Secularism's claim to universality as a Western narrative

One of the most important features characterizing the so-called postmodern world was that the great causes and great stories, in his phrase meta-narratives, in which people would believe and for whose sake they would mobilize en masse, would no longer hold sway. These meta-narratives that played a major role in the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as freedom, equality, socialism, enlightenment, justice, would come to an end, and people would be left alone with their more local, more micro-level and extremely multiplied stories.

This was not, of course, an ideal or a desire of the postmoderns; it was a diagnosis. But even as a diagnosis it must have been rather hasty. Because the history of humanity's acquiring new idols for itself does not look likely to end any time soon. Meta-narratives are, ultimately, the natural results of the drive, inherent in human nature, to construct virtual realities and to induce people to believe in them. The history of people making their own idols and finding a buyer for them does not come to an end as long as human beings exist.

Even in the postmodern period, the narrative of "bringing democracy" to backward regions groaning under dictatorships, in the name of sustaining Western hegemony's own narrative, remained effective for some time longer. Was not "democracy" brought to Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of this grand narrative? No argument was put forward to persuade people of this new grand narrative; in the dust and smoke of the September 11 attacks, ABD and its allies were able to persuade people in a mode of lament in which every kind of story was held excusable.

Let us admit that no one sufficiently questioned how ABD and its allies, having brought and sown democracy in Iraq, managed to reap terror from it. Subsequently the so-called "Islamic terror" on which ABD and the whole Western alliance based their security narrative kept arising in the regions to which they had brought democracy, and provided the justification they needed for their own wars. Of course, it must also be seen separately that this justification, or the persuasiveness of grand narratives, is directly connected with the power to establish a fait accompli.

Perhaps one of the greatest narratives pointing to this de facto power is the narrative of secularization. Secularism is one of the most important components on which the West today defines itself and bases its claims of universality. Secularization, as a concept identified with the West, is at the same time the opposite of Islam.

Therefore the acceptance that as ground is covered in secularization as a universal value, one is advancing step by step toward the absolute victory of Western hegemony, that is, of modernism, is lodged in minds like an axiom. It is well known that in Niyazi Berkes's famous work "Modernization in Turkey", modernization is used, in the mental and institutional sense, as synonymous with Westernization, and that in turn with secularization.

By contrast, all manifestations, reflections, and symbols that evoke and bring up Islam are reflected as an objection to secularization with its claim of universality, a makeshift exception, and a scandal.

According to the analyses of Salman Sayyid, there is another sub-discourse to which secularization discourses cling in order to break this resistance, namely to bring to the fore movements, thoughts, and tendencies parallel to secularism from within Islam, just as from within other cultures that could display similar resistances. Thus, although in essence Western-patented, one ends up clinging to the claim of universality of secularism.

Indeed, the discourses put forward in the name of the secularization of Muslims, even if by way of the complaint of some Muslims, end up supporting these claims: universalizing secularization to the point that it can manifest itself even within Islam or among Muslims.

Yet as one of the powerful narratives of Western hegemony, the most conspicuous claim of secularization is its claim of universality. This claim of universality is sought to be proven by showing that it can be found in every part of the world and in every culture, and at the same time it is presented as the final point of an evolutionary line that all humanity will eventually reach. Therefore even the Muslims who today appear as an obstacle in the way of this inevitable evolutionary path will eventually secularize.

The huge book "A Secular Age," published a while ago (2007) by the famous philosopher Charles Taylor and awarded the Templeton Prize (Turkish translation Dost Körpe, İş Bankası Yayınları), is also bound with great fidelity to this narrative, and tries to show how all cultures and beliefs in the world find the secular reason immanent within themselves. In fact Taylor may even be counted a devout Catholic who has devoted all his work to building a multicultural, peaceful world, but the narrative of the universality of secularization, to whose spread he too has served with all his philosophical power, becomes one of the examples of the narratives the postmoderns think they have left behind.

Coping with this narrative is an important step in the search for the construction of Muslim subjectivity that Salman Sayyid undertakes in "Remembering the Caliphate".

Perhaps we can try to shake this narrative philosophically with a few questions. For example: is the fact that traces of secularization are found in the earliest times a sign of its universality, or of its being an utterly archaic attitude?

Or does the fact that there are tendencies toward this thought or attitude in all the cultures of the world again show not its universality but that it is a mixture that cannot be defined so as to include all its members and exclude all others? Let us proceed from here..