August 1, 2007
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Religion A Cultural Construct that Secularists should engage
By Mark Daou

LONDON: I am a secularist and exercise my choice of distancing myself from religious dogma and crude beliefs. Yet, I cannot claim that I’m a-religious or of having no relation to religion. As a secularist I do not think that my primary task is to avert religion, on the contrary I think as a secularist I should be engaging it, from my own perspective.

I think religion is predominantly a cultural construct. At the core is the belief in the existence of God all the rest are social and cultural constructs that are shaped by the philosophy, economy, and environment of the time and location. The books, teachings, requirements, practices and traditions are totally subject to the people involved in them at the specific time and place. The same text is interpreted in different formats and with varying implications in different contexts.

We all know self-declared believers who affiliate to a particular religion or the other yet their practice of that religion is selective. They may have personal preferences to how they practice and what they abide by from their religious teachings; taken at a macro scale those selective processes are totally the product of the dominant cultural trends of the time. Think of Iran’s dress code of the black veil covering the entire body in a specific design, it is a relatively new style of requirement that has never existed before. Or the bourqa advocated by the Taliban. Or versus the de-veiling campaign in the early 20th Century in the Arab world were activists like the Egyptian Huda Shaarawi was the first women to take off her veil in 1922 in a public bus station in Cairo. With each period and political influence comes the special construction of religion.

As a secularist that is how I see religion as a cultural construct that can be influenced by the debates and thought of the time. In the Middle East the clamping down by repressive regimes has closed down the avenues for debate and discussion. Most affected are the cultural domains, academic pursuits and political development all those feed off one element: freedom. The only spaces to escape the repressive Arab regimes have been the religious institutions which maintained there hierarchies intact and were able with time to become the dominant force in the production of cultural values and ideas. Thus, the modern Arab society is highly influenced by religious teachings.

Other forms of cultural production like the press, cinema, books, poetry, arts, education were all killed, they had no were to retreat except for minor oasis like university campuses or secret societies and recently some blogs. But the damage to their capability to produce a challenging set of cultural constructs to interpret life around us, to make sense of it, and to selective choose how to live it was nearly annihilated. Religion based cultural is all that was left. The alarm was only struck when that religious cultural became a political force and challenged the Arab regimes.

To ward the prominence of the current religious institutions and overall ideological dominance of religious dogma over our societies and the future prospects of those Arab societies we need to reinstate the general transformation into its proper context. First, we need to realize that the current religious situation is a social construct, not doomsday prophecies of the near end of the world, nor is religious influence a proof of the righteousness of the religion of a specific interpretation of it. Second, we need to concur that the current situation is an ephemeral situation fuelled by suitable political, economic, social and mainly cultural factors.

So what are the implications of the above analysis? As a secularist how can I put that to further my secular agenda? The implications are several, primary is to remember that religions, even the set of beliefs, are totally subject to construction and thus are constantly changing and adapting with time. I do not venture far in concluding weather religion itself is a necessity in society or itself a phenomena that will end on day, but I can guarantee that it will constantly change and its influence will ebb and flow. From here we can move to the second implication that there are always differing opinions in religious circles the debates about contraception in the Vatican, the debate about Israel’s relevance to the Jewish faith, or even the current debate in Qom on the need to equate the share of inheritance received by men with that of women. As a secular activist we need to remember that we cannot hold a categorical position against religion as some extreme communists of the latter days (unfortunately, some of the current ones as well) did. We need to be more open to those views and help by contributing our two cents to that debate and engage in it. Our focus will not be in determining the sex of angels but rather in promoting the cultural values and interpretations that we as secular leftist believe in. The Church of Rome eventually conceded to a secular Europe, the Muslim world already has voices from within the religious institutions preaching the synergy between secularism and Islamic beliefs. We should not be averse to such struggles to construct a new cultural and social reality which religion and religious activists can contribute so greatly too to the benefit of their beliefs and way of life.

To be able to follow that path we need to reinstate the importance of freedom particularly that of speech. We need to focus on the social sciences and the debates that they produce. We have to broaden the scope of liberties provided to journalists, academics and politicians to be able to challenge more forcefully and with bigger ability the cultural poverty that was produced by the Arab regimes and to regain the cultural sphere from the clutches of further impoverishing political religions particularly political Islam a la Bin Laden or Hizbollah.

Mark Daou is a Lebanese researcher resident of London, the UK.