Secularism Was Intoxicated by Colonialism
How did secularism spread in Egypt?
The emergence of secularism in the Arab world coincided with the arrival of the European occupier, who saw in the collapse of the Islamic legal system a means of penetrating Islamic identity and creating a state of deep subservience in the occupied countries. The earliest example of this occurred in Egypt at the hands of Napoleon, who, while only briefly in power, succeeded in implanting the seedling of secularism after setting aside Sharia law and infusing a European atmosphere into Egyptian culture and taste. The backlash against the military occupation was the catalyst for attempts to penetrate local environments by encouraging educational missions for students from the occupied countries to the West, where they would be immersed in Western thought, immersed in a state of fascination. The greatest negative impact of the expatriates became apparent with the withdrawal of the military machine of the occupier, as they took over the reins of universities and the circles that constituted the culture. They were able to impose the Western mood on everything after monopolizing influential positions and creating a generation that based its reading of thought, literature and history on Western thought, literature and history. Taha Hussein - who is considered the most important figure to have influenced the Egyptian university - even said, at the conclusion of his doctoral dissertation, which he discussed at the Sorbonne University, that the Ottoman Empire was the reason for the stagnation that afflicted the Egyptian mind in recent centuries. Egypt slept while Europe took great strides, and did not awaken until under the influence of the blessed Bonapartist campaign . It rose and interacted with the Europeans who became its teachers. I believe with utmost certainty that the influence of Europe, led by France, will restore to the Egyptian mind all its past strength and fertility.
In the same vein, secularism was and still is the main Western weapon to penetrate the Islamic world and was welcomed with open arms without pushing or conflict. The Arabization of Western secularist writings and their dissemination in the general atmosphere was a step by Christians and the shoes of the colonizers who sought to overthrow the Ottoman Caliphate. Among these was ” Farah Antoun ,” one of the Christians who studied in France and adopted its secularism and mythical progress as a model to deceive fools and idiots and make them believe that Islam is the cause of the decline of civilization and that as soon as we remove the religious garb and catch up with the West, we will become like them in the degree of prosperity. Likewise, the Christian ” Salama Moussa ” promoted the Pharaonic and ancient Egyptian model as one of the solutions to get rid of the dominance of Islam and said:
” The religious bond is impudence. We, the children of the twentieth century, are too great to depend on religion as a unifying force that unites us .”
He linked the Arab renaissance to a basic condition, which is getting rid of the Arabic script in favor of the Latin script, saying:
“We have bound our language with letters that prevent it from expressing science; that is, they prevent us from advancing. When we adopt the Latin alphabet, we move forward about a thousand years.”
He declared, “He is an infidel to the East and a believer in the West. Therefore, he was keen to make his readers turn their faces towards the West and disavow the East. How could he not say that while he praises fate that Egyptians are not Arabs, and considers interest in Arab culture a waste of youth and a dissipation of their strength, and describes Europeans as clean and intelligent.”
Arab secularism has never been linked to objectively arriving at the truth, nor has it been characterized by intellectual freedom and the discussion of opinions. Rather, it was, like Christianization campaigns, merely a means for Western tendencies and the desire to expand by deceiving the ignorant and seizing their wealth while they bow their heads in prostration to their sophisticated and civilized colonial master.
