Zawaya

Religious freedom is the foundation of modernity

By: Iqbal Al Gharbi

The Maghreb has a rich cultural diversity, as a result of many Roman, Arabic, Ottoman and European invasions and conquests. Moreover, the Maghreb’s heritage has been enriched thanks to the mobility of traders and the ease of trade in this strategic crossroad. All this led to the presence of many religious and linguistic minorities; these communities were flourishing and well integrated because they often spoke the same language and had the same culture as their host countries. Examples of these communities are Christian and Jewish minorities in major Maghreb cities, Amazigh people in Morocco, the small and large Kabylie and southern Tunisia, Ibadites communities in Mzab in Algeria, Djerba in Tunisia, and Djebel Nefoussa in Libya.

During the period of national fights, local elites attempted to reconstruct a collective identity for themselves based on Islam and the Arabic language in order to stand out from the colonizer. The anticolonial struggle was based on Islam, which was associated with resistance and the reconquest of patriotic identity.

After independence in the Maghreb, although the ruling powers back then all claimed their adherence to technical modernity, the French speaking world, and the West, Islam has remained the only constitutional religion in the region. All Maghreb governments who were seeking legitimacy wished that their nations would emerge with a supposedly religious and linguistic homogeneity to build and consolidate the State and provide it with a strong ideology.

In recent years, the social and political activism of new religious minorities in the Maghreb showed a mutation that occurred under the influence of several factors: globalization, free flow of information, the culture of human rights, “the democratization of writing” according to the wording of Jacques Berque who allowed profanes to access to major sacred texts, and the visibility wish, all have deeply affected the dominance of the “Maliki Sunni Muslim” paradigm in the Maghreb.

Nowadays, while Catholicism has adopted a more cautious approach with regard to missionary activities, some branches of Protestantism that have powerful means demonstrate an all-out defensive dynamism in the region. Moreover, according to the U.S. State Department, thousands of Maghreb people convert to Shi’ism. As for Wahhabism, its rapid expansion is due to the impetus of political Islamism and propaganda of Middle Eastern media.

Therefore, a new religious profile is emerging in the Maghreb and creating disorder in the religious identity of its communities. This new profile raises questions and requires appropriate responses from the Maghreb elites about the new data in the present time, in a perspective that complies with the spirit of openness and the ethics of tolerance, democracy and secularism.

The emergence of new religious movements broke with uniformity and may be useful in starting a debate on contemporary issues of Islam in regard to religious freedom and secularism. Including different points of view in a discussion and encouraging open “public” debate has always addressed some shortcomings of human societies provided that a concrete expansion of the public sphere takes place in the region. Religious freedom, which is one of the fundamental values of modernity and human rights, and which allows individuals to believe or not, or to choose their religion without being prosecuted, banished, or threatened in their physical or moral integrity, must be the core of this open debate.