I would like to speak about the relation between religion and open society or, let’s say, the relation between religion and politics, and especially religion and democracy. Now, it seems to me that there are two basic paradigms. Phrasing the issue in terms of ideal types you can think of two extremes: one where religion and politics are fused or amalgamated, and one where religion and politics are totally separated and divorced. Now the paradigm of the fusion of religion and politics has been a temptation for all religions as far as I can see, which means that all religions have endeavored to strive for political power and control. This has been a strong temptation in Christianity, Islam or Hinduism. It is always a temptation that needs to be resisted because it has bad effects both for religion and for politics. In Christianity, the bad effects which are constantly being recited are things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, and all the alliances between throne and altar. The fusion of religion and politics is one of the paradigms that we find in history and is a model that, I believe, has to be resisted.

The other paradigm is that of a complete divorce or separation between religion and the social and political sphere. Again this is a paradigm which has its problems; it is detrimental, in many ways, both to politics and to religion. It deprives politics of certain ethical and spiritual resources and, on the other hand, it deprives religion of any kind of public voice or discourse. Here I want to speak a bit about the relation between religion (or the revival of religion) and democracy and I turn especially to the example of Islam, because being here in Morocco I thought this was particularly relevant. Now, I believe there are again two paradigms or extreme ways of saying that Islam and democracy, or religion and democracy, are basically incompatible. One can either say that democracy destroys or negates Islam, or that Islam destroys or negates democracy. This is an antithesis which is by no means imaginary. It has played itself out in reality in many different ways.

Those who say that democracy is incompatible with the Islamic religion have certain arguments on their side, and I refer particularly to political thinkers who have a great following among young people in the Islamic world: such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and his writings or the Pakistani Ala Maududi and many others. They have basically argued that what is wrong with democracy is that it transgresses a central idea of religion, namely, that it transfers to people the only sovereignty that exists, the sovereignty of God. Democracy can also be, and has often been, translated as the sovereignty of the people. This is a stark polarity which can not readily be bridged. The argument of people like Qutb and Maududi is that if you opt for the sovereignty of people, you basically enter into a new era of Jahilyia, which was overcome by the prophet Mohammed; you return to the age of ignorance as you assert something which is incompatible with religion. I just want to emphasize that these people who argue that democracy and Islam are incompatible are not just ignorant and stupid: they have certain arguments. Their arguments are bad, but arguments they are. And the idea is basically that you cannot have at the same time the supremacy of God and the supremacy of men. You have to choose between the two. For people like Sayyid Qutb there is a whole series of Jahilyias which have taken place in the Western world. They recite such things as Helenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. All of these are seen as steps towards a greater Jahilyia, which has to be reversed.

So the first approach is to say that democracy has to go and Islam has to be reinstated. The second formulation is that democracy and Islam are incompatible and that Islam has to go, or at least Islam or religion has to retreat into a purely private room. Islam has to be rigorously privatized, just as the Western enlightenment has tried to privatize Christianity. Now, these are the arguments of defenders of radical secularization or laicism, as well the arguments of agnostics. An example (again, I will take it from the Islamic world, but it could be found anywhere) is the Algerian-American theorist and political thinker Lahouari Addi. He wrote an essay called “Islamicist Utopia and Democracy” where he points out precisely this contradiction, concluding that it is Islam which has to go. For Addi, the Islamist utopia is another formula for making public or politicizing Islam that is incompatible with modern democracy. Public Islam, he says, is a form of medievalism; our political modernity is incompatible with the public character of religion. Modernity is based on the depoliticization or privatization of religion.

These are two ways, then, of talking about the relation between religion – especially Islam – and democracy, one saying that Islam has to triumph over democracy and the other saying that democracy has to vanquish and eliminate Islam. Now, my question is: is there possibly a third way? And this is the one which I personally prefer. I fully agree with Giuliano Amato whose arguments are moving in this third direction. And I believe that this direction, which is favoured by a number of Muslim thinkers or intellectuals in the Islamic world, is also the option that our celebrated guest of honour today, Mohammed al-Jabri, is following in his writings, together with Mohammed Arkoun and, to some extent, Hassan Hanafi amongst others. But I would like to cite especially the Iranian philosopher Abdulkarim Soroush, partly because he happens to be a friend of mine, although not only for that reason. He has written very beautifully about that third possibility, describing what he calls a “religious democracy”. This is the kind of option that puts the emphasis (and I speak here as a social and political philosopher) on what we today call “civil society”. It is in civil society that religion must be given its freedom to speak and its ability to express itself, not on the level of the government or the state. It is not a matter of abolishing the liberal and neutral state but of granting more freedom to religious believers in the arena of civil society, that is, in schools, associations and churches.

In America, there are these two principles: the separation of church and state which means the state is not a religious institution, and on the other hand, the principle of religious freedom. So, how can you have a state which has no established religion but at the same time encourages the freedom or believers or, in other words, that does not denigrate or marginalize the freedom of believers? This is precisely what Soroush has called a “religious democracy”. It is not that religion dominates democracy but that different kinds of religion or religiosity (it could also be a very non-doctrinaire or non-establishment kind of religiosity such as the Sufi religiosity) coexist with democracy. I have tried to describe to you what are the relationships between politics and religion. You can either have a radical paradigm that fuses the two or one which separates the two; but I think the only salutary way to go is to grant to people their self-respect and identity, to give people in the civil society – which is a space between the state and the private home – the maximum freedom for the expression of religious beliefs. This I believe is compatible with democracy and religion, especially with Islam.

Fred Dallmayr is the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Theory and teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (Usa). He is the autor of several books among which: Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), Dialogue among Civilizations. Some exemplary voices (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), Small Wonder: Global Power and its Discontents (Lexington Books, 2005).

This text is the transcription of the intervention held by the author at the round table organized by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations “The awakening of religion and the open society”, which took place on UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day (Rabat – Morocco, 16th November 2006). The following figures participated at this meeting: the Interior minister Giuliano Amato, the philosophers Abdou Filali-Ansary (Morocco), Fred Dallmayr (U.S.A.), Sadik Al Azm (Syria), Sebastiano Maffettone and Alessandro Ferrara (Italy), Reset Editor-in-Chief Giancarlo Bosetti and Reset DoC’s director Nina zu Fürstenberg.