There's a form of liberalism that imagines it can offer a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and co-exist. And it polices that ground - the prosecution of the 'Catch the Fire' ministry for saying some pretty awful things about Muslims in Victoria is a case in point.
On this view, it is necssary to distinguish public and private, religion and politics and so on, so that you can put contentious difficulties into a non-political sphere as far as possible.
Taylor writes:
...a controversy like that over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses shows how wrong this view is. FOr mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground of all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges. Moreover, as many Muslims are well aware, Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, postreligious outlook that happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals as a more organic outgrowth of Christianity - at least as seen from the alternative vantage point of Islam. The division of church and state goes back to the earliest days of Christian civilisation.
(Taylor, 'The politics of recognition' p. 62)
2 comments:
I agree to some extent. Liberalism is an outgrowth of Christianity, but more than that it is an result of efforts to find a solution to the vicious religious conflicts of the 17th century. It was, and is, a solution christian pluralism but begins to fall down when the pluralism becomes more and more plural. I agree that the structure and nature of liberalism is incapable of dealing with islam (and other worldviews or ideologies that are alien to a Christian way of thinking). But I reckon the liberal methodology still has legs it will just turn out a different result with different inputs.
One of these differences will have to be different notion of the political and the religious. I think this distinction is becoming really difficult to maintain (what is a religious belief anyway?). More promising perhaps would be something like a distinction between ideology and the state or something like that.
JRS
Its hard to define the word itself as it means different things to different people. Specailly, if you apply it on the non western nations.
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