Preliminary Draft: Please do not cite or circulate without the author’s permission. Abstract The “Arab Spring” revives a debate that has challenged scholars of political

theory and transitology for decades: the compatibility of Islam and

democracy. In my paper, I would like to present both liberal and postsecular

perspectives on state-religion relations and point to their theoretical blind

spots and normative weaknesses concerning the recent developments of

change in the Middle East and North Africa.

I will argue that transitology has an underlying secularization thesis. This

thesis suggests that there is a single way to modernity that presupposes

secularism as a prerequisite for liberal democracy and, indeed, for

democracy in general. This has the consequence that Islamists cannot be

conceptualized as democratic actors. Postsecularism, too, cannot solve the

problems posed by liberal theory. I will therefore propose that the design of

state-society-religion relations should themselves be subject to democratic

decision-making processes. In the final part, I will argue against the

assumption that the decision for liberal democracy is neutral. To opt for

liberal democracy always means to also accept a certain bundle of values. If

this is true, no more reasons can be found that justify the exclusion of

religious arguments from the public sphere while allowing liberal concepts of

“the good”.

INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE Hanna Pfeifer M.A.

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

Otto von Guericke Universiy Magdeburg

Zschokkestr. 32 D-39106 Magdeburg

Telefon: +49 391 67-56424

Telefax: +49 391 67-16475

hanna.pfeifer@ovgu.de

www.ipw.ovgu.de

ECPR General Conference Bordeaux 2013 Panel: Religion and the Third Wave of Democracy Paper: Transitology, Liberal Democracy and Religion: Democratization and the “Arab Spring”

-- -- 05.08.2013

Hanna Pfeifer

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Transitology, Liberal Democracy and Religion: Democratization and the “Arab

Spring”

The “Arab Spring” revives a debate that has challenged scholars of political

theory and transitology for decades: the compatibility of Islam and

democracy. In my paper, I would like to present both liberal and postsecular

perspectives on state-religion relations and point to their theoretical blind

spots and normative weaknesses concerning the recent developments of

change in the Middle East and North Africa. I will argue that those relations

need to be subject to democratic decision-making instead of being assumed

as a precondition for democracy.

During the 1990s’ debate on the third wave of democracy, Huntington

(1991a+b; 1993) famously stated that there was a connection between

different civilizations and the proneness of societies to enter a democratic

transition. In particular, he suggested that “Western ideas of individualism,

liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law,

democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little

resonance in Islamic (...) cultures” (Huntigton 1993: 40). According to

Huntington, the main problem for the democratization of Islamic societies is

that in Islam, there is no distinction between a religious and a political

community. Islamic concepts of politics therefore “contradict the premises of

democratic politics" (Huntington 1991a: 28). This culturalist explanation of

promising and less promising transitions to democracy seemed to be

confirmed by the poor performance of countries with a Muslim majority on

pertinent democracy indices. From 1981 to 1990, there were only two

countries classified as “free” by Freedom House (Huntington 1991a: 28).

Moreover, there seemed to be a sort of Arab exceptionalism concerning

democracy with none of the 22 countries being considered as a full

democracy until today and only Lebanon being regarded as democratic at all

(Polity IV 2013). Before the Arab Spring, only three countries (Kuwait,

Lebanon, Morocco) were “partly free” according to Freedom House index.

Hence, empirical data supported Huntington’s civilizational approach.

Nonetheless, he received strong objections on both the theoretical and the

empirical level. A main strand of theoretical critique rejected the cultural

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essentialism at the core of the civilizational model, arguing that plurality and

diversity are features inherent to cultures: “Due to the experience of

contemporary political battles, especially in the Middle East, Islam is often

portrayed as fundamentally intolerant of and hostile to individual freedom.

But the presence of diversity and variety within a tradition applies very much

to Islam as well” (Sen 1999: 15). This is what came to be known as the multi-

vocality of religions: “Religious traditions, according to this perspective, are

(…) complex entities, which we cannot regard as a single whole, by

neglecting the substantial differences and contrasts within them” (Ozzano

2013: 151). Besides the theoretical objections, Huntington’s approach has

been challenged by empirical puzzles, too. Surveys conducted in different

Arab countries in the early 2000s showed that a majority of the population

support democracy and, surprisingly, at the same time Islamism (Jamal

2006). This observation is in line with the results of analyses of regime

preferences in Central Asia (Collins/Owen 2012) that point to a strong

support of a so-called “Islamic democracy” as opposed to a liberal or secular

democracy. Apparently, there are visions of democracy inspired by Islamic

heritage and culture – except they may not match what is classically

understood to be a liberal democracy.

