Winning Freedom from Religion

How would you respond to radical Muslim clerics in northwest Pakistan -- now under Islamic law -- who are calling for expansion of Islamic law across the entire federal republic of Pakistan? Should any nation be governed by religious rules?

Although it may not often be realized, freedom from religion is one of the rights we enjoy in this country. The fragility of that right has been tested repeatedly. At this moment we seem to be holding back the forces that attempt to impose worship. But the struggle has been dicey, as everyone knows. Even in the strongest political democracies, the right not to worship is viewed suspiciously by the devout, and if given their way, the most intolerant of fundamentalists would wipe it out.
So when we look at societies where religion is enforced, it's helpful not to mark them down as primitive, authoritarian, or barbaric. The reality is that rights don't exist until they are won, and they aren't won until a large segment of society realizes their worth.

Islamic countries with rare exceptions are not fully democratic, and those that consider themselves democracies are constantly subject to clerical interference. Such is the nature of power and the internal struggles to grab it and hold on to it. In Pakistan's case, it hasn't been clear for forty years that any faction is willing to cede power to any other. Civil authority wrestles with the military; a few elite families maintain their inherited privilege; the intelligence service runs a shadow government; and behind it all, the ordinary citizen is probably most loyal to his local mosque.

Therefore, the question of Islamic law is entangled --or should we say strangled?--by a host of social factors. Looking in from the West, we cannot help but be mystified. The absence of women's rights offends us. We have contempt for the Taliban's extreme Puritanism that bans dancing, shaving, and television. But rather than fall for the right wing's propaganda about a "clash of civilizations," it's more realistic to view the Islamic world as a clash of the past and present. The glory days of Islamic culture are long past, but the nostalgia to restore a mythical Islamic paradise is extremely powerful. What we see as the benefits of modernism pose a threat to that nostalgia as well as to the reactionary forces that want to maintain their power.

Will Muslims rise up against all the anti-democratic elites -- civil, military, and religious -- that hold them in constant oppression? Not as long as Shariah law and inflexible fundamentalism are seen as "good." That's the stark reality. If we find it noxious, we should take a moment and ask ourselves why the U.S., which enjoys enormous freedom, cannot do a simple, rational thing like ban assault weapons. The answer is that we have our own extremists, irrationality, and hidebound traditions. We have our own isolated factions unwilling to surrender their power. More to the point, we have our own struggle to be free of religion if that is our personal choice.

Published in the Washington Post