They take their own precautions accordingly, but this is a realm of precaution and consciousness very different from the situation in which, for Christians, the world is enchanted, which in fact operates a kind of animist consciousness. That is why Muslims are the last people who would weep because the world is being disenchanted, and in fact, despite all the processes of rationalization, secularization or modernization, they have not severed their ties with the realm of the malakut (the unseen dominion). This relationship is maintained in a manner consistent with the most rational level.

SO WHAT DOES SOCIOLOGY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS?

The second point is this: secularism was seen as the necessary ideology of urban society, which developed as a result of the process of industrialization. For industry dissolved the traditional world based on religion and organized the urban environment, in which religious relativity prevails, according to its own needs.

By creating a de facto situation, it wrested one last concession from religions, which the priority of these needs, being relative to begin with, had already weakened considerably in their claim to truth. That was to give priority, in the organization of daily life and in the construction of the calendar and the clock, not to the needs of religions or of the religious, but to the needs of industrial production.

Among the unending priorities of industry, no suitable space was left for the performance of any worship, ritual or habitus based on religion.

In this situation, secularization could be seen not as a purge or a cultural assimilation program imposed on the religious through political pressure, but as the result of a sociological process affecting the whole world at once. Moreover, secularization, and atheism as its ultimate theology, do not advance as a result of new developments, new arguments or evidence emerging in the world of knowledge; on the contrary, they develop as a result of the fact that this way of life has left no practical space for religion.

In fact, as an Islamic principle of faith and practice also reminds us,

"if people do not live as they believe, they begin to believe as they live."

Thus the undeniable reality of the effect of lifestyles on people's ways of thinking and believing sufficiently explains the sociological development of secularization.

The truly interesting point is that in the most advanced stages of the consumption-based modern, even postmodern, way of life, which has in fact left no space whatsoever for religious practice, where one would expect secularization or atheism to increase even further, precisely the opposite development has emerged.

Today we live in a world far faster, far more consumption-based, far more globalized, far more capitalist and far more intertwined than the modern world that is thought to have given birth to secularization as a necessary sociological outcome. Yet we also see that, within this world, with each passing day people's cosmological conceptions are more affected than their own subjective perceptions of religion. It is another world, filled with people from different religious realms who live side by side, clash or reconcile, tense up or become articulated with one another…

This very development lays bare in all its nakedness the human self-sufficiency, pride and heedlessness that underlie the presentation of secularization as a norm

and also reminds us once again that secularization, just like religiosity, is one of the most fundamental states of the human being.

To witness this fundamental human condition certainly teaches a person better, until it teaches him God better as well.