In my paper, I will argue that besides the analytic and normative bias towards

liberal democracy that has long been queried, transitology has an underlying

secularization thesis. As I will demonstrate in the first part, this thesis

suggests that there is a single way to modernity that presupposes secularism

as a prerequisite for liberal democracy and, indeed, for democracy in

general. This has the consequence that Islamists such as an-Nahda in Tunisia

and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt cannot be conceptualized as

democratic actors: They are either seen as inherently antidemocratic because

in their political agenda, they do not separate the religious from the political

realm, or, if they are attributed the potential to become a democratic actor,

they are understood as a conservative party that is not really Islamist

anymore. This is the case in both Stepan’s concept of the twin tolerations

and Roy’s thesis of the failure of political Islam.

In my second part, I will start with the Habermasian concept of a postsecular

society as an alternative to the liberal view on the relationship between

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religion and democracy. I will then try to show that the concepts of both

secularism and postsecularism are plural and that the design of state-society-

religion relations should themselves be subject to democratic decision-

making processes. If one accepts this assumption, a perspective of post-

democratization that focuses on “what in fact is” as opposed to “what ought

to be” (Valbjorn 2013: 31) can foster a better understanding of the processes

taking place in Tunisia and Egypt.

In the last part, I will address the question of what “normative costs” we

might have to bear from a liberal perspective in accepting the plurality of

(post-) secularisms and of democratic forms. I will argue against the

assumption that the decision for liberal democracy is neutral because it

allows for the realization of any theory of a “good life”, but instead precludes

certain forms of life and practices and excludes certain actors from the

public sphere. To opt for liberal democracy therefore always means to also

accept a certain bundle of values. If this is true, no more reasons can be

found that justify the exclusion of religious arguments from the public

sphere while allowing liberal concepts of “the good”.1

0. From Demo-crazy to Hybrid Regimes

Early transitology after the beginning of the third wave of democracy relied

on a dichotomy of possible outcomes for regimes in transition: they could

either develop into a liberal democracy or fall back into an autocratic regime.

It was a widely held belief that democracies could be “made” (see “guidelines

for democratizers”, Huntington 1991b: 141-164) and that successful

democratic transitions were mainly a question of clever institutional

arrangements (Croissant 2002). Democratic transitions were thought to

follow a pathway that started with the liberalisation or reform of the

autocratic system leading to the collapse of the old system and the

emergence of a democratic system or breakthrough (O’Donnell/Schmitter

1986). The last step of a successful transition would then be the democratic

consolidation, “a slow but purposeful process in which democratic forms are

                                                                                                               1 Those issues have been addressed in the debate between liberals and communitarians over years (e.g. Walzer 1990; for an overview see Honneth 1993). However, they have not lost any of their relevance and remain latent in different current debates.

Hanna Pfeifer

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transformed into democratic substance” (Carothers 2002: 7). All in all, the

wave of political change of the early 1990s led to the optimistic view that

collapsing autocracies would endeavour their way to democracy and that the

transitional countries would sooner or later experience a consolidation to a

liberal democratic system. This is why the 1990s episode of tranistology was

sometimes called “demo-crazy” because its scholars seemed to be spotting

democracy anywhere (Valbjorn 2013: 26).

Yet, the initial euphoria declined when empirical assessments of what was

actually happening replaced the “wishful thinking” (Valbjorn 2013: 27) of

democratizers. Indeed, most of the regimes of the third wave seemed to get

“stuck” in the transition process – or not to pursue the path suggested by

transitologists at all. As Carother’s analyses in his seminal work on the

transition paradigm, the core assumptions of transitology could no longer be

held, as reality apparently did not fit the model. Collapsing autocracies were

not necessarily on their way to democracy, not even on a general

democratization path. Indeed, the idea that there was one single way leading

from autocracy to democracy proved to be “a simplistic and often incorrect

conceptual order (imposed) on an empirical tableau of considerable

complexity” (Carothers 2002: 15). Thus, the old transition paradigm turned

out to be unsuitable to capture the newly emerging democratic grey zones.

The strong bias towards liberal democracy that characterized the phase of

demo-crazy was certainly due to the hope that Fukuyama’s (1989)

proclaimed “end of history” was reached after the end of the cold war: What

seemed to be the normatively only desirable outcome, a world of liberal

democracies, clouded the analytical view of the actual processes of change

taking place in the world.

When the first doubts concerning democratization processes in several world

regions arose, many authors started to adapt their concepts to empirical

realities. Broadly, they employed two main strategies in order to capture the

phenomenon of democratic grey zones. One strand of analyses tried to find

(diminished) subtypes of either democracy or authoritarianism. With their

concept of competitive authoritarianism, Levitsky/Way (2002) introduced a

subtype of authoritarianism that came to be very popular. Those regimes are

characterised by formally democratic institutions and rules, such as

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elections. Yet, the formal system is systematically undermined by political

elites, which makes the system fail to meet minimal standards for

democracy. Examples for democratic subtypes are O’Donnell’s delegative

democracies (1994) or Merkel’s defective democracies (1999), yet there were

many more. This made Collier/Levitsky (1997) warn democratization scholars

about the dangers of proliferation of “democracies with adjectives”

(Collier/Levitsky 1997), such as the fragmentation of the discourse and a

consequential lack of comparability as well as conceptual stretching of the

overarching concept of democracy. A second general strategy was therefore

to consider the emerging grey zones as a regime type sui generis. Those so-

called hybrid regimes combined properties of both democratic and

authoritarian regimes, but added a third type of regime to the predominant

dichotomy (Rüb 2002; Zinecker 2004).

