"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest". This lesser known quote of Churchill may be taken as to underscore the premise that the business of governing a nation is a thankless task.

This is in a stark contrast to the Islamist premise which seeks the creation of an Utopian society led by the pious and governed by divine laws, where the human intellect is not deemed fit to make meaningful contribution in matters of governance and law.

At best, what we have is a set of compromises that constantly evolve, responding to the tensions and contradictions within society. While the will of the majority prevails, the rights of minority groups will be protected. For the minority groups, if they can articulate their case persuasively enough, their cause may even become mainstream.

A case in point is the environmental movement. In the '70s their concerns seemed eccentric and radical but today they figure prominently on the agenda of governments and international agencies, so much so that even those who contemptuously disregard the complaints of environmentalists at home have to pay lip service to them at international fora.

Freedom of expression, one of the pillars of modern democracy, has allowed fringe groups to exist freely, from militant ecologists and anti-globalisation groups, often relics of the old left, to extreme right-wing racial supremacists and ultraconservative moralists. To the casual observer, Western society appears to be tearing itself apart in many different directions, ready to crumble under the weight of their sins.

At the peak of Islamic revivalism in the '70s and the '80s, such shallow evaluation of Western society prompted Islamists to smugly predict the imminent, impending implosion of Western civilisation, backing these predictions with the crime and homicide rates in New York City, the statistics on teenage pregnancies, divorces and single parenthood, and the problems of drugs and alcoholism in the West.

Moral high ground

But today, the West remains as strong and dominant as ever. True, secularisation has increasingly pushed religion and God out of public consciousness. We are seeing an ever-increasing crassness and hedonistic materialism in the youth subculture, and western art and literature today reflect a post-modernist crisis of meanings and values. But those who have lived and worked in the West know that this implosion is not about to happen anytime soon.

The pillars of civilised life in the West - the schools, hospitals, universities and research institutes, the justice system, the institutions of government etc. are run by mainly decent people who may not be religious but nevertheless hold on to values imparted by religion such as a sense of fair play and justice, personal responsibility, love of knowledge, hard work and respect for human dignity.

If the enduring, timeless appeal of classical music, Shakespeare and the classic operas can be taken to represent the stability and continuity of Western civilisation in the face of the fleeting and superficial frivolity of pop culture, then those who had anticipated their quick demise will be disappointed.

What has to be appreciated is that the west has a remarkable capacity for self-criticism and renewal, so much so that despite their history of imperialism and colonialism they can still hold the moral high ground in matters of humanity's mutual concerns - such as in the discourse on human rights and the environment - their occasional, glaring hypocritical posturing notwithstanding.

It is unfortunate that the Muslims' assessment of the West and secularism is often coloured by the centuries old Muslim-Christian conflict that stretches back to the Crusades and the Western double standard when it comes to dealing with Muslims.

While they practice democracy at home, Western governments have no qualms in propping up unpopular despotic regimes in Muslim countries. Herein lies the Muslims' antipathy towards secularism. Secularism means Turkey, and it means betrayal of Islam. Culturally, secularism is sex, drugs and rock and roll and politically, it means despotism and economic hardship.

Rare victory

But Turkey is secularism's worst advertisement. If one needs to give it a name, it may be called 'bastard secularism'. Turkey has long dreamt of joining the ranks of the civilised world by applying to be a member of the European Community. In 1993, Jacque Delors, President of the European Commission said that 'membership of the European Community is conditional on the possession of a shared Christian heritage" and this may well have been the reason for Turkey's failure to be admitted.

But perhaps the more important reason is that for all its fanatical defence of secularism, Turkey failed to uphold the democratic norms and traditions of western Europe. The recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg by a narrow four to three margin in backing the Turkish government for its ban on the moderately Islamic Welfare (Refah) party was a rare victory for Ankara, which has been condemned by the court at least 11 times since 1998 for violation of freedom of expression.

(The decision was apparently based on the party's position regarding the Sharia law and the use of force to achieve and maintain power, but this has been denied by Laurent Hincker, the lawyer who represented the Welfare party).

The international community, especially the EU, have long censured Turkey's oppression of its Kurdish minority who are also Muslims but culturally and linguistically distinct. The inhumane detention and torture of suspected Kurdish guerrillas and sympathisers have been highlighted by international human rights organisations and the Turkish government has been taken to the European Courts of Human Rights on numerous occasions on this issue.

