Dear Friends,

 I don't know many of you in person but your names are familiar. Being on a list put together by Khalid ensures for me that there must be some worthwhile common features to our thinking, including the capacity to have independent critical judgement.  So, it is a great pleasure to share my thoughts with you on the very interesting topic raised by Khalid.

 I found Naeem Sadiq's views very clear and I can associate myself with much of what he has said. However, I want to raise a couple of questions. They are important for me in clarifying my own thinking.

 We seem to be defining secularism as representing a rational approach and we contrast it with religious faiths as presumably not having this approach - almost like mutually exclusive categories. As Naeem Sadiq says, the two are "not just incompatible but also diagonally opposite".  Most people, I think, would agree with this distinction. But I have one fundamental problem with this. To explain this, let me define faith as accepting some first premise without question. To me this is the essence of religion. So, if a person accepts to submit to the will of God then he is called a Muslim.

 If we apply my definition to secularism, to me it too becomes a faith - a faith that requires the acceptance of rationalism as being the unquestioning first premise. [And we know, since Kant at least, that pure reason cannot be used unquestionably].  Am I wrong in interpreting it this way?

 It is not merely a matter of semantics. It leads me to two conclusions: (a) to always question the first premise on which the superstructure of our
 ideas/opinions may be based; and (b) to wonder whether far from being diametrically opposite there may be a vast range of intersecting areas of ideas and opinions that are cohabited by the so-called secularism and the so-called faith.  My point is that all faiths, at some point, were viewed as being more rational than the other alternatives present. Similarly, one may be accepting the label of secularism today because it appears to be more rational. Is "humanism" today's bandwagon just as much as the revealed religions were in their time? If not, then we have to develop some
 other criteria for distinguishing between what we consider adherence to faith and to secularism.  This is for the starters.

 Abrar Hasan
 14 January 2003