Thus, much attention was paid to capturing the phenomenon of democratic

grey zones on a conceptual and empirical level. The critique of liberal

democracy as a normative telos of transition processes, however, has not

been adequately dealt with yet. Transitology, it seems, still relies on the idea

that “full” democracies can only be called so if they are liberal and therefore

secular.

I.1. Liberalism and Secularism

The secularization thesis has different dimensions, but can be summarized

in the prediction that secularity is a feature of modernization processes. One

dimension of this thesis is empirical: With economic development, the role of

religion would necessarily decline and finally it would disappear (Shah 2012:

3). This historical view referred to both society and politics: It was assumed

that individuals’ belief and religious practice and community would decline

and that the “differentiation of religion from other spheres of society”

(Shah/Philpott 2011: 28), especially from politics would weaken its influence.

According to the secularization narrative, the separation of the political from

the religious realm and the privatization of religion was a main precondition

for the emergence of the modern state in Europe after the peace of

Westphalia (Cho/Katzenstein 2011: 168). “Because in Europe the three

processes of secular differentiation, religious decline, and privatization have

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been historically interconnected, the tendency has been to view all three

processes as intrinsically interrelated components of a general teleological

process of secularization and modernization, rather than as particular

contingent developments” (Casanova 2012: 25-26). This is particularly true

for liberal theories that understand modernization as a "linear process in

which liberal formations such as capitalism, secularism, and democracy all

progress together" (Snyder 2011: 18). Consequently, there was a monist view

of modernization paths that were thought to necessarily include

secularization processes: “(…) Two related developments – secular

modernisation and the rise of science and rationality – would combine to put

relentless pressure on religious faith, resulting in its steady decay and the

emergence – around the world – of decidedly secular polities and societies"

(Haynes 2009: 293). Religion therefore belongs to premodern times and is an

anachronism to the modern state.

The assumed monism of modernization adds a normative dimension to the

secularization thesis, namely that “religion should be confined to the private

sphere” (Shah 2012: 2) and not be mixed with politics. In liberal political

theory, the normative secularization thesis is founded on the dictum that the

democratic state should be neutral in its ideological foundation

(“weltanschauliche Neutralität”). A Kantian tradition of political thought, first

of all John Rawls (1993), claims that all encompassing doctrines and theories

of “the good” life belong to the private sphere whereas the public sphere and

thus politics should be guided by pure practical reason (Reder 2013: 65-66).

While religious argumentations presuppose the acceptance of an

encompassing belief system, modern societies are characterized by the

plurality of the beliefs held by its citizens. Consequently, not all members of

society share one comprehensive conception of “the good” and such

conceptions or belief systems should therefore not be used in public

debates. Those should be guided by rationality – a feature that has often

been characterized as contradictory to religious argumentation (Reder 2013:

72). The separation of politics and religion is thus thought to be a protection

of the neutrality of the state that should operate through rules, norms and

procedures based on reasons and justifications that can be accepted by any

rational individual no matter what theory of “the good” it holds: “(…) Political

Hanna Pfeifer

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liberalism makes the distinction between a self-standing political conception

of justice and a comprehensive doctrine. A religious doctrine resting on the

authority of the Church or Bible is not, of course, a liberal comprehensive

doctrine (…). Nevertheless, it may endorse a constitutional democratic

society and recognize its public reason. Here it is basic that public reason is

a political idea and belongs to the category of the political” (Rawls 1993:

485-486). What is more, the liberal conception of the secular not only

protects the political sphere from religion, but also vice versa (Fischer 2009).

Ideally, religions are left alone by politics, do not need to justify themselves

publicly and profit from the freedom of religion and the liberty of conscience:

“(Public reason) does not trespass upon religious beliefs and injunctions

insofar as these are consistent with essential constitutional liberties” (Rawls

1993: 486).

I.2. Why Islamic societies cannot be democratic, why Islamists cannot be

democrats

A dominant strand of scholarship has argued that this liberal conception of

secularism is unavailable to Islamic societies and that Islam and liberal

democracy therefore constitute an irreconcilable opposition. “While

democracy requires secularism, openness and the acceptance of non-

religious state authority, Islam by its nature – and therefore any ‘Islamist’

politics – demands a theocratic state in which there can be no debate about

right and wrong, or about appropriate social order, because its aim must be

‘to bring about the rule of God’” (Teti/Mura 2009). According to such

argumentations, Islam relies on a fixed religious text, divine sovereignty and

therefore can logically not draw a distinction between the religious and the

political sphere (Anderson 2009: 196). Moreover, according to the

incompatibility thesis, Islamic tradition transports values that hamper

democratic development: “This paradigm contends that Islam (…) prevents

people from demanding democratic change. These studies tend to

emphasize the existence of antidemocratic cultural variables as plausible

explanations for the persistence of authoritarianism in the region” (Jamal

2006: 52). Among such factors are the proneness of Muslims to accept the

status quo due to their belief in divine destiny, the rejection of individualism

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as a fundamental basis to liberal democracy, a doctrinal emphasis that lacks

both democratic orientation and advocacy for liberal freedoms and gender

equality (Jamal 2006: 52). Therefore, scholars have suggested a “negative

correlation between the presence of a Muslim majority (…) in a country, and

the development of democracy” (Ozzano 2013: 150).

Such arguments stem from an essentialist view of Islam that assumes a

unitary and closed core of religious doctrine. Against this essentialism,

different sides have argued that the multi-vocality of religions should be

emphasized and that all religions comprise elements that are more and less

conducive for democratization (Haynes 2013: 174). Such favourable

traditions in Islam are for example shura and ijma, consultation and

consensus (Ozzano 2013: 150). Moreover, a core principle of Islamic

tradition is interpretation as a method not only for the understanding of

Islamic doctrine, but also for jurisprudence and the development of sharia

(Teti/Mura 2009: 93-95). Sharia, as opposed to a widely held belief, is not a

written set of principles, but has “an evolving nature (…) as human

interpretation and practice of divine guidance” (an-Na’im 2012: 28).

Nonetheless, some authors point to the limits of the multi-vocality of

religions: “Religions are indeed multivocal, but (…) at any point in time there

may be a dominant discourse and practice that renders them more or less

supportive of certain patterns of political development. (…) It might still be

argued that there remain elements within ‘actually existing Islam’ – within

the tradition as presently constituted and realised in the world – that are

problematic for democratic development” (Anderson 2009: 202-205).

The incapability of differentiating between the political and the religious

realm is the alleged critical feature of Islam that renders Islamist actors

automatically antidemocratic from a liberal perspective. Following the liberal

conception of secularism sketched above, a party that tries to transform

religious norms into positive state law undermines systematically the

neutrality imperative of the democratic state. Moreover, as comprehensive

doctrines are believed to be kept alive as a normative state system only if

they are forced upon a plural society, Islamists are suspicious of abandoning

the democratic game as soon as they are in power. This has been referred to

as the Islamist dilemma: “If allowed to run for elections, Islamists may win

Hanna Pfeifer

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and cancel elections once in power, but preventing them from running

undermines democracy” (Teti/Mura 2009: 102). The view that Islamists

cannot escape the essence of Islam has been criticized as ignoring the

historical emergence of Islamist movements as opposition to colonialism

and, later, to authoritarian rule in the Middle East rather than a necessary

amalgam of religion and politics. Some have argued that Islam is mainly used

as an instrument, as a political myth in order to legitimize political goals via

religious language (Teti/Mura 2009: 101-103). The factual plurality of

Islamist movements is thought to support this view.

I.3. How Islamists can be democrats in practice, but then lose their Islamist

character

If it is true that in Islam religion and politics are not necessarily inseparable

and if essentialism of any kind is rejected, Islamist actors can indeed be

democratic actors, as Stepan (2012a+b; 2013) shows. With his famous

concept of the twin tolerations, he choses an institutionalist approach to the

question of religion and democracy. Founded on an extended version of

Dahl’s polyarchy, Stepan applies a thin concept of democracy developed

earlier with Linz (Linz/Stepan 1996). By a consolidated democracy, Linz and

Stepan mean “a political regime in which democracy as a complex system of

institutions, rules and patterned incentives and disincentives has become (…)

‘the only game in town’” (Linz/Stepan 1996: 15). This means no significant

actor tries to undermine democratic governance, a strong majority of public

opinion “holds the belief that democratic procedures and institutions are the

most appropriate way to govern public life” (Linz/Stepan 1996: 16) and that

both governmental and nongovernmental forces are bound by the rule of law

(Linz/Stepan 1996: 15-17). A successful democratic transition that does not

yet imply a democratic consolidation is characterized by the following

minimal conditions: There is a sufficient agreement on how an elected

government is to be produced, the government is empowered through

popular vote and has the de facto authority to produce policies and finally,

there is no body that de jure shares power with the three branches of state

power (Stepan 2012b: 90).

