Dare to understand! · جرأت کن بفهمی!
What Secularism Is — and What It Is Not
Secularism is often described as an attack on religion. In fact, it is the arrangement that allows people of every faith — and none — to live freely side by side.
In much of the Muslim world, including Afghanistan, the word “secular” is used almost as an insult. It is presented as a foreign plot against Islam, a synonym for atheism or immorality. This misunderstanding is useful to those who rule in the name of religion, because it makes any call for separation of religion and state sound like an attack on faith itself. It is worth being clear about what secularism actually means.
What Secularism Means
At its core, secularism is a political principle with two parts:
- Separation: the state does not rule according to any religion, and religious institutions do not control the state.
- Equality: citizens have the same rights and duties regardless of their religion or lack of religion.
A secular state does not tell people what to believe. It does not make laws on the basis that a holy book commands them; it makes laws through public reasoning that all citizens, of any faith, can understand and debate.
What Secularism Is Not
It is not atheism.
Atheism is a personal belief about God. Secularism is a political arrangement about the state. Many devout believers are secularists, because they understand that a state which can impose one religion today may impose a different one tomorrow. Religious minorities, in particular, have often been among the strongest supporters of secular government.
It is not hostility to religion.
A secular state protects the freedom to worship, to build places of prayer, to teach one’s children one’s faith and to express religious views in public. What it does not allow is the use of state power to force religion on others, or to punish people for leaving or questioning it.
It is not the absence of morality.
Secular societies have laws, ethics and strong ideas of right and wrong. They ground them in reason, human rights and the well-being of citizens rather than in a particular revelation. As many of the world’s most peaceful and least corrupt countries show, morality does not collapse when the state stops enforcing religion.
Secularism does not ask believers to give up their faith. It asks only that no one be forced to live by someone else’s.
Why Secularism Protects Everyone
When religion and state are joined, the question becomes: whose religion, and whose interpretation? Sunni or Shia? Which school of law? Which cleric? The result is almost always that one group rules and others suffer — and that dissenters within the ruling group suffer too. Secularism removes this struggle from politics. No one wins the power to impose their faith, so no one has to fear it being imposed on them.
Secularism and Afghanistan’s Future
Afghanistan is a country of many ethnic groups, languages and religious traditions. Decades of war have been fuelled in part by competing claims to rule in the name of God. A secular, pluralist state — one that guarantees equal rights to women and men, Sunni and Shia, believers and non-believers — is not a threat to Afghan identity. It may be the only framework in which all Afghans can finally live together in peace.
Further reading
On this site:
Sources and further study:
