By Fauzi M Najjar
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The intellectual crisis agitating muslim minds today centers on the relationship between modern Muslims and their past. For the last two centuries, Muslims have found themselves caught up between authenticity (attachment to their values and culture) and modernity. They view most Western ideas, ideologies and institutions as a threat to Islamic law, values and culture. Among these foreign imports, secularism seems to represent the greatest danger. As separation of religion and state, secularism was first championed by Christian writers like Ya’qub Sarruf, Faris Nimr, Nicola Haddad, Salama Musa and others. Except for Salama Musa and Lewis Awad, these Christian immigrants were Syrians, who had found refuge from Ottoman rule in British-occupied Egypt. The first Muslim religious scholar to advocate secularism was Shaykh Ali Abd al-Raziq (1888-1966) in his al-Islam wa ‘Usul al-Hukm, published in 1925. In that famous and controversial work, Abd al-Raziq asserted that Islam was a religion and not a state, a message not a government, a spiritual edifice not a political institution, a proposition that led to his defrocking by the Azharite Committee of Ulema.
