Secularism
There are two definition of secularism:
First, it is a system of doctrines and practices that disregards or rejects any form of religious faith and worship. This is a total rejection of any religious beliefs. The person who professed this is either called as atheist or agnostic.
Second, the belief that religion should not enter into the affairs of the state and the public, e.g., in politics, in education, and in economics.
In other words, religion is a private matter and it is practiced by individual for their own individual and personal reasons.
Religion is still accepted according to different individuals and has its own practical benefits for that person who professed that religion.
But outside the realm of private matters, religion does not have any importance and only some religious principles are being used if they are deemed to be worthy based on various individual judgement. Hence, the overarching system is the secular system that is totally based on human reason and desires.
The term secular comes from the Latin word saeculum, which means ‘this age’ or ‘the present time’, and this age or the present time refers to events in this world; hence, it also means ‘contemporary events’.
Secularism is an ideology, which means it has its own set of values or perception of the reality and its main tool for understanding this reality is through human reason that is not guided by a true revelation.
Any values that come from religion are only useful or practical according to human needs that can change from time to time.
Ultimately, religion should be banished from the realm of human affairs either public or private.
Secularization is the process towards secularism. It is defined as the deliverance of man “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.”
It relativises all values and produces the openness and freedom necessary for any kind of human action.
All actions of man are relative to that particular time period, all values become relative. Goodness and badness have less sacred values, and there is less sense of accountability, since accountability has now become relative.
There are three main components of secularization:
- The disenchantment of nature, which is to dispel nature (i.e. all the existing things around us including man and the natural world) from being attached to any kind of supernatural and animistic beliefs or any kind of metaphysical realities, other than what has been proven true and certain from scientific empiricism and quantification. Nature is only understood in naturalistic interpretation and changes in accordance to natural laws and causes.
- The deconsecrating of values from any kind of transcendental and religious attachment, i.e. values are then being determined by human reason that is not guided by revelation. Values then become relativised and changes in accordance to human needs and fancies.
- The desacralization of politics: Political authority has a lot of power in determining public affairs such as the education system, the management and distribution of wealth and ensuring law and order. Hence, in secularization, religion has very limited control in managing public affairs. In Islam, however, any kind of ruling authority in Islam has its legitimization only when it is in total conformity with the Syari’ah of Allah SWT.
Materialism
In materialism, there is only one reality, which is this physical universe as being described and interpreted in accordance with scientific principles and methodologies.
Anything that cannot be measured and quantified to be existed “materially” is deemed to be non-existent. Metaphysical problems such as God and moral values are considered to be non-existent in materialism.
Everything that exists in this world moves and changes in accordance with the immutable laws of science; hence, everything then can be conceived like a machine, and can be manipulated by man, who is the most complex kind of machine.
Even in the human being, his emotions and his consciousness are part of the biological machine of the human body, and these must be proven to have some sort of substantial existence based on scientific observation and experiment.
Only the physical body exists, and hence the needs and wishes of the body have a paramount importance in materialism. Materialism is the foundation of the modern world view.
Some of the characteristics of the modern world view:
- The universe is an impersonal phenomenon, governed by regular natural laws, and understandable in exclusively physical and mathematical terms. God has withdrawn from any direct activity in the universe, since the universe is conceived like an elaborate working of a clock.
- The human mind is capable by its own rational faculties of comprehending the order of the universe, and that order was entirely natural. Human reason and empirical observation replaced religion as the principal means of comprehending the universe. And that universe can be known objectively by the human mind.
- However, on the same stroke, that human mind is incompetent and beyond its faculties to understand life and the universe beyond what has been proven to be true by scientific empiricism and experimentation. Religion and metaphysical problems gradually being put aside as a personal occupation and it is fundamentally distinct from the public objective knowledge of the empirical world.
- This world and this life are more real and have more claims towards existence than the other world as conceived in many traditional religions. Embracing this world in its fullest sense is the ultimate aim of the modern man since it is this life that can be confirmed to really exist.
- Hence, understanding the whole of existent should be independent from any religious constraints in order for man to decide for himself any matters regarding his life and destiny. He is the master of his own destiny who is capable to decide what is best and good for him.
Postmodernism
When science was becoming so confidently and convincingly true and the Western man was becoming so successful in utilizing his scientific knowledge in conquering the natural world and the rest of the world through their Industrial Revolution and Imperialism, one of their philosophers, Immanuel Kant (d. early 19th century), began to criticize the foundation of that scientific worldview itself with his famous work Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant was able to formulate and criticize that there is no such thing of knowing the universe with a total objectivity. Man only knows objective reality of the universe precisely to the extent that reality conforms to the fundamental structures of the mind.
What man knows is a world permeated by his knowledge, and causality and the necessary laws of science are built into the framework of his cognition. Observations alone do not give man certain laws; rather, those laws reflect the laws of man’s mental organization. In other words, the mind does not conform to things; rather, things conform to the mind.
Space and time are “a priori forms of human sensibility”. They are not drawn from experience but are presupposed before that experience. And so with the law of causation. The mind does not derive cause and effect from observations, but it is already predisposed in our mind’s intellectual cognition.
Hence, the foundation of the scientific worldview is based on a shaky ground, i.e., science couldn’t claim anymore that it has the real objective truth about the universe and about life itself.
Hence, nothing actually in the possession of the mind of the Western man that can bring him nearer to the Truth: not even in his religion, in his philosophy, or even in his science.
Hence, the birth of Postmodernism, as being articulated by its founder Friedrich Nietzsche (d.1900), who has already anticipated the coming of nihilism in the Western worldview.
Some of the characteristics of postmodernism:
- Postmodernism rejects all truth claims. Nothing has an intrinsic nature which may be expressed by or represented. Everything is a product of time and change. Truth is relative and nothing is absolute, except for absolute relativism.
- There is no ultimate Reality. Reality is what has been created in each epoch by various groups of people, and none of them can claim to have the real Truth.
- Human existence and the existence of the universe are purposeless. There is no meaning to our existence except what we would like to construct it for our own various practical reasons.
- It accepts multiplicities of truths either in science, religion, philosophy, or anything that the human mind can conceived of.
- It generates doubt in all perspectives, since no one can claim to have the absolute truth.
Postmodernism’s impact to other human cultures:
Although postmodernism relativizes all values, the Western scientific dominating worldview is still at its core. It acts like a double blade that seek to destroy the foundation of other cultures and values, and at the same time promoting and continuing Western domination towards other non-Western people, either in economy, in politics, in education and in many other cultural and traditional elements.
One of its tools is globalization, which is a way of ensuring that Western worldview will always remain colonizing the mind, body and spirit of the rest of the world.
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