The term “Secularism” has historical roots dating back to the religious wars in Europe that erupted in the 17th century and the emergence of the modern nation-state, where power shifted to the civil state away from the domination of the church.
The late scholar Dr. Abdel Wahab El-Messiri, in his encyclopedia “Partial Secularism and Comprehensive Secularism,” differentiates between two approaches to understanding secularism. Some restrict it to the separation of religion from politics and the economy, meaning the separation of religion from the state. This type of secularism does not oppose religious and moral principles but does not wish to involve them in worldly affairs subject to experimentation.
There is also comprehensive secularism, which strictly tries to neutralize the relationship between religion and values in various life aspects. It believes that only materialism can explain phenomena and that the material is the center of the universe. This concept developed through eras with the rise of the nation-state, European colonialism, increased production, the erosion of intermediate institutions like the family, the spread of value-free utilitarian thought, a shift towards rampant consumerism, and finally to the post-modern era with the spread of multinational corporations and phenomena such as sexual deviance, the nuclear family, and the misuse of science in medical and research fields.
The secular state, with its educational, entertainment, and media institutions, has reached the human conscience, infiltrated dreams and behavior, and undermined what remains of religious or even human morals!
When Socialism and Liberalism Met
El-Messiri points out the essential material essence of Western philosophies, despite surface differences. The Soviet Union, deeply entrenched in comprehensive communism, quickly adopted liberal values and American goods obsessively upon its fall. Meanwhile, the United States, which still allowed freedom of belief and Protestant religious propaganda, fell deeply into secularism and atheism due to the expansion of industrialization, urbanization, and the commodification of everything, including humans—a process known as “Americanization.” This resulted in the widespread prevalence of McDonald's, Pepsi, hamburgers, sexual advertisements, war movies, the American lifestyle, and songs and literature linked to the grim reality rather than ideals, despite its inherent racist bias against the Third World, Arabs, and Muslims specifically.
Globalization has literally dismembered the world and its people with its colonial advance, the emergence of Westernized elites in the Third World who rule through oppression, supported by Western (democratic secular) countries, or through phenomena like Nazism and Zionism that dismantled Polish, Russian, and Jewish humans in Europe, and Palestinians in our Arab East. Thus, the history of secularism cannot be separated from the history of modern Western colonialism.
Between Nazism and Zionism!
Modern secularism is an expression of the disappearance of values and the sacred from human life, and the glorification of commodities and materialism alone, leading to “the computerization of everything,” as El-Messiri describes. He links what happened to European Jews, who were treated as obsolete parts to be eliminated and transferred to Eastern countries, with what the Zionists, supported by America, are doing today by displacing and exterminating Palestinians.
El-Messiri also connects Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers with the persecution, extermination, and imprisonment faced by Palestinians today at the hands of the Zionist Nazis of our time. This is done by cold-blooded employees who believe these systematic steps are necessary for the security of “Israel,” the offspring of Western colonialism; from their perspective, it is a rational matter unrelated to emotions or history, which they simply erase to let the Darwinian theory of the fittest prevail.
In his famous book “Modernity and the Holocaust,” Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman links modernity with the fall of values, with increasing relativism and the absolute religious truth, leading to a focus on the body and the absence of any standard in human behavior. Instead, there is an instrumental rationality concerned only with procedures, not ends, just as the Nazis sought to exterminate the mentally and physically disabled through “euthanasia” before moving to gas chambers to suffocate the Jews, considering them all useless categories!
Some have linked the secular Turkish forces during the rule of Erbakan to this tendency, as they staged a military coup against the people's choice of a moderate Islamic party, the Welfare Party. Here, the secular forces became the greatest adversary of democracy, turning into a fascist secularism until the balance of moderation was restored later.
El-Messiri highlights an important aspect: the impact of Western pragmatic thinking on Arab political elites over the past decades. With it, the Palestine cause shifted from being a matter of land taken from its rightful owners and given to Jews who committed horrific massacres and destruction to reclaiming the borders of 1967. We began to concede little by little, and the discourse changed after the Camp David Accords, taking an economic rather than an Arab nationalist form, until the hope became a ceasefire on innocent people and halting the expansion of settlements.
If we contemplate “Israel,” we will see it as merely a practical application of Western imperialism, which has always exterminated millions and plundered their resources in Africa and Latin America for its interests. Zionism is a secular Darwinian movement that turned Jews and Palestinians into utilitarian materials to achieve its goals, just as it did in Vietnam, Bosnia, Chechnya, and all the roles led by American intelligence.
Secularism from Within
Secularism never carried the dream of peace, justice, and equality as it claims. The French Revolution was a period of sacred violence, Napoleon's armies brought nothing but destruction and death to Eastern countries, as did the British Empire, which plundered the resources and enslaved the people. The Bolshevik Revolution produced Stalin in Russia, and thus were the secular regimes around the world.
El-Messiri, in his encyclopedia, dedicates sections to miserable models produced by secularism, such as the Singaporean hero (transformed into a production hero and a greedy consumer market), the Thai hero (transformed into a sexual force that can be marketed), and finally, the hero by Zionist standards, where sheer material brute force devoid of any value decides to exterminate the other in its camps.
Colonialism, by the logic of “transfer”—meaning a person who believes in moving and has no loyalty to culture or place—created pockets loyal to it in all its former colonies. It moved Chinese people to Malaysia, Jews to Palestine, and Jews also to Argentina, thus moving the human surplus it did not want to achieve its interests.
The idea of transition and instability evolved to include even the human gender. A man could become a woman and vice versa, and the call for free choice of partner emerged, with men marrying men and women marrying women. Thus, humanity fell into the swamp of deviation from any value or instinct.
Comprehensive secularism reduced humans to raw materials, cheap labor, and guaranteed markets for the benefit of the stronger and superior race in its biased colonial view. It encouraged the division of the world into small nation-states, then further divided them and stirred up prejudices to maintain its dominance. Meanwhile, it raised consumption rates, increased market demand, and spread Americanization, ending the uniqueness of cultures and the individuality of humans. It encouraged the idea of immediate gratification of desires outside traditional systems. At its core, America denies humanity and sanctifies materialism. Our duty is to confront secularism with a comprehensive project expressing our open, civilized, and authentic Arab-Islamic identity and instilling it in future generations.
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