Morocco # English board

Hi everyone,

There's an article in marocpost.net with an interview of our foreign minister, the article in itself is not important, it's the usual background noise of our press, however there is something odd in the first paragraph, take a look and let me know what you think.

[marocpost.net]

What does he mean by secular values ?

I think he means by “Secular values” long-term values which are anchored in the history of the nation (Secular means also long term time-frame, like we say “secular bilateral relations between 2 nations”).

In my humble opinion, in the first paragraph the author is just repeating a famous sentence of the Moroccan establishment which we use to hear from national media since long time. It is a nice speech and an ideal for Morocco (and any other muslim country) to fully conciliate tradition and modernity, democracy and Islam, universal values and national identity...This was originally the model of the Moroccan society as seen and preached by Hassan II, but we need a lot of work and time to achieve it.

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Krim

What does he mean by secular values ?

Bingo ! That's what struck me. The word "secular" being uttered by one of our ministers, was odd. True, we're not applying islamic law, true also that M6 put forward reforms like the mudawana labeled as anti-islamic by the PJD, but talking about secularism is normally done by a few in a press like TelQuel, never from a member of the cabinet.

Anyway, I thought it was odd, it's swimming counter-currents these days in the muslim world.
Alximo had a point, H2 did preach that but in his days it wasn't so controversial, besides H2 was a free mason, by definition he was a secular.

It was all time controversial to talk about secularism in a muslim country. Some argues with the fact that Islam and Secularism are in principle incompatible. Also, total secularism of a muslim society has proven its failure in the Turkish model. Kamal Attaturk abolished the khilafa, adopted the European secular state-laws and closed all doors to any reference to Islam in the state, but after 70 years an Islamist party came to power via democratic process.


Applying total secularism according to the western model, is in my opinion, un-realistic in any muslim country. Some scholars and intellectuals tried to argue that some kind of semi-secularism at least in the “The management of state´s affairs” is not contradictory to Islam, like the de-facto secularism of most of Muslim countries despite a hint in every constitution to Islam as state´s religion...etc

Also, several secular regimes ruled the Arab world but they were pure despotism and dictatorship, and the outcome was frustration and return to Islam in the political arena (like the case in Irak, Syria, Egypt). So we have also the other dilemma: both secularism & despotism and Secularism & democracy exculding Islam lead to islamism.

Since long time, this dilemma of Islam & Democracy and Secularism is discussed between religious and seculars in the Arab world without real progress...and there is still a long way ahead to get out of this “existential problem” of the muslim world, and the priority here is for think-tanks, scholars and intellectuals to find out proposals and not the politicians.

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chelhman

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Krim

What does he mean by secular values ?

Bingo ! That's what struck me. The word "secular" being uttered by one of our ministers, was odd. True, we're not applying islamic law, true also that M6 put forward reforms like the mudawana labeled as anti-islamic by the PJD, but talking about secularism is normally done by a few in a press like TelQuel, never from a member of the cabinet.

Anyway, I thought it was odd, it's swimming counter-currents these days in the muslim world.
Alximo had a point, H2 did preach that but in his days it wasn't so controversial, besides H2 was a free mason, by definition he was a secular.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2006 04:03 by alximo.

Alximo, if you look at the history of nations, secularism is the inevitable, natural evolution of any society once the people have reached a certain level of education, legislation emancipates itself from religion.

However, as you pointed out, all attempts in predominantly muslim countries have failed for a number of reasons.
First, it was imposed by force, as in the case of Turkey, although I'm not sure it's a failure in Turkey, Turks have voted islamist majorities because of the corruption of the traditional parties not because they wanted the chari3a to be applied. Polls show that Turks are still very much attached to the secular system as it is.

Another reason is our religion itself, we still haven't matured enough, I've opened a post here on the impossibility of self-criticism. First things first, we need to move to another level of comprehension and adherence of our religion. As it stands now, Islam is taken as a set of strict guidelines, which translates into unmovable rituals often meaningless to the illiterate, they just know it has to be done, without understanding the depth of the scriptures.
It is unthinkable that we could discuss a clean break between religion and state affairs without looking into an evolution of the faith.

Islam has been and still is an instrument of power in some countries, take the Saudis for instance, the whole pseudo legitimacy of their throne is based on religion.

Finally, as far as our country is concerned, we already have a secularized nation, the law of men is applied not the divine law, but putting that on a constitution is not a good idea, it's even highly dangerous these days.
Like with all things, we need to educate our people, to be able to discuss this in a mature way. Our brand of secularism is not going to be the turkish way, the french way or the anglo-american way, we'll have to come up with our own. But definitely not now.
We have other things to worry about.

Guys, in this context, des relations seculaires mean des relations de longue duree, very old in times, Seculaire is a coming from Siecle.