October 27, 2006
What is problematic about Muslims in Australian society is the Muslim reintroduction of religion into public discourse just as we citizens are still trying to painfully wrested themselves free from the strictures of our own religions---Catholic or Protestant Christianity. We are still confronted by fundamentalist Christians desire to Christian Australia so that it is a Christian nation. What we have is the angry rejection of modern Australian secular culture by Christian and Islam fundamentalists.
Ronald Dworkin, writing in the New York Review of Books, says:
Some religious people find that for them faith trumps science in these [biblical account of the creation of the universe and of human beings] and the other few remaining areas in which faith challenges science. They deny the truth of Darwinian theory in the self-conscious exercise of their personal responsibility to fix the role of faith in their lives. That is their right: it would be a terrible violation of liberty to try to coerce them out of that conviction. But they must not try to impose that faith on others, including children, most of whom attend public schools.
Religion is why we non-Muslim citizens cannot leave the Islam community to the Islam community.This is not to argue for a policy based on the expectation that millions of Muslims will so suddenly abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers is simply not realistic. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being Australian is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European. For secular Australians to demand that Muslims adopt secular humanism would be almost as intolerant as the Islamist jihadist demand that we should adopt theirs. But, the Enlightenment fundamentalist will protest, our faith is based on reason! Well, they reply, reason can be intolerant and violent.
In the relationship with Islam as a religion, it makes sense to encourage those versions of Islam that are compatible with the fundamentals of a modern, liberal, and democratic Europe.
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Part of the problem with Islam and Western secularism is that Islam "lacks" the dualism of church and state, of pope and emperor, on which secularization in the West has been historically based. To the contrary, Islam conceives of itself as a civic religion. Ironically, it was just such a civic religion that Rousseau, looking back at the paganism of the classical republics, pined after, in the face of the political problems posed by the privatism/other-worldliness of Christianity.