But even if one were to leave this aside and examine Turkey's record as a secular state, it falls dismally short of the standard of Western secular democracies which it tried to imitate. During the last half-century, the Turkish constitutional court and the military, the self-proclaimed guardians of the secular republic, have banned more than 30 political parties.

Anti-religious dogma

The Welfare party used democracy as a yardstick by which to judge the failure of Turkish secularism to be truly pluralistic and to respect the rights of all of its citizens, including their freedom of conscience or right to live according to their religious beliefs.

Dr Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Welfare party who was prime minister in 1996 but forced out of office by the military a year later (the reason being, apart from his soft Islamisation program, was that he had infuriated the army and the Kemalist ruling class when he toned down the war effort against the Kurds in Anatolia and northern Iraq) had argued that true secularism should not only mean state autonomy, but also that religion be respected and be free from state interference.

The Welfare party wished to amend the definition of secularism to guarantee the right of all people to live in accordance with their religious beliefs. If in western Europe secularism had ushered in democracy with its values of civility, power-sharing and tolerance, Turkish secularism has nurtured an anti-religious dogma - as rigid, militant and intolerant as it claimed 'Islamic fundamentalism' was.

It is simply the other side of the fundamentalist coin, and some of its irrational edicts amount to a form of 'cultural suicide', in the words of a British Muslim scholar, Turkey being essentially a Muslim nation with Islam's legacy remaining an important factor in defining the identity of its people.

Of the numerous examples, the Washington Post in October last year reported that a Turkish court sentenced a 23-year-old female student to six months jail for 'obstructing the education of others' by wearing a head scarf to her college final exams.

In April 1999, Merve Kavakci, a 31-year-old American educated computer engineer, elected as an MP for Istanbul on the Welfare party ticket, was forced to leave the parliament without taking an oath and was stripped of her Turkish citizenship. (There cannot be a more glaring comparison of this than to the London Metropolitan Police's decision in respecting the religious rights of its Muslim female officers to wear the head scarf).

It seems secularism in Turkey and other Muslim countries like Syria and Algeria has only produced dictatorship, economic hardship and violation of human and civil rights, which includes the oppression of Muslims who wish to practice their religion.

Fundamental freedoms respected

The Islamist response of condemning secularism and calling for the establishment of 'the Islamic state', elevating that doctrine to an article of faith, is a selective misreading of secularism. After the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, with many Muslim lands colonised by Western powers, Muslims came to the painful realisation that they were in a very weak position militarily, economically and technologically.

Kamal Atarturk and the 'young Turks' thought that Islam was the source of Turkey's backwardness and shame. With the complicity of Western powers, they dismantled the much-weakened 600-year- old caliphate and secularised and modernised Turkey, hoping to bring it back to where they thought it belonged, Europe.

To achieve that goal, Turkey must actively shun its Islamic identity and heritage, sometimes resorting to ridiculous measures such as legislating against the Muslim attire, beard and tarbush in favour of the western suit.

But Turkey's experiment with secularism is only successful in imitating the external forms of westernisation. In the west, secularisation - the freeing of the public domains of law, government, economy and education from the dictates of the church and confining religion to the private sphere - has ushered in an age of reason and enlightenment, scientific progress, industrialisation and economic prosperity.

In the realm of politics and governance, it has nurtured the values of open-minded tolerance, civility, and a healthy respect for the individual rights and civil liberties, including religious freedom.

This is not to say that Western democracy is flawless, and not a few people view the 'end of history' thesis with distaste, but it is something that works because it recognises pluralism and respects fundamental freedoms. The Islamist belief that the secular West, which Turkey's Kemalists claim to be their model, is anti-religious is not quite accurate.

There is no doubt that with increasing secularisation, religion is on the decline if one looks at the attendance at services for worship and adherence to church-dictated codes of personal behaviour, especially with regards to sexuality, reproduction and marriage.

But Christian values nevertheless persist and it could be said that secular humanism appropriated for itself some of the non-material categories of Christianity and superficially secularised them. This is most apparent in the human rights discourse where concepts of 'dignity of man' and the 'brotherhood of man' would have no meaning in a purely materialist world view.