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Democracy is thereby understood as “a system of conflict regulation that

allows for open competition over the values and goals that citizens want to

advance” (Stepan 2012a: 56). As long as actors do not resort to violence,

restrain the rights of citizens and stick to “the rules of the democratic game,

all groups are granted the right to advance their interests, both in civil

society and in political society” (Stepan 2012a: 56) – including religious

groups or parties. As Stepan argues, “’hard’ secularism (…) is not necessary

for democratization and may even create problems for it (…). In a democracy,

religion need not to be ‘off the agenda’ (…)” (Stepan 2012b: 89-90). The

important point about the relationship between politics and religion,

however, is that the concept of twin tolerations is institutionalised, i.e. “the

minimal boundaries of freedom of action that must somehow be crafted for

political institutions vis-à-vis religious authorities, and for religious

individuals and groups vis-à vis political institutions” (Stepan 2012a: 55).

This means that, on the one hand, religious groups should not have a

constitutional position that allows them to interfere with the free policy-

making of democratic institutions and to question its authority, and, on the

other hand, religious groups are free to worship in private, to advance their

causes and values publicly and to form political parties (Stepan 2012a: 57).

Concerning the “Arab Spring”, Stepan considers Tunisia to be an example of

successful democratization – even though not consolidation – and

implementation of the twin tolerations. An-Nahda as a religious party “must

refrain from asserting special claims, based on access to the divine, to wield

an authority capable of nullifying or suspending human laws (…) (while)

secular parties must not deny the right of citizens influenced by religion to

articulate their values democratically in civil and political society” (Stepan

2012b: 94). Religious parties may only be banned from the political process

if they violate democratic procedures or core liberties and minority rights

indispensable for a democratic constitution. Stepan’s proposition of the twin

tolerations is indeed a variation of the liberal paradigm of secularism in that

it allows religious actors to enter the public sphere and political

contestations. By proposing minimalist institutional thresholds to both

democratic institutions and religious groups it treats religious like any other

parties. Yet, this approach has three blind spots. First, it does not solve the

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liberal apprehension that holistic concepts of “the good” should be excluded

from political debate because they are not shared by everyone in a pluralist

society. I will deal with this problem in the next section. Second, it does not

consider the question of how the minimal liberal values that, according to

Stepan, are a necessary precondition for a democracy and need to be

implemented in its constitution. Third, if the requirements of the twin

tolerations are met, the question arises what distinguishes an Islamist party

like an-Nahda from conservative parties such as the Christian Democratic

Union in Germany.

Concerning the second blind spot, an-Na’im has called for “an Islamic

hermeneutics for human rights” (an-Na’im 2012: 38). He advocates a view

that sharply distinguishes between the normative system of a state, i.e. a

corpus of positive law that sanctions criminal behaviour, and sharia as a

religious normative system derived from divine authority that sanctions sins.

Yet, those systems are compatible because they necessarily deal with

different subjects: Whenever a norm is implemented as positive law, it

automatically becomes “the secular political will of the state, and not the

religious law of Islam (…). If state law enforces a principle of sharia, the

outcome is a matter of state law and not sharia; it does not have the

religious significance of compliance with a religious obligation. Conversely,

compliance with sharia cannot be legal justification for violating state law”

(an-Na’im 2012: 29-36). Sharia and state law are therefore two different

systems necessarily operating on different terms with their respective

authority that is based on either divine or popular sovereignty respectively.

Yet, an-Na’im acknowledges that this seemingly clear distinction does not

suffice in order to contain all religious powers that question certain liberal

principles such as human rights. This is, according to an-Na’im, due to the

misinterpretation of sharia as divine and eternal instead of being “an

appropriate normative system for (the founding scholars’) community in very

local terms” (an-Na’im 2012: 39). He therefore calls upon “modern Muslim

scholars to construct an Islamic normative system that is appropriate for the

present context of Islamic societies” (an-Na’im 2012: 39).

The question remains, though, who should initiate such a reinterpreting

discourse in the public sphere if an-Na’im wants to stick to his strict division

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between the religious and the political realm. If sharia is a subject of

religious authority and not part of the political decision-making process, an

interference in its interpretation would certainly violate the autonomy of the

Islamic community. This is what Roy (2013a) has called the “search for a

‘good Islam’” (Roy 2013a: 10) which he considers as one main strategy in

Europe to deal with the integration of Muslims. “This is the theological

predicament: the issue of integrating Muslims in Europe is supposed to be

linked to an enquiry into the theological tenets of Islam as a religion. Either

the Muslims present and promote a liberal interpretation of Islam, or their

integration in Europe is conditioned on a prior theological reform that would

make Islam compatible with (…) so-called Western values” (Roy 2013a: 6). He

considers the role of the Western secular state as ambivalent insofar as, on

the one hand, it provides religious freedom and, on the other hand, formats

religion into the Western model of state-society-religion relationships. Yet,

“this interventionism runs against the very concept of religious freedom” (Roy

2013a: 8). It remains thus unclear how, within a strict secular framework as

proposed by an-Na’im, religious doctrine should legitimately be influenced in

a way that makes it allegedly more suitable to Western values.

