Research Article
- Mohammad Salim Al-Rawashdeh
Abstract
The term secularism is considered one of the most important terms that has been raising many issues and problems. Perhaps the most important issue raised on secularism itself is determining the origin and meaning of this concept which is problematic, in addition to the confusion which is associated with the translation of this term into Arabic. We note that there are different contradictory translations, depending on the terms of reference and starting points from which each researcher refers to or starts from. We have shed a some light upon the period of shaping and formulation of the Arab thought has become an intellectual freedom because of the weakness of the state authoritarianism, and the spread of liberal democracy ideas that included freedom of opinion and belief, and therefore open a wide range of crystallization of new ideas that have emerged an intellectual trend and the call for the separation of religion from the state as a solution to the crisis that the area experienced at the time, that argument was given by the Nationalists at the beginning and found its way to appear more clearly and away from other interpretations with a number of Arab intellectuals who have presented this concept to express suitable political and intellectual environment to encounter such ideas. The basic summary of this controversy is in the dealing of direct and explicit to the question of secularization in the discourse of contemporary Arab, which contributed in drawing the major features of the intellectual trends since the renaissance to recent times. Although Al Athama, alerts that secularism is not a vision or a steady ready but strict trial of the relationship between religion and politics reveal an ideological conception of a secular rise to the level of 'alternative religion. On the other hand, Athama concludes that the Byzantine - Christian and Muslim - Al-Khalifa experience is similar with respect to the relationship of religion and state on as they are based Eastern heritage on the one hand, and to the idea of monotheistic on the other hand.