*2.1. Habermas' Postsecular Approach: Basic Ideas and Current Developments*

Basically, Habermas' argumen<sup>t</sup> is threefold. The first point is a sociological analysis: at least for the time being, secularization theory is wrong. There are many modern, well-educated people who still believe in God and accept various kinds of sophisticated, religiously informed doctrines. Note that Habermas still trusts analysts who give evidence that secularization theory might prevail in the long run. However, he also acknowledges that religious people are more resistant in upholding moral arguing under the pressure of a capitalist modernity, which causes social pathologies elsewhere. The second issue is a problem of political theory: given the, at least current, stable existence of religious strata and their moral convictions, a ban of religious arguments from the public sphere is not viable within an inclusivist liberal concept of the public, which is in dire need of support against social pathologies. Rigid secularism as a political project is therefore morally and politically wrong. However, this verdict against secularism is a limited one. Habermas still believes that religious language is less rational than secular language. Rational arguments are the corner stone of every public deliberation, and only they lead to legitimate politically binding and juridically enforceable decisions. Thus, religious claims can be made in public, but as soon as the deliberation process enters political or juridical institutions, which are entitled to make binding and enforceable decisions, religious vernaculars have to be translated into a secular language. The third insight is a philosophical claim: religious language is richer than secular discourse. The translation process, which is necessary for a political decision, is also an enrichment for the debate. Secular reasoning freed thoughts from their religious shelf. Sometimes this process destroyed semantics worth being kept or did not succeed in translating all of the valuable meaning that was contained by the religious concept (Barbato and Kratochwil 2009; Calhoun et al. 2013; Habermas 2006; Habermas et al. 2006, pp. 101–15).

Within the debates and developments of Habermas' approach, a few aspects need to be discussed in some more detail with respect to the question of applying the concept to the Middle East: even in his latest work, Habermas trusted Pippa Norris' and Ronald Inglehart's (Norris and Inglehart 2011) empirically ill-proven claim that better-o ff societies secularize, while poorer and more fertile strata of the world population are more religious (Habermas 2019, p. 84). Progress, according to this view, might thus back secularization theory in the long run. That claim stands historically in stark contrast to the experience of European modernity, in which mass deprivation led to atheist labor movements and the poor peasants of Russia backing Lenin's revolution (Chadwick 1990). Looking at the modern Middle East of the 21st century, in particular at the Arab peninsula with a domestic product far beyond global average, the thesis should be considered false. The so-called oil sheiks are not only fabulously rich, they are able to compete in setting standards in architecture, infrastructure, technology, and sustainability. Nevertheless, there are no indications that these modernization processes will have an impact on religiosity, as would be expected by secularization theory. While there is sti ff competition among the various interpretations of Islam, with Qatar on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and the UAE on the side of authoritarian pluralism, secularist tendencies do not rank high within these societies. Incoming poor migrant labor and the well-o ff nationals of the Gulf emirates are obviously divided by class, often in their creed, but less in their degree of religiosity. We do not see any history repeating of Marxist working class or Enlightenment bourgeois secularization as demonstrated in early modern Europe. The thesis of rich and secular vs. poor and religious should be considered false due to the example of the Middle East.

Habermas restricts his notion of a postsecular society to Western countries (Habermas 2008). For him, only those societies went through a full modernization process that experienced a balanced combination of religious decline and enlightened religious resistance as a precondition for the postsecular arrangemen<sup>t</sup> between secular and religious citizens. Here is not the place to make a global comparison, but it is safe to say that two hundred years of secularization that started initially with Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798–1801) and became a genuine Turkish and Arabic project after the end of the Ottoman Empire had some e ffects in the Middle East. Processes of secularization can be e ffective in political, public, and private realms. The decline of religion does not have to be sharp or close to zero to observe reversing trends to secularization, which Peter Berger labeled as desecularization (Berger 1999). It is of course open to debate whether secularization will triumph in the long run in the Middle East. It is also possible that religious resistance, beginning with the assignation of French General Kléber by Suleiman al-Halabi (1800), will prevail either because Islam is, for good or bad, immune to full-fledge secularization processes or because Political Islam has better answers to the challenges of modernization. In any case, the Middle East is not just a landscape or a geopolitical region but a public space in which transnational elites and masses discuss their joined and di fferentiating experiences and judgements as they go through processes of secularization and desecularization.

A brief look at the history of the Middle East might be in order to sketch that development. The pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt or the Ba'ath Party in Syria and Iraq, the White Revolution of Sha Reza Pachlevi in Iran, the postcolonial socialism of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, the republican and socialist states of Yemen, and Kemal Atatürk´s laicism, as well as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict between Zionists and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) were secular enough to classify the Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the emergence of the Islamic State, the electoral victory of Recep Tayyip Erdo ˘gan in Turkey and the following settlement of his rule, the Pyrrhus victory of the Islamic Salvation Front and the following Civil War in Algeria, the mainly Shia–Sunni split in Yemen's current war, and the increasing role of religious nationalism

in the State of Israel and in Hamas' rule in Gaza as clear indicators of desecularization. The rise of Political Islam, broadly understood as a comprehensive political doctrine based on Islam, after the failures of secular nationalism varies but is evident (Cesari 2014; Tamimi and Esposito 2000).

