Adonis Diaries

How do you understand “Secular States” to mean?  

 Note: This is an edited version of an article I published in 2009.  This essay applies to all States, western, orient, animists, pagans, monotheists, secular, semi-secular, democratic, theocratic and other political systems…

Charles Malek, a philosopher and Lebanon’s representative to the United Nations in its earliest 1946 sessions in San Francisco, proclaimed in the sixties that Lebanon cannot survive as a State, unless all Lebanese convert to Christianity! Lately, the Moslem Sunni fundamentalists proclaimed in 2006 that the State of Lebanon should be governed Caliphate-style.  The Moslem Shiaas of Hezbollah want to establish the rule of the “Wilayat al Fakeeh”, an Ayatollah who would lead by holding both the spiritual and political powers.

Fact is, Lebanon political structure is multi-theocratic, though the Constitution, (which has never been applied), never mentioned religion to be the sources for generating laws or running and administrating our civil status.

For example, the Christians during the civil war wanted to establish Christian cantons, exclusively for the right-wing Christian Lebanese, since they over ran the Palestinian Christian camps in their “enclaves” and evacuated the lucky surviving Palestinians from the massacres outside the Christian cantons.

Do Christians in the Levant (Near East States) have ground to be worried?  Islam means by “Jihad” the right to proselytize Islam everywhere and all the time.  As if the western nations have not been carrying their own brand of “Jihad” since Medieval Age to any place they wanted to colonize.

The Christians in the Levant have grounds to be apprehensive: the Christian sects have refrained from converting Moslems because conservative Islam sects demand as “halal” the shedding of blood for the “blasphemous” re-converted Moslems.

The Moslem Sunni salafists in north Lebanon, twice fought the Lebanese army within two years; hundreds of soldiers died and were handicapped for life. The Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden has the same political objective with a twist; the Qaeda wants to establish the restrictive and ultra conservative Wahhabi sect as the essence of selecting Caliphates.  The Wahhabi sect is the one adopted by the obscurantist Saudi Arabia theocratic monarchy.

In 1925, the Sunni Ali Abel Razzak wrote in his book “Islam and origin of governance” that “Islam is innocent of what the conservative Islam understands of the Caliphate.  The Caliphate was never in the religious planning, and neither were the religious judges nor any of the civil administrations in the government.  The Prophet Muhammad didn’t recognize them or order them or denied them.  The political and civil administrative issues were left to the Moslems to decide upon them.  Thus, it is proper that we engage our mind and consider the experience of nations, and the rules of politics that are the best around for our Nation.”

In Iran, Ayatollah Borojardy was detained because he wanted to separate States civil politics from religion, thus, resisting the “Fakeeh” concept of government.  In Lebanon, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasr Allah, publicly harangued the Shiaa to considering “Wilayat al Fakeeh” as the official political system of his party.

Knowing that Nasr Allah speaks as a clergy in every religious ceremony, blending religion with politics with resistance to the Zionist Apartheid State, could we ever hope that the politics of Hezbollah are just short-term tactics to uniting the Shiaa against Israel?

The State of Israel would like you to believe that a mythical leader they named Moses had a revelation by a superior being named Yahweh to conquer land by the sword and genocides:  Land that was “promised” to the horde of tribes following him.  Thus, Israel would like to establish a Jewish theocratic State in Palestine.

It has been categorically proven that the Old Bible was initiated in the second century before Christ in Alexandria, and chapters were added many centuries later, and it was re-edited several times. Hebrew, as most Arabic verbal slangs bordering Syria, was a verbal slang of the Aramaic written language:  A written version was created in Alexandria as Jews flocked to Egypt around 300 BC.

If you are nowadays following Lebanon’s politics and the preparations for the election in June 7,  you might have the impression that it is the political leaders of the religious sects who are manipulating the sacerdotal castes of our 18 officially recognized religious sects.  

Don’t be fooled; ask any Lebanese and he will tell you that he is forced constitutionally to pay his first allegiance to his sect.  In fact, the sects were given the legal and official right to administer the civil status of its co-religionists from birth to death and the central government is totally helpless in interfering; even if any serious government  wishes to change the political system, it would never want problems to blow in its face…

My question to the western States’ citizens is: Do you believe that the separation of State and religion is implicitly a de facto reality?  Do you believe that religious clerics and institutions have desisted from meddling in State affairs? That during voting periods, the religious sacerdotal castes do not impress on the political climate?

Do you believe that there is no religious backlash on religious minorities? Isn’t religion recognized in your constitutions and in the prayers of your national ceremonies?  Are not the civil administrative posts implicitly submitted to a quota system?

I am sincerely worried about the practices of those hypocritical Secular States who force its minorities to submit to the various litmus tests, on the ground of applying civil laws and regulations. Personally, my position is that religious doctrines and stories are a bunch of hog wash nonsense of myths and abstract concepts that even “zero IQ quotient ” individuals refuse the premises.

The religious sacerdotal castes would like you to substitute “your belief in a Creator” from watching the cosmos and the mysteries of life, into total faith in their particular ideological constructs and set of values.  I feel limited in finding a resolution where check and balance can be erected to cope with the all permeating power of the sacerdotal castes in every States around the world. 

Constitutional laws need to be thought out to restrict the implicit power of the thousand tentacles that religions have instituted to infuse their ideologies in schools and civil administration of people’s daily life. One of the best and most efficient methods is to encourage the establishment of opportunities to exercising choices in every aspect in our lives from birth, decentralized schooling systems, marriages, legal divorce alternatives, and burial at each of the legislative, legal, and executive branches.

Only available opportunities for choices, backed by political determination to honor those choices in the workforce, in the daily living, and in society structure, can permit a fighting chance for all those free minded and reflective citizens and families who respect their potential power for deciding what is best for their spiritual development.

The best that “secular” Western States could do was restrict separation of State with religion to public servants, and refrain from explicitly relating religious political pressures in political campaigns.  Other than that, religions and particularly the religion of the majority, are definitely the most influential power-brokers, alongside the financial multinationals.