From: "Mohammed BEN JELLOUN" <mohammed.benjelloun-AT-mail.bip.net>
Subject: Footnotes to the commentary on Rushdie and secularism
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 03:03:33 +0100


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Dear whom secularism may concern

I found the passage bellow instructive. According to philosopher Charles Taylor, the dispute about Rushdie's Satanic Verses showed to which degree the idea, about the necessity to make distinctions between the public and the private or politics and religion, was wrong.

Charles Taylor says the following in the opening of section V in "The Politics of Recognition", in A. Gutmann (ed), Multiculturalism: Examining "The Politics of Recognition", (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press 2nd ed, 1994), pp. 25-73:

For a traditional Islam it is not at all about separating politics and religion as we got used to within Western liberal societies. Liberalism is no possible place of meeting for all cultures, it is the political expression of an entire spectrum of cultures which is impossible to combine with another spectrum of cultures. Besides liberalism in the West, as many Muslims are well aware of, is not so much an expression of the secular post-religious outlook which happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals but a more organic outgrowth on Christianity--at least when considered from Islam's alternative point of view. The separation of Church and State originates from the oldest Christian civilization. Its first forms were entirely different from ours, but the foundations of modern development were layed. The very term secular belonged originally to Christian vocabulary. 36

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Note 36: Larry Siedentop argues well for this view in "Liberalism: The Christian Connection", Times Literary Supplement, 24-30 March 1989, s. 308. I have also discussed these issues in "The Rushdie Controversy", Public Culture, 2, I (Fall 1989), s. 118-122.


Best,
Mohammed

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