Malise Ruthven on Tariq Ramadan's Critique of Secularism

From Harry's Place:

Ruthven's take on Ramadan's biography of Mohammed, in the New York Review of Books, is worth reading in full.

But here's a choice bit:.

In analyzing Western secularization he places the emphasis on classical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment themes that freed the Western spirit from the institutional control of the Church. In Western history, he writes "the sphere of the religious was...founded on authority and dogma." The Church not only had spiritual authority but property and temporal power which it used to oppose science, rationality, and freedom of thought. Secularization was therefore the process by which the people claimed their rights to intellectual freedom after centuries of suppression by the Church.
Islam, he insists, will not be subject to this process of secularization because it was never institutionalized in the form of a church. God is present in Muslim consciousness "by means of a Book and a human example...and not by means of an institution or an incarnation." Under a revitalized Islamic polity—based on the constitutional principles of Medina—Muslims can modernize their societies without succumbing to the dehumanizing forces of secularism.
This is a widely held belief among the Islamists or "Salafist reformers" whom Ramadan is proud to support. There is, however, a profound flaw in his analysis which pervades all of his books under review. It is dangerously utopian and optimistic. In several unguarded passages he gives himself away: unlike Western Christianity the shared faith of Islam—"the brotherhood of Faith—is opposed to any idea of tragic consciousness." This is an astounding statement because it excludes, consciously or otherwise, the whole of the Shia minority tradition, which is suffused with a tragic sense of loss and betrayal....The absence of virtually any reference in Ramadan's work to the Sunni–Shia divide is highly significant and has a direct bearing on his flawed analysis of secularization. The process of secularization in Western Europe was a complex phenomenon, and included important strands of the anticlerical tendencies to which he alludes. But he overlooks the most critical ingredient in the mixture of intellectual and historical forces that engendered the Enlightenment: the privatization of religion in the West and its progressive and necessary removal from the political realm. He ignores both the Reformation and the wars of religion that devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a strange omission for a Swiss student of Nietzsche educated in the city of Rousseau and Voltaire.
The anticlerical and sometimes antireligious feeling of the Enlightenment was born in humanitarian revulsion at the horrors of sectarian slaughter. For Pierre Bayle, writing in the 1690s, God was "too benevolent a being to be author of anything so pernicious as the revealed religions which carry in themselves the inexterminable seeds of war, slaughter, and injustice." By failing to address the cleavage that reaches back to its point of origin—in the first civil wars of Islam and in the Prophet Muhammad's household—Ramadan avoids putting forward "Islamic answers" to explain the fates of thousands of victims of sectarian killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The Sunni–Shia division is a raw, untreated wound in the body of Islam. Though Muslim leaders routinely denounce sectarian strife as contrary to the Prophet's teachings, the cleavages in Muslim societies—buttressed by endogamous marriages and separate places of worship—still tend to fall along sectarian lines, as we see daily, whether in Baghdad or Beirut. Unless this fundamental division is addressed, with religious differences recognized and institutionalized along the lines that prevailed in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Ramadan's argument that Islam can avoid the destiny of Christianity falls flat on its face.

The finer points of Islamic jurisprudence do not interest me.
The interpretation of all these schools are dictated by the Quran and the Hadiths and as such can not be altered in the way that Tariq Ramadan is suggesting.
Because it is a closed system, Islamic jurisprudence collapses in any society that is guided by the values of secular humanism. This is principally due to the fact that Islam itself was not constructed in accordance with humanism - if anything it is an inhumane system of law and governance.