A win for 'secularists' in Libya? It's not what you think.

How easily we forget that in the West, civic liberalism was preceded by the Protestant Reformation. The liberalization of Christian theology and its daily interface with ordinary folk ushered in secular politics. But that did not mean Christianity stopped influencing politics.

In the late-20th century, crucial breakthroughs on civil rights came through Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblicaly inspired ethos. Today, shifts in church doctrine on abortion, contraception, euthanasia, gender, and same-sex relations still shape civic space. 

Conversely, the failure to liberalize religious traditions can put the brakes on civic culture.

South Africa’s Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church played a key role in supplying the political theology of apartheid. Post-colonial India’s official liberalism collided with a caste system that claimed a Hindu theological basis; that was why Gandhi strove to “recast” that theology.

The road to inclusive civic politics after the Arab Spring runs through the gates of a pluralism that’s validated and supported by religion. The antidote to Al Qaeda and Salafi extremism isn’t an escape from Islam, which is hardly feasible or democratic. It’s a deeper appreciation of a Muslim heritage that belies the bigoted readings of sharia on which those groups base their tribal honor codes.

That heritage is one where the arts, medicine, philosophy, and politics flourished when hard orthodoxy did not. Cairo was born in the 10th century synthesis of a Shiite minority dynasty, the Fatimids, and a Sunni-Jewish-Christian populace; it fostered a world-class cosmopolitan empire that was a match for the Mughals in India and the Ottomans in Turkey.

There is a price to pay for the lazy assumption that tolerance and pluralism are strictly secular virtues. The civil war in Syria, for instance, reflects the folly of such thinking. After half a century of official secularism, the minority Alawites (who are Shiite Muslims) dread their fate under a Sunni Muslim majority.

The answer to such intolerance lies much more in religious liberalization, a process that will take time. Nothing short of the retrieval of pluralist values nurtured in often deeply convivial Muslim relations with each other and with the world’s other great traditions will serve as the basis for inclusive and accountable citizenship today.

It’s a quest in which educators, imams, mosques, the media, and civic organizations have a vital role – including in the West, beyond our post-9/11 phobias and illusions. 

Amyn B. Sajoo lectures in the history and politics of the Muslim world at Simon Fraser University. His books include "Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas" and "Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination."

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