Political Islam challenged not only secularist nationalists but also more traditional monarchies, such as Morocco, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia, and the Gulf Emirates. Those dynasties that were stable enough to survive the secularist and nationalist challenge were able to modernize without compromising their monarchical rule. The demands of democratic participation pressured monarchies with populous nations, such as Morocco or Jordan, to integrate Political Islam within their political system (Brown and Hamzawy 2010). Since the Grand Mosque Seizure of 1979, the Saudi dynasty had to prove the legitimacy of their rule to Wahhabi scholars and fostered Salafism in the region and globally. The home-grown terrorism of Osama Bin Laden worsened the situation (Hegghammer 2010). The Gulf Emirates, such as the UAE or Qatar, whose population is composed mainly of migrant workers, had less internal pressure but saw the need to project their power into the region to maintain the rule of their dynasties at home. The opposing decisions of the UAE and Qatar after the Arab Spring is one of the major cleavages in today's Middle East (Davidson 2019; Kourgiotis 2020). Thus, it is safe to say that the Middle East saw processes of secularization and desecularization that resulted in a political landscape of deep and conflictual plurality concerning legitimate relationships of religion and politics.

However, the conflictual plurality is not restricted to a split within the Sunni community concerning the reaction to democratization, to Political Islam in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, or to Iran and uprising Shia communities. There are many other cleavages vibrant in the region. Still dominant and spilling over into other areas and issues is the Israel–Palestine conflict. Last, but not least, the diverse Christian communities, ranging from the oldest Christian traditions, speaking the Aramaic language of Jesus to the Christian migrant workers from Asia and Africa, particularly in the Gulf Emirates, are part and parcel of the plurality of the Middle East (Stetter and Nabo 2020). Christian thinkers and politicians, such as Constantin K. Zurayk, held high-ranking positions in the pan-Arabic movement. They embraced secularism as a way to avoid Muslim dominance and saw Arabic nationalism as an opportunity to leave the inferior status they had in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire and become full citizens of the postcolonial nation states (Sabra 2006). Secular nationalism was, however, a troublesome solution for minorities as well (Mahmood 2016). While the nationalist Young Turks and Kemal Atatürk based their nation building project on religious and ethnic cleansing and homogenization in favor of a Sunni nation of Turks but chose a rigid laicism that imposed state control on religion, pan-Arabism was much more open to pluralism, and its secularism was much less rigid. It provided a political identity to which all religious fractions of society were supposed to belong. The terror reign of the Islamic state against various non-Sunni communities in Syria and Iraq, based on a kind of Sunni nation-building (Barbato et al. 2016), as well as the all-out campaign of the Alawite regime of Assad against the majority of the Sunni citizens of Syria, revealed the plurality of religious and ethnic belongings that secular pan-Arabism and the Ba'ath Parties of Syria and Iraq once tried to integrate, partly at the expense of the Sunni majority, in Iraq, particularly at the expense of Shias and Kurds. Already this very brief sketch of the history of the Middle East challenges the orientalist notion that only the West experienced secularization and desecularization deep enough to become ready for postsecular developments.

A postsecular society emerges when the religious cleavage loses its dominance due to a pluralist arrangemen<sup>t</sup> open to both religious and secular arguments. The debate about weaker or stronger versions of postsecularism was united in ruling out authoritarian claims but restricted itself to the rational deliberation of religious and non-religious arguments (Butler et al. 2011; Cooke 2007). Arguing for integrating authoritarian rule into the postsecular approach heavily compromises this normative demand. The argumen<sup>t</sup> here is not that authoritarian rule can be part of the postsecular ideal. Both the strong and the weak reading of the postsecular approach (Barbato and Kratochwil 2009; Chambers 2007) depend on the common ground that rational deliberation in contrast to authoritarian decision is the decisive point for the normative concept. The argumen<sup>t</sup> here is rather that postsecular developments

can be observed even though they are part of a broader picture that is shaped by authoritarian rule and power politics. As the debate of Habermas' deliberative approach in international relations has shown, deliberations are islands embedded in strategic actions of power politics (Deitelho ff 2009). These insights have to be integrated in the debate about a postsecular society, particularly in international relations (Mavelli and Petito 2014).

Habermas' latest discussion of the entanglements of religion and politics and the historical emergence of a public sphere in Europe are illuminative for the argumen<sup>t</sup> here. Based on Rosenstock-Huessy's claim of a papal revolution in the 11th century (Rosenstock-Huessy 2013, pp. 516–61) and Bergman's discussion of this thesis with respect to the emergence of the rule of law based on canonical law (Berman 1995), Habermas argued that the popes' claim of supremacy over politics based on doctrine and law paved the way for accountability and delegitimized the self-understanding of emperor and kings that their bare will was already sanctioned by God as lawful. The clerical elite of the popes were able to push through remarkable parts of the papal program. In the entanglements of religious and political elites based on the doctrine of an ideological superiority of the clerics over the might of the warriors, an open public and the rule of law could emerge (Habermas 2019, pp. 637–75).

