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In the meantime, another apparently self-evident fact has become fragile. This is the differentiation and contrast between the civil and religious community. This was not characteristic of antiquity and the early modern era but has definitely shaped our concept of a civil society since the Enlightenment. In the Western world, this concept of the civil society was preceded by the Christian dualism between “secular” and “religious” rule. After reciprocal, absolutely painful, disputes since the Enlightenment, the concept that – although it had been shaped by the Christianity it dialectically opposed – the Western state no longer had any need for genuinely practised Christianity to be able to develop itself as a “societas perfecta” in the sense of the Greek polis. Of course, the Western state, complete with the civil society supporting it, continued to live precisely in those conditions that had been moulded by Christianity and that it would be unable to reproduce – let alone create anew – itself. Going beyond the individual argumentative purpose – “transcending” it – these conditions include the justification for those rights to protection and freedom that have the common denominator of “human dignity”. For their part, these rights require a liberal, democratic, and social constitutional state to remain guaranteed. But as long as there is no lack of Christian, or functionally equal, prerequisites for this kind of formation of a civil society and its state, the secular state in the Western tradition only needs some kind of civil religion to give expression to its moral foundations and, ultimately, perception of sense not only discursively, but also symbolically – and, therefore, appealing to the emotions – as well as stabilising socially in this way. This religion must not necessarily be Christianity as long as it is possible to make “human dignity” the key element of social and political order convincingly.

But now there are extremely influential alternatives to the formerly Christian character of a (civil) religion that unites individuals to form a nation. In particular, there is very special alternative in those Western states that have a large Muslim minority in their population. Members of this group often also – or even above all – feel that they are part of an Islamic culture spanning many societies and states. However, precisely this culture, which dates back to late antiquity, did not produce the Western state and the society that supports it, but, in many cases, even expressed its opposition to both. What is important in Islam is not the contraposition of the “state” and “church”, or a dualism of “politics” and “religion”. It is much more a matter of the relationship between “Dar al-Islam” and “Umma”. The latter is – completely corresponding to the Christian church as an “assembly of believers before God” – the community of Muslims. On the other hand, the Dar al-Salam – which can be translated as “house of peace”, in contrast to the “house of war (Dar al-Harb) – refers solely to that part of the world that has really already been pacified: namely, through the establishment of precisely these rules, both politically and as a form of state. A “societas perfecta” is therefore not possible in the orthodox thought of Islamic culture on the basis of any civil religion but only there where religious Muslims, who have been guided in the right direction, govern. It is therefore a matter – for the sake of peace – not only of the religious character of an individual society and its state, but of the questionable legitimacy of a special path of those societies and states that precisely do not allow themselves to be guided by Islam in which, however, Muslims live permanently.

Viewed in such contexts, the very concept of a society that is understood in a non-religious manner, as has become customary in Western cultures, seems subversive for Muslim societies and is regarded as an act of aggression by more than a few Muslims. This, in turn, is ascribed not only to the different intellectual foundations of secular-Western and religious-Islamic societies but also to the diminishing supremacy of the West that humbled and deeply damaged the “ethically superior” world of Islam. In this way, political religion becomes directly linked to political power struggles and revenge.

Acting on the foundations of civil society today, therefore, demands having arguments that are – or could, at least, become – compatible with internal debates on Islamic self-understanding. By the way, when considering China’s rise to become a dominant global power, it should be remembered that, in the future, Western ideas of a civil society will also find themselves in competition with completely different East-Asian convictions on the just relationship between the state and the people living in it. However, these combine well-established insights into traditional Chinese statecraft, which were only slipped into the once-fashionable garb of Communism, with such new possibilities of governance based on modern technology relating more to scientific data and “harmonising” social control than on trying to cultivate the willingness of a self-determined citizenry to participate. Whether a political model of this kind is inferior or superior to the Western version must be treated as an open question. The desired answer can only be provided if one’s own efforts to bring about or secure a really “good life” are reinforced through sustainable, successful politics.

In any case, civil society of the Western variety is not something that can be achieved once and for all. Anyway, it can only come about as soon as – and for as long as – its complex cultural requirements are satisfied. But, even then, it remains threatened by anti-pluralist currents regardless of their origin and goals. It can only counter the allure of ideological righteousness, and the willingness to believe in religion, with cumbersome considerations about the fact that being open to criticism is what makes learning possible, and that all historical examples of politics founded on a specific claim to truth are terrifying. A civil society can also threaten itself. This occurs especially when those civil-religious formulas and civil-liturgical practices, which guarantee the stability of the civil society through symbols appealing to feelings, are used tactically and instrumentally to defend current cultural-hegemonic positions against new competition. That is when communication-hygienic rules of political correctness develop into quasi-religious taboos, concern about the preservation of civil liberty becomes political witchcraft, and securing equal rights for all leads to a new caste structure separating the “decent” from the “evil”. In essence, these are precisely the new internal trends in our Western civil societies that, in the meantime, are impairing all the opportunities that a form of pluralism that flourished for many years granted us. For the sake of the wider common good, we should therefore attempt to better understand – and apply more honestly – those rules which, in the West, have so frequently turned selfish individuals and self-righteously competing groups into a public-spirited civil society that takes an active part in its community.