Farhan Wahab
Classical anti-Semitism rooted in nationalist notions viewed Jews as a distinct cultural entity functioning outside the national collective, particularly within the Germanic majoritarian context. This perspective considered Jews not as a demand for a separate polity but as a religious-cultural group that remained authentically true to its cultural origin. This perception persisted even after the emergence of the nation-state, which extensively politicised cultural identities along majority and minority lines. Consequently, those deemed minorities were relegated to the status of permanent foreigners within the nation, with their destinies placed under the control of the sovereign majority.
The major accusation was that Jews were refusing to assimilate with the secular nation-state. However, the problem was not that Jews were refusing to obey the authority of the state (paying taxes, taking part in democratic politics, and so on). Instead, they weren’t supportive of the homogenising political project of the state, which means embracing the cultural ethos of the majority by stripping themselves of their own culture and religion.
So, the religiosity of the Jews became a threat to secular harmony (majoritarian cultural hegemony). However, on the other hand, Christianity of the majority was considered as the direct extension of the secular state.
As Joan Wallach Scott writes, secularism has never enjoyed a unified meaning across time in history; instead, the meaning has always depended on who invoked it and for what purpose, and that determined its meaning. Now secularism is seen as synonymous with gender equality in France in the presence of “Muslim other “. However, even after the French Revolution, women were not allowed to vote until 1940. The reason was the European Heteropatriachal assumption that women are inherently piteous, so they would be unable to participate in secular politics. On the other hand, in the beginning, the nation-state had to come up with secularism not to eradicate religiosity and to create collective impiety but to pacify and share sovereignty among the Christian sectarian rivals.
In the post-colonial context, secularism has always been deployed to regulate minority religions, the majority religion being under the wing of the state that is made up of the so-called nation(majority). So, the need to invoke secularism in a post-colonial context is not to create a pluralist polity but rather to subjugate and regulate the minority and their respective religions. This is part of the homogenising political project of the nation-state.
In contemporary France, the French state often accuses the Muslim minority of acting like a nation within the French nation, that is, culturally, Muslims are remaining true to their cultural origin (religiosity, cultural practices, etc.) even though the Muslim minority like any subjects of nation-state pays taxes and lives a wholly regulated political life under the French state. However, the French state expects Muslims to become culturally invisible and mingle into majoritarian culture. French state believes if Muslims cease to exist as Muslims in France, there will be harmony and peace as one nation (meaning of French Republicanism is embracing French cultural ethos. For example, Muslims eating pork and drinking wine are considered signs of proper assimilation.
This is the demand of French secularism; hence, the parliament has enacted anti-separatist laws, which include banning the veil, closing mosques, and restricting the right to propagate religion, among other measures. The list is extensive.
So, in political modernity, secularism exists not as an ideal that enables a pluralistic existence but is a weapon often deployed by the majority to eradicate the cultural differences of the minority subjects.
Cultural assimilation, considered the significant component of secularism, is not a common cultural practice derived from anything specifically secular; it is the majoritarian cultural ethos interpreted as secular and common. This is why Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin called French secularism “Christianophile Secularism”, and Saba Mahmood refers to this as a synonym for nationalism. Mahmood points out that in Egypt where the secular standards are Islamic cultural ethos since Muslims are the majority and the state is made up of Muslim dominance.
The cultural demand of secularism isn’t about sharing the sovereignty with minorities; it is mostly about making the minorities invisible; the minority should cease to exist within the majoritarian sovereignty so the majority can practice their supposed sovereignty without any interference.
Under a mono nation-state, secularism is more of an oxymoronic phenomenon since it is a weapon that is used as an instrument to strip minorities of their culture and religion. A nationalistic instrument often invoked by the state for its cultural project of creating a unified majoritarian identity. So, in that sense, it is synonymous with nationalism. Therefore, it is oxymoronic.
In the presence of this particular type of majoritarian tyranny, minorities tend to give a different and radical meaning to secularism it never rendered to its subjects, which is considering secularism as a precondition for a pluralistic existence within a nation-state and invoking secularism to defend their cultural and political rights and also trying to emancipate the majority from its obsession with homogeneity that is using culture as a potential instrument to legitimise the sovereignty and nationalism.
At this juncture, the minority’s heretical reimagination of secularism is unsettling the cliched notion tagged along with secularism that” secularism is all about collective impiety” Instead, in their radical reimagination, secularism is considered as a guiding principle that challenges the cultural hegemony of the majority and depoliticise every group’s cultural origin to participate in a pluralistic politics that is antithetical to the colonial/political modernity’s norm of creating a homogenous cultural and political space.
