In layman's language, within our current political context, a secular state is the antithesis of an Islamic state. The call for a secular state is an implied rejection of PAS ideology.

Sim Kwang Yang
SIM KWANG YANG was DAP MP for Bandar Kuching in Sarawak 1982-1995. Since retiring in 1995, he has become a freelance writer in the Chinese-language press, and taught philosophy in a local college for three years.

He is now working with an NGO in Kuala Lumpur, the Omnicron Learning Circle, which is aimed at continuing learning for working adults and college students. Suggestions and feedback can reach him at: kenyalang578@hotmail.com.
Reflection in the River of Flux
Dissecting the Protean Monster
Is an alternative government ever possible?
What to expect from PM Pak Lah?
Who, or what, is an intellectual?
Are we worthy of freedom of expression?
This call for a secular state is a strange phenomenon; it manifests the power of pure negation. It means that whatever shape and size the PAS idea of an Islamic state shall take, some radical proponents of political secularism will always reject it out of hand, beyond negotiation or compromise.

This total and blind rejection of the Islamic State proposal, especially among non-Malays and non-Muslims, is the natural consequence of decades of racial politics in our country. When religion is often seen as an extension of race, anything Islamic in matters of official policies is viewed as an attempt at national assimilation, an encroachment upon their freedom to pursue their own faiths.

This perception is cast in the traditional mould of a zero-sum game, in which non-Muslims citizens conceive of no other alternatives except the two versions of Islam served up by Umno and PAS. For many fence-sitting non-Muslims who are unhappy with the status quo, this is a painful Hobson's choice. My suspicion is, most of them will vote for BN in the coming general election, not because they support the policies of the present government, but because they see Umno as lesser of the two perceived evils.

Politics ought to be about choosing the good life, for oneself and for one's country. When this choice is reduced to a range of evils, then it is a sad commentary on the political health of the nation. It is even sadder that there are so many self-proclaimed fence-sitting voters, as if fence-sitting is an ethically comfortable position from which to view the political world.

This sort of radical opposition to all things Islamic, will only entrench further the inter-ethnic chasm that will block all attempts at national reconciliation and meaningful reform.

Fortunately, on malaysiakini at least, there are hints of a vibrant discussion on the concept of an Islamic state, and some Muslim-Malay writers are even making serious efforts to make sense of what this idea of a secular state actually means.

Serious reflection, more than knee-jerk gut-reaction, will generate more light than heat on this issue. After all, we are grappling with the two most complex and contentious concepts in human civilisation, i.e. politics and religion. The long historical journey to the present era is littered with disasters detonated by a dangerous but seemingly inevitable mixing of these two most potent forces motivating mankind.

Some commentators have pointed to the modern liberal democracies in the Scandinavian states, Western Europe and North America, as models of successful secular states that seem to have provided political stability and economic well-being for their people.

Enlightened perspective

It is useful to cast our mind to the world at large, once in a while, to learn from the experience of other people elsewhere. Malaysia does not exit in a vacuum. Many features of our political life are the inheritance of a long and complex world-historical process. Examining the relationship between politics and religion within a world-historical context may be the thing we need to develop a more enlightened perspective on our own predicament.

Frankly, I suspect also that radical opponents of the PAS model of an Islamic state must have harboured secret aspiration for the kind of egalitarian liberal democracies existing in the West. What they should know is that the separation of the state and the church in the West is neither an immediately given fact, nor an ideology for which a great philosopher has constructed an all-encompassing theoretical system, in the sense as communism was a theoretical construct of Marx and Engels.

The apparent separation of politics and religion in the West today is itself the consequence of a protracted power struggle involving political and religious forces lasting quite a few centuries.

Around the time of the Renaissance, there was a great deal of tension between the Church of Rome and the earthly princes of the numerous principalities and fiefdoms in Europe. It was a matter of who had the ultimate authority to legitimate political rule over a body of people.

While the secular princes and emperors had all the near absolute political power over the life and death of ordinary minions, the Church by virtue of a kind of divine mandate monopolised all moral authorities over all mortals, including earthly rulers. The Pope could and did excommunicate kings and princes; or he could give them a kind of divine blessing through the symbolic gesture of crowning them.