Obviously, the papacy or an equally unified and unifying religious actor does not play a comparable role in the Middle East. However, the emergence of rule of law, a critical pluralist public, and a tamed and accountable political power might not need unified religious balancing but only a pooled and pluralist religious counterpart. The decisive point for the e ffect of the papal revolution is less the institutionalized power than the claim to represent ideological supremacy without monopolizing political power. The popes tried to be influential and insisted on the entanglements of politics and religion, but, apart from the status of a prince in the Papal States, the popes never attempted to become political rulers of the space they tried to dominate doctrinally. This concomitance of a claim of ideological supremacy on the one hand and political abstinence and neutrality in favor of the rule of law and doctrine on the other hand opened up the space for a public sphere. It is well known that the history of the papacy has its dark sides of corruption and hubris. However, in some respect that is a sign for hope rather than for despair. It does not take constant saintly behavior on the side of religious actors and their institutions to trigger the emergence of the rule of law, a critical public, and the taming of political power.

Transferring these insights to the Middle East brings an essential argumen<sup>t</sup> into focus: the disentanglements of religion and politics, so often imposed on the Middle East and simultaneously lamented as impossible, are not necessary for normatively viable progress, but a powerful interreligious coalition of religious actors that claim public authority for the sake of the rule of law and a critical public but do not aim for revolutionary regime change in order to take political o ffice by themselves is crucial. The claim here is not that a postsecular Middle East in this ideal sense is in the o ffing. However, the Arab Spring already showed opportunities in that direction, and most recently, the Document on Human Fraternity, signed by Grand Imam Ahmad al-Tayeb and Pope Francis, laid the programmatic ground for such an endeavor. The postsecular concept has to be tailored to detect these trends.

### *2.2. Connolly's Postsecular Approach: Deep Pluralism and Politics of Becoming*

Two decades ago, William Connolly had already begun to criticize the rigid ideology of secularism because it does not provide, quite in contrast to its self-understanding, a common ground for everyone but excludes as a partisan project most of the religious members of the citizenry. While secularism offers a foundational ideology to integrate various world views, Connolly pleaded for a deep pluralism in order to find pragmatic compromises, not foundational consensus (Connolly 1999). The term of deep pluralism or negotiated pluralism invites us to trust in a society that di ffers fundamentally in various aspects of its creeds but is nevertheless able to find bridges and connect networks that construct viable social fabrics based on mutual respect, an open public, and the rule of law. However, such an endeavor comes with a prize for those who profit from the frictions of today. Connolly's term for such costly transformations is politics of becoming. Change is costly for those benefiting from established arrangements. Or, in Connolly's own words,

"The most complex ethical issues arise in those contexts where su ffering is intense and its visitation upon some is bound up with securing the self-confidence, wholeness, transcendence, or cultural merit of others. That is, the most intense, intractable cases of su ffering are political in character. They often revolve around what I call the politics of becoming" (Connolly 1999, p. 51).

The decisive question for the politics of becoming is the attitude of those who benefit from current arrangements. Do they trust in the promises of the transformation because they also see a role for themselves in the new arrangements, or not? A positive or a negative answer decides about fierce resistance or smooth transitions (Connolly 1999, p. 58).

Connolly's politics of becoming are open to the question of power. His approach has not enough trust in the pacifying force of reason to avoid the issue of exclusion by marginalizing the excluded strata as irrational. However, the idea of politics of becoming is framed as an emancipating project that should replace authoritarian exclusion instead of exchanging one authoritarian rule for another.

Power politics of becoming goes one step further. Again, the argumen<sup>t</sup> is not that authoritarian rule can be normatively justified but that an analysis of normatively meaningful postsecular developments is not to be disgraced because those developments are embedded in power politics or fostered and supported by actors who also intend to protect, stabilize, and legitimize their authoritarian rule. An expansion of the postsecular approach to the power politics of becoming is suitable for a fine-grained analysis without losing the capacity for a normatively sensitive evaluation.

### **3. Postsecular Power Politics of Becoming on the Ground: Arab Spring and the Abu Dhabi Document on Human Fraternity**

From a normative as well as from an empirical perspective, the Arab Spring ended in a disaster. Only the forerunner Tunisia was successful in establishing a, at least, "flawed" democracy (The Economist 2020). While Algeria's experience of its civil war made it immune to any contagion effect, the thawing wind brought the Arab Spring eastwards. The authoritarian regime faltered and toppled, but democracy was not established. Whether the old dictators were killed, exiled, discharged, or kept in o ffice, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were stuck in endless war, while Egypt returned to an authoritarian rule under a former general. Would the Middle East be a better place if the Arab Spring never happened? Looking at the death toll and the rise of the Islamic State, there is grea<sup>t</sup> temptation to denounce the uprising. However, the failure to establish a new order does not necessarily delegitimize the will of the people to resist corruption and oppression. Perhaps this experience of a postsecular revolution (Barbato 2012) might still form the basis for an emerging new order of the Middle East.