I would like to briefly address the third question that arises concerning

Stepan’s concept of twin tolerations, i.e. the difference between Islamist

parties and conservative parties. Indeed, it is at this exact point where Roy’s

thesis of the failure of political Islam interferes. According to Roy, the

Islamist project of establishing an Islamic state and institutions, creating an

Islamic economy and building a transnational ummah (Roy 2013b: 16) is

doomed to failure because it is challenged from two sides: “(The Islamists’)

utopian conception of an ‘Islamic state’ has lost credibility. Islamist ideology

is now finding itself challenged both by calls for democracy that reject any

monopoly claim on power by a single party or ideology, and by

neofundamentalist Salafists who declare that only a strict personal return to

the true tenets of religious practice can serve as the basis of an ‘Islamic

society’” (Roy 2012: 8-9). Using the example of the Egyptian Muslim

Brotherhood, he claims that Islamists have lost their monopoly as religious

authority. Their attempts to re-islamize society had the effect of

individualising, pluralising and diversifying the religious field. Thus, in order

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to maintain their influence, the Brotherhood had to broaden its constituency

to people who “are more individualistic and less prone to feel the pull of

holistic ideologies” (Roy 2012: 9). “Thus while the Muslim Brotherhood may

finally have come to power, it is at the expense of its own ideology” (Roy

2013b: 16). This means that the processes of pluralisation and

democratization transform Islamists into democrats, thereby diluting their

ideology. In Roy’s view, Islamists can indeed be democrats – if they are

willing to give up on their program of political Islam. “(For Egypt), this would

mean turning the ‘brotherhood’ into a true modern political party; trying to

attract voters from beyond a hard core of devout Muslims; recasting religious

norms into vaguer conservative values (…); adopting a neoliberal approach to

the economy; and endorsing the constitution, parliament, and regular

elections” (Roy 2012: 13). Turkey’s AKP could serve as a “model of a post-

Islamist religious-minded and conservative party” (Roy 2012: 13).

As we have seen in the first part of my paper, the assumption that the only

way to modernity and therefore democracy leads via secularism entails that

Islamists can either not be democrats because they do not separate politics

and religion or, if they are democrats, they are not really Islamists, but rather

conservative parties. At the core of this argumentation is an underlying

secularization thesis that operates at both a historic-analytical and a

normative level derived from liberal political theory. In the next part, I would

like to start by addressing the first problem with the concept of twin

tolerations mentioned above, namely that the inclusion of religious

argumentation in the political realm rouses the liberal fear of entering into

an irrational discourse where encompassing doctrines of “the good” are

imposed upon plural societies. I will do so by briefly introducing the

Habermasian concept of the postsecular society, then turn to the main points

of critique that were brought forward against this conception and finally

advocate a post-democratization perspective on the “Arab Spring” that allows

for multiple concepts of the secular and the post-secular.

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II.1. Habermas and postsecular society

During the last decades, the different dimensions of the secularization thesis

– the separation of religion and politics that comes with the differentiation of

society, the decline of religious beliefs and practices and the privatization of

religion – have been challenged on the theoretical, empirical and normative

level (Casanova 2012: 25-27). Religion is now considered to be “one of the

most influential factors in world affairs” (Shah 2012: 3). On an empirical

level, rather than a general decline of religion and religiosity, multiple

processes of adaption and transformation of the religious can be observed

(Reder 2013: 17): Religion is politically vital, institutionally differentiated,

diverse in its forms and partially radicalised. Theoretically, this has inspired

new debates on the relationship between state, society and religion and thus

concepts of secularism. Those debates were normatively motivated, too: As

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, former judge on the German Constitutional

Court, famously stated in 1976, “the liberal (freiheitliche), secularized state

lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself” (Böckenförde 1976:

60, my translation).

While in his early works, Habermas considered religious argumentation to

undermine communicative action because it does not allow for an

intersubjective understanding free of prejudices, but predetermines the

goals of the discourse (Reder 2013: 82), he later considered religion to have

a significant moral potential to democratic societies. In his speech on the

occasion of the award ceremony of the Friedenspreis des deutschen

Buchhandels in 2001, Habermas reflected on the role of religion as a crucial

resource that endows secular societies with meaning and as the basis of the

moral foundations of the liberal state (Habermas 2001: 22-23). At this point,

he emphasized the semantic potentials religion bears for a postsecular

society (Habermas 2001: 25). Religion can have a corrective role in a

modernity that produces pathologies (“entgleisende Säkularisierung”,

Habermas 2001: 12) in that it provides a source of solidarity and

motivational force for participating in public discourse, both of which are

necessary conditions for the functioning of the liberal state (Reder 2013: 87).

