The document discusses the erosion of secularization worldwide, citing examples from Turkey, Afghanistan, and Russia, where religious influence is increasingly intertwined with politics and state power.
Extract
[...] Secularization is not an end in itself according to this logic. In Turkey, the blur between the religious and the civil is maintained and the mixing of genres (religious and political) is increasingly blatant, as evidenced by the re-Islamization of St. Sophia Basilica in July 2020 by its conversion into a mosque. By this decision, Erdogan puts an end to the universalist and international memorial character of the basilica since especially its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985. [...]
[...] Thus, the Taliban claim a rigorous application of Sharia law in everyday life, with the aim of re-Islamizing customs, justice, and all individual and collective rights and duties. To recall, the Taliban are a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim organization that claims a strict application of Islamic law. ? A step back on secularization in Turkey. Let's first talk about the nature of this step back. The drivers of this step back are conjunctural and directly linked to opportunism: there is an instrumentalization at work to reinforce the personal power of an individual: Erdogan here. [...]
[...] Also, critical thinking (the ability to have a critical sense) is poorly perceived by people who support an ideology or people who are not educated: blasphemy falls within this scope; it is a critical view of the religious fact that falls under freedom of expression. But beware, critical thinking is learned, it is an art of argumentation, it requires rigor and must be demanding with itself: it is a questioning that respects rationality and pragmatic logical reasoning, highlighting a contradiction to learn to think for oneself, freeing oneself from all ideological shackles (obscurantism) and emancipating oneself by building one's free will. [...]
[...] There is also a step back in Russia with the significant weight given to the Orthodox religion by Putin through the patriarch Kirill. In Russia today, religious minorities are discriminated against. This supposed religious discrimination manifests itself in the mobilizations implemented by the Russian authorities. In fact, the mobilized soldiers are mobilized by force and this mobilization mainly concerns populations far from Russia and non-Orthodox confessions (the Orthodox religion): religious and confessional minorities are clearly targeted to contribute to the Russian war effort. [...]