Complete separation

The present standards and norms of civil and political rights, the legislation protecting workers, the granting of equal rights including the right to vote for women, the protection of children and minorities etc. did not arise de novo all at the same time out of secularism as one grand, unified idea.

That would be giving it too much credit. But secularism, by curbing religion's monopoly on social discourse and allowing a pluralism of views by conflicting groups (including religious ones) to be articulated in the political and civil arena, gave birth to modern democracy.

It is important to understand that most modern democracies have not evolved consciously according to pre-conceived Utopian plans, but were in essence a balance of power equilibrium. And the extent as to how much religion plays into the equation is by no means uniform.

The French equivalent of secularism - lacisme - has a much more radical connotation then the English term. Lacisme is conceived as a doctrine of complete freedom from interference by religion.

This had arisen out of the particular historical context of France in the few centuries before the Revolution, including the very bloody war of religions in the 16th century, leading to a virulent backlash on the church by fanatical elements of the revolution. The fortunes of the church thereafter roughly followed those of the monarchists, enjoying periods of ascendancy during the Restoration and the Second Empire. But by 1882, religious instruction in state schools was abolished and replaced by general ethical instruction.

Laiscime accomplished the complete constitutional separation of church and state in 1905 by an act of Parliament. The impetus was partly by the church taking side with the French army and the nationalists in the infamous l'Affaire Dreyfus scandal, brought into national prominence by the writer mile Zola.

If the French model is the closest to that of Turkey's, the separation of state and religion is less clear in other Western European countries. In Britain, the English monarch is both head of the Church of England and the state. In the House of Lords, a number of seats are held by the clergy. The Education Reform Act of 1988 enforces religious education in public schools, which includes the teaching of Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism to children of the respective communities.

In 1998, after years of persistent demand, the British government decided to grant state funding to two Muslim independent schools, a benefit long enjoyed by Jewish and denominational schools. The situation in Germany parallels that of the United Kingdom where the Christian religion is taught in state schools, financial administration provides for the upkeep of officially recognised religious communities and blasphemy a crime figuring in the Penal Code.

Undoing of humanity

Political Islam's understanding of secularism as based mainly on Kemalist Turkey's experiment is flawed, ascribing to it as a systematic doctrine and a unified theory as the master paradigm of the West. Seeing the erosion of Islam in the cultural life of Turkey, it warns Muslims of the evils of secularism, ignoring its positive contributions, chiefly in nurturing democratic values, tolerance, social justice, economic and scientific progress.

The Islamist answer to secularism is the 'Islamic state'. The Islamist argument is that Muslims, unlike the Christians, do not need secularism for two reasons; one, everything concerning polity and governance of the state is provided for in the Quran and the Sunnah , and secondly the clergy as an institution does not exist (in Sunni Islam) and therefore there is no question of clerical despotism.

While the Quran and the Sunnah are important sources of guidance for Muslims, 'return to Quran and Sunnah ' has been turned into a cheap political slogan and outsiders may be forgiven to think that the two are primarily books of political theory and state-craft.

The business of government in the era of globalisation and information technology needs to satisfy the demands of all sectors of society, from simple village folk to the westernised, educated elite, and since this requires much human ingenuity, it is perhaps beyond the competence of the traditional ulama .

Their failure would erode the people's respect for them and for Islam. As to the second argument, while it may be true that the clerical institution does not exist in Sunni Islam, the Muslims' reverence for the ulama may mute justified criticisms of ulama who hold public office simply out of respect.

More seriously, it would not be acceptable for many modern Muslims to surrender their independence to the ulama class to determine for them and others, Muslims or otherwise, what is best for them. This could well be a recipe for religious despotism.

We must be able to learn from the complexity and richness of the human experience. We have seen the Islamic experience which started from uncompromising idealistic premises that soon collapsed under the crushing weight of reality as in Iran and Afghanistan to the Western experience which started from quite the reverse and evolved into something resembling idealism.

If there is anything that Islam, Christianity and other spiritual traditions can offer modern man, it is that secularisation as a Promethean hubris must not be left unrestrained. The crisis of the values and meanings of post-modernism, the poverty, loneliness and confusion of many blighted lives and the spectre of a purely technological and instrumental attitude towards nature, especially in the biological and medical sciences, should prompt us to reflect that the continuing banishment of God from public consciousness may well spell the undoing of humanity.