Debate about the relationship between religion and state has been stifled by history – and the influence of a colonizing West.

Ninety years ago in Egypt a new political party was formed. The Secular Party, as it was initially known, campaigned under the slogan: “Religion belongs to God, the homeland belongs to everyone.” The Secular Party did not oppose religion as such but objected to the Egyptian king’s use of religion to boost his authority.

Today, it is almost unimaginable that anyone in Egypt, or any other Arab country for that matter, would be foolhardy enough to set up a political party with such a name or platform. In the intervening years, secularism has become a dirty word, and debates about separating religion from the state — a necessary condition if liberty is ever to flourish in the Middle East — have been firmly shut down.

Europe, of course, witnessed a struggle between state and church that raged for centuries. Although there are still vestiges of the old linkage — the British monarch as titular head of the Anglican church, for instance — and pockets of resistance here and there, the basic argument has been settled decisively in favor of secularism.

In Islam, however, the picture is reversed. In the Arab countries linkage between state and religion is accepted almost everywhere. There are differences of opinion about the degree of linkage, but the principle itself is rarely questioned.

One reason, Herman De Ley suggests, is that history has led Muslims to associate secularism not with liberation, as Europeans usually do, but with foreign domination.

The dismissal nowadays of secularism, at least on the level of dominant Muslim discourse, has its historical roots in Western colonialism and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries: Muslims at that time were confronted with a political secularization that was imposed by Western powers.

In the European countries themselves secularization … had clear emancipatory effects (liberating society and man’s mind from the ideological and institutional shackles of the Church). In the colonies or protectorates, on the contrary, secularization was enforced as an ideological weapon — against Islam, that is — in order to suppress national or political aspirations of Muslim communities.

Ataturk’s forceful secularization of Turkey in the 1920s was another factor. In 1924, his abolition of the Islamic caliphate, by then based in Turkey and a shadow of its former self, sent shockwaves through the Muslim world, and various Arab rulers sought to claim the title for themselves — among them King Fuad of Egypt.

In 1925, though, an Egyptian sharia judge named Ali Abd al-Raziq caused a sensation by publishing a book, “Islam and the Roots of Governance,” that advocated a clear separation between religion and the state. Abd al-Raziq opposed the king’s efforts to become caliph but framed his argument carefully, so as not to directly attack the Egyptian monarch: instead of arguing that the king was unworthy of the caliphate he argued that the caliphate was unworthy of Islam. The caliphate had no religious justification, he said. It had often been corrupt and at cross-purposes with the Prophet’s mission.

But Abd al-Raziq’s case ranged wider than that. He told an interviewer:

“The main point of the book … is that Islam did not determine a specific [political] regime, nor did it impose on Muslims a particular system according to the requirements of which they must be governed; rather it has allowed us absolute freedom to organize the state in accordance with the intellectual, social and economic conditions in which we are found, taking into consideration our social development and the requirements of the times.”

For producing what has been described as “a classic of modern Egyptian liberal thought,” Abd al-Raziq was accused of atheism and hauled up before the scholars of al-Azhar, Cairo’s ancient religious university. He was stripped of his title as a religious sheikh and removed from his post as a sharia judge.

Since then, “secularism” (almaniyya in Arabic) has acquired deeply negative connotations in the eyes of ordinary Muslims – a situation that Fauzi Najjar, an emeritus professor at Michigan State University, attributes to the success of Islamists in characterizing Muslims who advocate a separation of religion and state as atheists and apostates.

One notable case was that of Farag Fouda, an outspoken secularist who ruthlessly mocked many of Egypt’s leading Islamists. In 1992, a group of teachers at al-Azhar, who had set up a committee to confront the “helpers of evil,” accused him of blasphemy. Five days later, Fouda was shot dead in his office by two members of the militant group, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. The Muslim Brotherhood publicly welcomed his killing and during the trial of his assassins, a scholar from al-Azhar argued in court that their action was justified because the authorities had failed to punish Fouda for his apostasy.

Another high-profile case was that of Nasr Abu Zayd, who taught Arabic literature at Cairo University. Among other things, he had been analyzing how Egyptian presidents used religious discourse in their speeches to present themselves as something they were not – “how the president started his speeches by quoting the Qur’an, ended his speeches by quoting the Qur’an, presenting himself as something like the Mahdi, the Imam.”

In 1992 Abu Zayd applied for a professorial post, and an academic committee considered three reports on his work. Two were favorable but the third, prepared by an Islamist, Dr Abdel-Sabour Shahin, questioned the orthodoxy of Abu Zayd’s religious beliefs and claimed that his research contained “clear affronts to the Islamic faith.” The committee then rejected his promotion by seven votes to six.

Not content with that, the Islamists then pursued Abu Zayd through the courts and succeeded in having him compulsorily divorced from his wife on the grounds of apostasy. Fearing for their safety, the Abu Zayds then fled the country. (Editor’s note: Pofessor Abu Zayd was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor last summer. Watch for an upcoming exclusive interview with Abu Zayd by The Arab American News.)

The decline of Muslim secularism reflects the rise of Islamism and the more generalized religious revival that has swept across the Middle East since the 1960s. A key moment was the humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 that discredited Arab nationalism, a relatively secular movement. Then came the Iranian revolution, and later the expulsion of Soviet forces from Afghanistan by the mujahideen, giving credence to the belief that with God on their side, Muslims are invincible — an idea that has been further reinforced by the Israeli retreat from Lebanon in 2000 and the futile Israeli onslaughts against Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza earlier this year.

Coupled with that is a widespread and not unreasonable feeling that Muslims are under siege from the West. The response, in many cases, has been to retreat into a protective shell, seeking the comfort and certainties that religion can provide — accompanied by a rejection of what are identified, often mistakenly, as “Western” ideas and values, including secularism.

For all these reasons it is extremely difficult today to have a sensible debate about the relationship between state and religion in Muslim societies. But if they are ever to develop political systems where people can engage freely as mature and active citizens, it is a debate that must be reopened. The question is, how?

This issue is discussed in more detail in Brian Whitaker’s forthcoming book, “What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East.” This article reprinted from The Guardian, 8 April 2009.