bworldonline/ Opinion Posted on August 27, 2014 09:53:00 PM The secular vs the ‘sacred’ Strategic Perspective René B. Azurin IN THE light of the no-end-in-sight turmoil that engulfs the Middle East, history and political science professor Anthony Pagden offers a fascinating 2,500-year perspective on the recurring and continuing conflict between what is known as the East and what is known as the West (although Pagden makes clear the demarcation is less geographical than cultural). In his award-winning book Worlds At War, he characterizes the essence of this battle as the “struggle” between the secular and the (so-called) sacred. The beginnings of the conflict can probably be traced to the time the Persian king Darius I launched a full-scale war against the Greeks in an attempt “to subdue the whole of Europe” (~490 BC). But -- with the coming of Christianity and then, six centuries later, Islam -- the conflict metamorphosed into an often violent debate on how God had intended man to behave and how his communities ought to be organized. We are today, of course, treated with the latest manifestations of this war as terrible violence erupts daily on our television screens, courtesy of BBC and CNN and Al-Jazeera. That no end is in sight can be gleaned from the fact that the Islamic group Al-Qaeda has vowed that the jihad (holy war) will go on until “the final destruction of the West.” That categorical assertion appears to permit no peaceful resolution.Oxford-educated Pagden is a wonderful storyteller and I found myself thoroughly engrossed in a 625-page account that slid effortlessly over 2,500 years of history. I remember reading it over five straight mornings in the corner of a tiny (but heated) café in one of those places where it makes no sense to stay out in the cold and considerable sense to pay for and nurse a steaming cup of coffee (or two) for as long as one’s coccyx can take it. That was four years ago. It’s not possible, in the space of this column, to even offer a synopsis of Pagden’s “page-turner” (a critic’s words) of a narrative and its wealth of historical detail, but I bring up the book now mainly for its relevant-to-us, though not-really-novel, conclusion. Pagden notes first that: “Political systems are all man-made, and, thus, like all things made by man, even their most fervent admirers have to admit that they may in the end turn out to be wrong, or at least in need of serious modification. The same does not apply to religion. Religions are not, supposedly, made by man but by gods. The stories they tell cannot, therefore, turn out to be wrong, and they can have no alternative endings.” Pagden observes that the three main monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- “all tell a slightly different version of much the same story... (but) each denies the validity of the others.” Christianity and Islam are both especially messianic and “believe that one day they will triumph over all the other faiths in the world.” Both faiths have had their share of “fundamentalists.” But the difference, Pagden argues, is that Christianity “has been compelled over time to be remarkably flexible and accommodating, in order to survive at all, in a world where its chief opponent is not another religion but a general indifference to all religions.” On the other hand, Islam may once have been accommodating but “is no longer so.” Says Pagden, “This is in part a consequence of the current political state of the Muslim world; in part, as we have seen, an embittered reaction against Western neocolonialism.” Pagden points out: “There is also a fundamental theological difference between Islam and Christianity that lies not in the ethical system that underpin both, nor in their conception of God, nor much in their notion of what doing good and doing ill consist of. It lies instead, as all the militants have insisted, in the association between religion and the law.” Pagden quotes a “Letter to America” posted on the Internet in November 2002, supposedly from Osama bin Laden: “You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shari’a of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, chose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your politics, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord your Creator... You are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” In the eyes of the fundamentalist Muslim therefore, America’s v and the West’s -- great crime is “the separation of the secular from the sacred.” How is this relevant to us? Well, we are today poised to incorporate Shari’ah law into our society’s legal framework with the imminent adoption of the Bangsamoro Basic Law, now in the hands of President Aquino and expected to be endorsed soon as urgent to Congress. The text of the law has not been released to the Filipino public but it undoubtedly incorporates provisions consistent with the principle spelled out in the 2012 Framework Agreement: “The Parties recognize the need to strengthen the Shari’ah courts and to expand their jurisdiction over cases. The Bangsamoro shall have competence over the Shari’ah justice system.” I wonder if the Philippine leadership understands that the insistence by the rebel group MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) on the installation of Shari’ah law in the Bangsamoro areas effectively means that it rejects the “Western” values -- individual freedom, tolerance of diversity, an intrinsic set of human rights, the rule of law based on rights and contracts (and not on the supposed prescriptions of some deity), and secularism (the separation of Church and State) -- that our society is founded on. So how can this work? How can “sacred” dogma be compatible with rational thought and progressive science? How can closed-mindedness and intolerance be part of a modern secular state? By this insistence on Shari’ah, the Muslim rebels are telling the rest of us that they will never allow themselves to be integrated into the larger Filipino society. They are also telling us that they believe that those of us who do not live their lives according to the beliefs of devout Muslims are abominations in the eyes of God. The 2,500-year battle rages on. So did our leadership negotiate a peace or agree to a surrender (ours)? One has to wonder if it might not have been better to have just given the territory away, assuming our government couldn’t win control over it. At least then, borders could be built and Filipino taxpayers would not see their money used to support an intolerant and incompatible and hostile ideology that is bound to eventually turn against us. Just asking. Dr. René B. Azurin is a management professor, strategy consultant, and author of several books on government and the economy.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:01:30 +0000
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