Habermas’ postsecular society is therefore both description and prescription

(Reder 2013: 89): Religion should be used as a moral resource and its

Hanna Pfeifer

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semantic potentials should be translated to secular language of public

reason in order to make their arguments accessible to all discourse

participants. This translation is necessary given the reasonable pluralism of

religious life forms and conceptions of “the good”. Non-religious persons,

respectively, should open up to such translation processes.

II.2. The contingent nature of secularism “as we know it”

What is most apparent is the instrumental role Habermas concedes to

religion (Mavelli 2012: 1063): It is not more than a provider of morality. As

Taylor and others have argued (Reder 2013: 106-112; Taylor 2011), this

conceptualisation of religion is a reduction in several respects. Even if

religion is understood merely functionally, the role as a moral resource is but

one function religion has in society. Religions are differentiated in their

functions, forms and practices, yet Habemas “completely overlooks religions

as lived experience, practice, mode of subjectivation or community of

believers” (Mavelli 2012: 1063). While Habermas does assert a plurality of

worldviews, he reintroduces a monism in what counts as communicative

rationality. What is allowed to be introduced to deliberation processes are

only norms that can claim universal validity (morals) while values and

theories of “the good” belong to the private sphere (ethics). Yet, as authors

like Mouffe (2000) have argued, it is our deeply-held worldviews for which we

are passionate that are crucial to democratic processes: “If there is anything

that endangers democracy nowadays, it is precisely the rationalist approach,

because it is blind to the nature of the political and denies the central role

that passions play in the field of politics” (Mouffe 2000: 146). In that he

wants to use religion as a tool against pathologies produced by modernity,

Habermas makes it part of the “secular project of modernity” (Mavelli 2012:

1063). Secularism, then, can be understood as “the power to define the

space, forms, and meanings that religion may legitimately ‘occupy in

society’” (Mavelli 2012: 1071) rather than being the strict separation of

religion and politics as suggested by the secularization thesis.

This already points to the contingent nature of the division between the

political and the religious realm. While the concept of the postsecular

suggests that there has been a sort of golden age of secularism, it ignores

Hanna Pfeifer

  17

the different roles that religion has played at different times. Rather than

speaking of the resurgence of religion, Reder therefore claims that there is a

new attention for religion that has always interacted with politics in different

ways (Reder 2013: 107-109). As Roy (2013a) points out, even European style

secularism is very diverse in its form and rarely a strict separation of religion

and politics, but rather marked by the formation of religions through state

interventions. The unity and unambiguousness of the secularization-

modernization theory is therefore a myth: “Secularisms (in the plural) are not

fixed and final achievements of European-inspired modernity but social

constructs and patterns of political rule with diverse and contested histories

(…). The unreflective blanket usage of the categories of the secular and the

religious has masked the diversity, history, and politics surrounding claims

to secularism, secularization, secular democracy, and a host of related

concepts” (Hurd 2012: 36). Secularisms are then a “powerful political

settlement of the relation between religion and politics” (Hurd 2012: 46). The

most dominant secularisms constitute a “practice of state sovereignty that

claims to be universal by defining the limits of state-centred politics with

something called religion on the outside. To delimit the terms and

boundaries of the political by defining religion as a private counterpart to

politics is a political move (…) (that normalizes) historically contingent

practices of sovereign authority“ (Hurd 2012: 47).

Yet, what is historically contingent cannot be normatively binding in a

universal sense. From a democratic point of view, the relationship between

religion, state and society is subject to democratic decision-making

processes and should therefore be thought of as a result and not a

precondition to democracy (Hashemi 2009: 2; Hashemi 2013: 214).

II.3. A post-democratization perspective and multiple (post-) secularities

While it remains uncertain how the transition processes in the countries of

the “Arab Spring” will proceed in future, what analysts seem to agree upon is

that a new political space has been established (Roy 2013b) and a re-

politicization of society has taken place (Valbjorn 2012). This means that the

role of religion in society and politics is a subject of negotiation – even if a

(violently) contested one. I would therefore follow Valbjorn’s (2012)

Hanna Pfeifer

  18

proposition to focus on what actually happens in those countries rather than

resorting to wishful thinking. As he argues, while transitions might not

always end up in liberal democracy, they are not condemned to be

transitions to nowhere either. They are “transitions to somewhere” (Valbjorn

2012: 26), even though this somewhere might not be the liberal fiction of a

secular state “as we know and want it”.

