A banner from the Salahuddin Revolutionaries’ Council in Aleppo’s Salahuddin neighborhood. It reads ‘Secularism became the accusation against those who disagree with our ideas’ – 8-11-2013 (Shahba Press Agency’s official Facebook page/Fair use. All rights reserved to the author)].

[This series of opinion articles on the relationship between
secularism and authoritarianism is the outcome of a collaboration
between SyriaUntold, openDemocracy’s NAWA and the Samir Kassir Foundation].

Throughout the 20th century,
the Arab world has always found itself operating either within an
Islamist or nationalist framework. Questions about whether there may be a
third outlet or source of knowledge which Arab intellectuals
have tapped into have risen, but rarely has the answer been positive.
In general, all Arab ideologies have usually operated within the two
aforementioned spheres.

Despite political conflict between the
two – sometimes even bloody – the existence of one is inevitably linked
to the other. In fact, the current state of Arab ruin, especially that in the Levant, is an extension of that dynamic. It
can’t be denied that the fall of the nationalist ideology meant that
Arabs reverted to the Islamist one. In fact, Islamists themselves have
said so.

In any case, my comments aren’t related
to that, but to the intentional false claims of Islamists that Arab
nationalist dictatorship is linked to modern politics and, therefore, to
secularism. Islamists continue to present themselves as the sole
alternative to replace Arab political regimes that are complicit in
spreading these false claims. (It is often concluded that Islamist
ideology is a “biological alternative.” Why? Because we are Arabs, it is
believed that we are instinctively born into an Islamic space!)

This Islamist false claim says that
with the fall of Ben Ali’s regime, his adopted ideology of Jacobin
laicism – which was the basis of his dictatorship – fell, with the
understanding that it was based on modernity. Soon
after, the regimes of other Arab states followed suit, apparently
proving this claim right. In fact, it gave credibility to the “Islamist
alternative” with the rise of political Islam in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the growth of Islamist movements in Syria
that took over the struggle against the tyranny of the Asad regime. All
these were taken as indicators that Arab secular ideology has fallen
after having been the cornerstone of dictatorships.

For the most part, these false claims
were based on two axes: Firstly, a political one, that equates the
tyranny of Arab political systems to western modernity; secondly, the
axis that takes advantage of what the religious sphere offers, which
meant accusing tyrannical Arab political systems of being based on
atheist agendas and therefore against Islam, the assumed natural state
of Arabs.

Undoubtedly, both axes are a product of
a larger foundational cultural context, especially in terms of trying
to delegitimize secularism by undermining its modern content and turning
it into “just another ideology,” and regressing back to Islamic
heritage as the cultural and historical path that establishes present
and future Arab aspirations. This heritage is recreated a thousand times
to serve the tyrant and the Islamists.

Furthermore, there is the equation of
secularism with the west, which has a history of hostility against
Islam. Unfortunately, Arab nationalist dictatorships have not gone
against Islamists in this intellectual nonsense. On the contrary, they
have always tried to prove they were more Islamic than the Islamists
themselves.

Gamal Abdel Nasser was a good example
(so are his ‘successors’) with his firm nationalistic legacy and the
cartoonish aspect of its modernity and secularism. To many, Abdel Nasser
was a charismatic legend who bought into a socialist ideology that was
hostile to Imperialism and Zionism. But the Egyptian leader was in fact
born into a religious sphere and was later influenced by the Muslim
Brotherhood. The fact that he remained chained to this socialist
ideology until his death did not sway him from the religious
intellectual frameworks within which he was raised.

Furthermore, the Islamic cultural paradigm of his nationalistic ideology
was not very different from that of his Islamist opponents, such as
Sayyid Qutb. His rather fierce opposition to some Islamists, was nothing
more than a temporary and military tyrannical ploy which he used to
protect his dictatorship; the same was for his socialist ideology and
his religious mentality.

The war between Abdel Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood was in fact more of a cat-and-mouse game. Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui once
alluded to this, saying: “The regime of Abdel Nasser fought the
Islamists as individuals, as political enemies and opponents. Perhaps
with the exception of the last year of being in power, he never fought
against the Islamist theory he was brought up to intellectually and
politically.”

Even when the Nasserist movement
afterwards tried to establish a coherent narrative, it was unable to
escape — on many occasions — from the use of Islamic symbols to
legitimize its ideology.

Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddhafi, the major proponent of dictatorship, was bolder
than most Arab rulers when it came to presenting new “Islamic examples”
that even the Ummayads didn’t dare to come up with. The goal of these
wasn’t to twist the sacred religious heritage, but to give legitimacy to
his dictatorship.

Other Arab dictators exceeded Abdel
Nasser in his ‘supply’ of religiously connotated ‘services.’ For
example, Hafez al-Assad worked on the “sunnification” of Syrian society
to exonerate himself in front of Syrians and to cover up for the crimes
of his ruling elite after the Hama massacre (1980). These efforts
included throwing religious celebrations that aren’t necessarily called
for in Islamic heritage, setting up al-Asad Qur’an recitation centers,
building mosques, and re-cultivating a group of pro-regime religious
leaders who could step in instead of the Muslim Brotherhood.

All this was to legitimize Asad’s rule,
which Hafez insisted was not hostile to Islam in Syrian society, but it
also consolidated a sectarianism that was already present. Undoubtedly,
the result was the creation of a new generation of fundamentalists, or
in other words, ‘a new Brotherhood’. As such, Asad’s attempts to
regenerate religious fundamentalism after talk of “Asadist secularism”
and “Asadist modernity” is not only comical but also painful, because
it is the cornerstone of the false claims presented by the “Islamists of
the Arab Spring.”

This mental mechanism of tying
secularism to Arab dictators is like trying to tie Islam to French
Christians under the pretext of “the Arab Renaissance [Al-Nahda].”
For example, the claims by some that Arab dictators are seculars or
that they have adopted a version of secularism (such as French laicism
as is the case of Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia) is not far from what
Egyptian jurist Muhammad Abduh
said in his famous quote that he “went to the west and saw Islam [i.e.,
independent thinking], but no Muslims; I got back to the east and saw
Muslims, but not Islam.” In either
case, we are facing totalitarianism: In the same vein to France’s
origins becoming Islamic, secularism now equates dictatorship. The aim
of tying secularism to Arab dictators is simply to bring it down.

Consequently, to rid oneself of
tyranny, it becomes important to fight secularist culture that brought
about dictatorship. Following this logic, France is no longer the old
city of “light” and renaissance whose people were originally
non-Christian — France’s origins will become “Islamic,” but its people
are unfortunately non-Muslims. Such Arab intellectual exercises are akin
to current Islamist intellectual endeavors, which are more systematic
in order to make the best of today’s deadlock in the Arab world.

Sadly, secularism in the Arab world
hasn’t had its fair share of study or criticism to be seen as a
necessary and modern issue as opposed to a political decision that is
forced by a dictator or passed via a number of legislations.

It’s frankly absurd to argue that the
fall of a few Arab regimes and the taking over of Islamists and
fundamentalists is akin to the fall of Jacobin laicism in its Kemalist version.
Such a reasoning wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for what was brought
about previously by nationalistic ideology and its contribution to the
longstanding Arab ruin.

Lastly, we can’t forget that the
current Islamist ideologies are the product of this ruin and they will
only bring about more decay.