In Middle English, it could also refer to the realm of the ‘this-worldly’ as opposed to the divine – the sacred and ‘other-worldly’ realms historically monopolized in Western Europe by the Roman Catholic Church. A term derived in Middle English from the Old French word seculer (itself from the Latin saecularis), the word originally referred to clergy who were not bound by the religious rules of a monastic order. Over the centuries, ‘secular’ has conveyed a far wider variety of meanings than current usage may suggest. Before I begin, it will be useful to examine more closely the history of some key terms. In the survey that follows, I will focus on the conflict between secularist and antisecularist trends in a variety of different states, starting with the rise of secularism in the West. A comparative historical survey of the rise and fall of successive waves of secularism in the modern era reveals a more complicated and paradoxical picture of trends in Western countries and of the impact of these trends on societies struggling to emulate the economic success of the modern West. In the quarter century since the Iranian Revolution took much of the world by surprise – not least in the way its religious leadership mobilized a genuinely popular uprising – many commentators in the West have been inclined to see the Middle East and South Asia as cultural backwaters, where religion-based politics are overcoming the secular forms of political organization appropriate to modern industrial societies.īut this understanding of recent events is misleading.
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