In the context of how the relations between religion and politics will be

designed, it is important to notice two important reservations of post-

authoritarian Arab society vis-à-vis the concept of secularism: It is a key

characteristic of both European colonial rule and the postcolonial

authoritarian regimes that have used the argument of secularism to suppress

political opposition and legitimize their policies (Hashemi 2013). It is thus

improbable that those societies and in particular Islamist actors will opt for

their own model of “secularism”. Rather, as the program of the Freedom and

Justice Party in Egypt shows, new terms such as the civil state (FJP 2011) are

created in order to describe and constitute state-religion relations. From a

perspective that is rather observing than prescribing, we might indeed find

new forms of the secular and, as Mavelli suggests, thereby of the postsecular

that transcends traditional binaries such as mind/body, public/private,

politics/religion etc. (Mavelli 2013: 1076-1078).

III. The liberal unease: “normative costs”

This proposed openness certainly provokes interjections from a liberal point

of view. Among the classical fears of liberals concerning redefinitions of

state-religion relations are the following:

a) We might lose arguments for human rights. They are a liberal heritage

in that they are based on the equality of all human beings and

constitute unalienable rights to everyone, regardless of his or her race,

religion and gender, that is: They are universal.

b) Women’s rights are particularly in danger because religious and

particularly Islamist actors tend to discriminate against women

because of either religious doctrine or tradition.

c) Minority rights might be threatened because in order to accept norms

set in politics, a religious choice needs to be made, i.e. one has to

Hanna Pfeifer

  19

accept a theory of “the good” that is not in accordance to one’s own

beliefs. Those who are not religious at all or do not follow the

dominant religion are then subject to rules that cannot universally be

justified.

d) Democratic rules may be undermined because religious norms as state

law can only be kept alive by authoritarian rule and not by democratic

decision-making.

I would like to make some remarks that might relativize the liberal unease.

First, it is important to note that human rights are not just morally justifiable

entitlements, but also the expression of a political consensus or project

(Lohmann 2008: 55). They therefore do have a certain stability and, at the

same time, they are a product of history that may be subject to change. Yet,

as we have seen above, it is indeed possible to argue in favour of human

rights from the stance of different doctrines, including religious ones.

Christian organisations, for instance, have played a vivid role in promoting

human rights around the world (Barnett 2011:95). Second, it should be kept

in mind that essentialising religion is neither empirically justified nor

normatively helpful. While there certainly are discriminating practices against

women that are justified with reference to religious doctrine, there certainly

is not an essence to Islam that makes such behaviour a religious imperative.

Religions are multivocal, even though this might be hidden behind a

dominant discourse or stereotypes about the Islam. Religious doctrine,

practices and traditions are plural and are subject to change and

interpretation. Finally, liberalism should give up the fiction that choosing

liberalism equals choosing neutrality. Liberalism is not neutral and it does

not allow for any theory of “the good life” and its practice. Indeed, it can be

considered as an encompassing doctrine or a value system itself. For

instance, it excludes certain actors and argumentations from public

discourse and deliberation by disqualifying them as irrational. As do other

comprehensive doctrines, liberalism produces exclusionary mechanisms. We

should not “ignore that, historically, secular liberalism itself was and still is a

worldview (Weltanschauung) that strongly shapes modern democracies. Why,

then, should persons with another worldview be excluded from the

discourse?” (Reder 2013: 154, my translation). Or, as Taylor put it: “Indeed,

Hanna Pfeifer

  20

the point of state neutrality is precisely to avoid favouring or disfavouring

not just religious positions but any basic position, religious or nonreligious”

(Taylor 2011: 37, my emphasis).

IV. Conclusion

In my contribution, I hope to have demonstrated that there is a lot to be

gained from a perspective that loosens existing dichotomies inherent to the

secularization paradigm, that refrains from (liberal or postsecular)

prescriptions of what should be and broadens its view for a plurality of

relations that can exist between state, society and religion. Sticking to the

secularization thesis does not only mean to ignore the factual plurality of

such relations, but also to not take seriously emerging concepts of

democracy. Those concepts may not be liberal “as we know it”, but one

should be open to assessing their democratic quality without prejudging

them as inherently antidemocratic because they do not embrace “standard”

forms of secularism. As Barber argues, “democratic politics begins where

certainty ends” (Barber 1996: 349) or, as Taylor puts it, in politics, “there is

no (…) set of timeless principles that can be determined (…) by pure reason

alone” (Taylor 2011: 35). This is why, in Barber’s view, democratic politics is

“precisely not a cognitive system concerned with what we know and how we

know it but a system of conduct concerned with what we will together and do

together and how we agree on what we will to do” (Barber 1996: 348). The

relation of religion and politics, it seems to me, should be subject to this sort

of “democratic struggle” (Barber 1996: 357). Western secularism is

contingent in nature and plural in its forms. What role religion plays in

society and politics is subject to democratic negotiation processes. To

organize those relations differently than “we know it” means to opt for a

system of values – as does the choice of liberalism.

Hanna Pfeifer

  21

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