The nation states of Europe embarked on an arms race
in 1870, which led ultimately to two world wars. Secular ideologies
proved to be just as murderous as the old religious bigotry,
as became clear in the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet
Gulag. The Enlightenment philosophes had believed that the
more educated people became, the more rational and tolerant
they would be. This hope proved to be as utopian as any of the
old messianic fantasies. Finally, modern society was committed
to democracy, and this had, in general, made life more just and
equitable for more people in Europe and America. But the
people of the West had had centuries to prepare for the democratic
experiment. It would be a very different matter when
modern parliamentary systems would be imposed upon societies
that were still predominantly agrarian or imperfectly
modernized, and where the vast majority of the population
found modern political discourse incomprehensible.
**
But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim
world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as
benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philosophers
as John Locke (1632-1704) as a new and better way of
being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state
control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals.
But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a
brutal attack upon religion and the religious.
Atatiirk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, suppressed
the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear
modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterproductive.
Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went underground.
