Islam must adapt to democracy (and not the other way around)

There is a vast difference between living in a secularized society and one that is not. Getting rid of theocratic domination and separating religious power from political power is undoubtedly one of the culminating moments in human history. Those of us born into a democracy have already found ourselves in a world where no religion is law, but anyone with a modicum of memory can recall what it was like to live under the obscurantism of National Catholicism.

Individual freedoms are incompatible with the establishment of norms derived from religious texts. This is obvious, but it doesn't seem that everyone sees or understands it that way. When the Church perversely uses laws that prosecute defamation or blasphemy—which shouldn't be a crime in a truly secular society—to impose its agenda, what it is doing is attempting to erode the pillar of the separation between religious and political power. But it is even more worrying and dangerous that many new citizens of liberal democracies neither understand, embrace, nor defend this principle. young people from Roda de Ter who were interviewing Mònica Bernabé In their magnificent report on imams in Catalonia, they highlight a worrying reality that all of us in direct contact with Muslims have observed: they don't seem to understand that they live in a society where there is no right to oppose the fundamental values that sustain it, such as equality between men and women. If these young men fervently adhere to a convert who appears to be a fundamentalist, it's because the education they've received hasn't provided them with a democratic worldview, and they don't defend their values. Values that, conversely, they brandish when it comes to anti-racism or respect for religious freedom. The latter cannot be included or tolerated when it promotes views that directly conflict with individual freedoms and rights. Therefore, the reflection that emerges from Bernabé's work is very worrying: we have parallel societies to our own in which the figure of authority is a man who is ignorant of the context in which he lives and who transmits medieval ideas about what he means. be a good personThus, the teacher who supports coeducation will instill equality in students who will go to the mosque on the weekend, where the imam will tell them that women are diamonds that must be hidden to be valuable, transmitting to them the most outdated form of sexism, or telling them that if they are good Muslims, they will go straight to hell from work and school for not believing in the one true religion.

It is urgent to educate these new generations in secularism so that they integrate the fundamental principle of the separation between religious and political power, and do not try to impose their particular beliefs on non-Muslims. We have left them alone to face the influence of different fundamentalisms (I would call them directly). nationalism(since their project is not only spiritual but also political, and they spread the idea that the single nation to which all Muslims of the world belong is the great Islamic Ummah). And what is worse: they have received a democratic education, but they have only grasped at the aspects that suit them: religious freedom and anti-racism. These are the grounds from which various Islamist organizations have operated to create a climate of opinion according to which all criticism of Islam is Islamophobia. A perfect breeding ground for the rise of fanaticism.