It is not uncommon to question the compatibility of Islam with secularism, and rightfully so. If we look at countries with Muslim-majority populations, only a handful claim to be entirely secular. These nations are exceptions to a long list of Muslim states that have adopted Islam as their religion. In order to understand whether Islam is inherently against secular political systems, one can either look at religious texts to find some kind of conflict, or they can look at the political history of Islam.
In this article, I hope to prove that Muslim nations today are largely nonsecular unlike many regions that were once in control of the Catholic church (which are now secular) because they have enjoyed a significantly different political history over the past few centuries. Although a wide range of theories exist for why the Catholic church lost a significant portion of its political powers in the mid-sixteenth century, many people believe that a significant contributing factor was its constant interference in the private affairs of local people.
Western Europe was a land of bitter divide based on religious grounds. Minorities were constantly being persecuted by agents of the Catholic Church, and there was barely any room for dissent. In such a stringent political atmosphere, people were slowly losing faith in the ability of their religious leaders to provide solutions to their political problems. The reason why Christian-majority states in Western Europe are secular today is not necessarily because their religion so-prescribes secularism, but because of the failure of the Catholic Church in providing
Many people associate the emergence of secularism in Europe with the Age of Enlightenment. While it is true to a certain extent that the growth of rational thinking led to a considerable decline in the popularity of the Catholic Church, the main reason why people were seeking alternate systems was because the theocracy-based system that had existed for a long period of time was clearly unsuccessful in meeting the demands of the people.
Unlike Christianity, Islam never called for a system in which one body such as the Catholic church was empowered with the jobs of the executive, legislature and the judiciary. The Islamic political system is one based on the separation of these very powers, and at no point in time during Islamic history did all powers vest in one hand. Minorities in the Muslim world, historically speaking, enjoyed a lot of rights that were unheard of at those points in time. For the most part, leadership was never an issue in the Islamic world.
Having said that, the time has come for Muslims to take a hard long look at themselves. The conditions that existed in Western Europe some five hundred years ago is evident in many Muslim countries today. Minorities are constantly being targeted, and political leaders are clueless about how to tackle the situation. Divides based on religion are on the rise, and many people are becoming frustrated by the affect of living in a nonsecular state. The level of intellectual discourse on Islam in the modern world has reduced drastically, and there is virtually no theological scholarship that Muslims can turn to base a modern Islamic nation state upon.
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