Later, a symbiotic relationship existed, where the feudal kings claimed the divine right to rule, while the churches of Europe enjoyed great prestige and influence in the royal courts, as well as amassing a huge fortune in church properties. In the end, the awesome powers of both institutions were subverted from within, and later made irrelevant by changing times.

Secular state in West

Here, for me to continue to give broad strokes in historical sketches would do great injustice to the many complex factors behind the twists and turns of events lasting a few centuries. I will leave it to historians in their various fields of specialisation on the subject, and lament that history has not been properly taught in our classrooms.

However, two events stood out, to mark the emergence of the modern secular state in the West.

The first was political. The English Civil War that broke out in the summer of 1642 between Parliament and King Charles I was essentially a conflict within the ruling class, although the issues over which the war was waged had far-reaching political implications for the evolution of the English political system.

Then the unthinkable happened. In the confusion following the king's defeat, Charles I who had claimed to rule by divine decree and hence could do no wrong was trailed and found guilty of betraying the liberties of his subjects! When the sovereign's head ended up on the chopping block on 30 January 1649, the death knell for the old doctrine of Rule by Divine Right had rung throughout Europe. (The coffin nail had to wait for the French Revolution of 1789.)

In the Glorious English Revolution of 1688, King William could ascend to the throne only on condition of agreeing to the Declaration of Rights, which set out the fundamental principles of constitutional monarchy, balancing the liberties of the subjects, and the rights of the sovereign.

When the old feudal legitimacy of government based on religious decree had collapsed, an alternative form of legitimating political power had to be found. The Social Contract Theory, proposed in different forms by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean - Jacques Rousseau, sought to replace the old concept of sovereignty by grounding the right of rulers to rule on the consent of the ruled. This set the pace for universal suffrage, the development of parliamentary democracy, and the separation of religion and politics till this day.

The second event that hastened the secularisation of political power had to do with the Enlightenment, which in a sense defined the idea of modernity, and gave birth to many of the conceptual parameters with which we live our lives today.

French Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu were pioneers in the art of social criticism. They attacked established institutions, above all the Church. Montesquieu pondered long on the different basis of good government, and came up with the separation of powers to check the corruption and despotism of all governments.

They shared with other Enlightenment thinkers elsewhere a common legacy from the Western humanism that had its revival during the Renaissance. Their focus of concern was to turn from the obsession with the other worldly salvation proposed by the Church, to the secular concern of the human individual and his society. There was a common optimistic view about the power and benefit of modern science, a common faith in the value of human reason as opposed to blind faith, and a sprite belief in the progress of history.

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant condensed the spirit of the Enlightenment into one succinct phrase: Dare to know.

The long and short of the Enlightenment was a new way of looking at the world and reorganising it, at the expense of the traditional influence of the Church at that time. Perhaps they had opened the floodgate for Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to declare later that God was dead, and all things were permitted. For better or for worse, religious faith has taken a long tortuous route to the realm of private belief, the freedom of which will always be guaranteed by the state, but which will find it hard to interfere in the earthly business of politics again.

Crude genealogy

I have traced a very crude genealogy of the Western secular state as we know it today, even though I am not entirely convinced that in Western democracies, there is such a total and sharp division between religion and politics even there. For instance, we still find on every American dollar bill the phrase In God We Trust. And President Bush did invoke religious imageries like Good and Evil when waging war against Iraq, and the overpowering presence of the Christian Right in his regime is certainly food for thought.

Nevertheless, a lesson can be learned from history. If only we can crawl out from the bottom of our small Malaysian well, we can see a vast sky filled with countless stars of possibilities. No religious or political institutions are frozen in time.

Perhaps, to free ourselves from the narrow immediate urgency of contingent happenings, to order to open ourselves to a whole new world of possibilities, we should first seek liberation from our ancient fetters of racial and religious prejudices.

Then, perhaps we can begin to discuss the issue of a secular state intelligently.