COMMENT Three terms - secularism, liberalism and pluralism - have had bad notices in the ill-tempered quarrel between theocrats or quasi-theocrats and the rest.

Two of them - liberalism and pluralism - do not deserve this fate at all.

In the Malaysian context, the two terms were once considered positives for they took cognisance of our racial diversity and held  democracy to be the best medium to resolve disputes.     

Secularism, by contrast, invited the fate it has come to be saddled with in Malaysia where it is regarded as an alien transplant from western democracies that equate religion with superstition and view the secular state as antidote for that virus.

In Malaysia, the public square - the arena where citizens debate the issues of the day - has never been regarded as ‘naked’, that is, void of the influence of religious viewpoints.

So while the ‘naked square’ may have been a western construct, it was never a Malaysian innovation.

Therefore the term ‘secularism’ and its correlates, such as ‘secular state’, have not deserved in Malaysia the connotations that have come to be attached to them in the west.

Secularism is the idea that although all faith groups have a right to exist and have their say, none of them has a right to dominate others, and all of them should recognise that they self-constituted interest groups, just like political parties and trade unions, and must obey the same restraints.

This concept of secularism - not the one that has come to hold sway in western democracies - is an important starting point in the debate about the status of Islam in our polity, a debate that has taken a refreshing turn with the entry of what is regarded as the voice, hitherto silent, of the Muslim moderate.

The recent injection of this voice, from a coterie of once-eminent Muslim civil servants, diplomats and judicial personnel,  into the national discourse on the status of Islam simply means that the forces of the Islamic hard right have now a countervailing competitor for the ear of Malaysia’s Muslims.

There are no better building blocks for the insertion of this body of opinion that a clarification of the concept of ‘secularism’ so that it is free of the meaning that has rendered many Muslims allergic to it - that is, a process of stripping of the public square of any influence by religion.

The religious can have their views heard but must not claim dominance for them.

Secularism is said to prevail and a state is considered secular insofar as it allows religious voices to be aired in the public square but no right to dominance is ceded them, especially when those voices and views are in clear conflict with what are regarded as democratic principles.

How does one reconcile this stance with the federal constitution that says the religion of the federation is Islam?

Not detracting from the secularity of our polity

Nothing in the history of our jurisprudence interprets this clause of the constitution as detracting from the secularity of our polity such that the specific mention of Islam as the religion of the federation is taken as effecting ceremonial functions and no more.

A Supreme Court opinion written by former Lord President Salleh Abas is often cited in conceiving this interpretation to be substantive and definitive.

Hence a substantial body of legal and political opinion has congealed around the position that Malaysia is a secular state and Islam is the religion of the country.

This stance has come to be regarded as an oxymoron because secular states do not acknowledge a preference for a religion.

 

But this is thinking of a more recent vintage when the concept of a secular state came to be seen as averse to the expression of a preference for a religion.

This was  not the case when our constitution was drafted in the mid-1950s when the thinking behind a secular state and an official region did not give off antithetical resonances.

Original intent of the drafters and promulgators of the constitution is important and there is nothing in the records to show that they meant differently from what subsequent judicial and political opinion has held their meaning to be.

All of which is grist for the arguments to come in the national discourse on the status of Islam.

Suffice, with the insertion of a prominent body of moderate Muslim opinion in this discourse, the balance has shifted from what it was the last few years where it tilted in favor of the Islamic hard right.

The triumphalism of the latter is set to be exposed as premature and vacuous.

The country’s moderates, no matter their religious affiliation, can breathe somewhat easier.   

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.