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10 March 1940—

De-politicizing Religion

When he was a boy, Asghar Ali Engineer’s father, a Muslim Bohra priest (Bohra is an India-based Shi’a sect), told him two things. The first was that violence is never justifiable. “He often drew my attention,” recalls Engineer, “to the verse of the Qur’an that to kill a person without justification amounts to killing whole humanity and to save a human life amounts to saving whole humanity.” The second bit of advice from his father was “to do what my conscience dictated and not to care for the consequences.” Engineer took both to heart.

After working as a municipal engineer in Bombay for twenty years, Engineer retired to serve as a leader in the Bohra community. But over the years his progressive interpretations of Islam proved too controversial for his fellow religionists, and he was formally expelled from the community in 2004. Views that got him into trouble included his conviction that women deserve the same legal and civil rights as men; that violence, especially when perpetrated in the name of religion, is an affront to all genuine religious sensibilities; and that sectarianism—or what he calls “communalism”—is a disrupter of domestic and international peace.

Engineer first became worried about sectarian violence as a youth, when murderous confrontations between Muslims and Hindus raged across India. Such cruelty perpetrated in the name of religion, he concluded, was a corruption. “Religion to me never could be a source of hatred. It always was a source of compassion and love.”

Problems arise, Engineer believes, when religion becomes politicized as a weapon wielded by special interest groups. “It is not religion but misuse of religion and politicizing of religion, which is the main culprit.” The collapse of religion into sectarianism or communalism too easily encourages adherents to see nonbelievers as less-than-human outsiders, and this in turn induces a forgetfulness of the core religious insight that each person represents the whole of humanity. When that happens, sectarian violence is just around the corner. It follows, argues Engineer, that the key to avoiding it is to keep politics and religion distinct from one another. When it comes to criminal law, human rights, civil liberties, and social entitlements, the best framework is a secular one. Religion as “a source of moral and spiritual richness” remains independent and consequently is able to serve as society’s moral and spiritual barometer. Moreover, because it’s not dragooned as an ideological weapon by any one sect, it “does not pose any challenge for a secular political set up.” Used as an “instrument of power” by sectarians, religion becomes dangerous. Embraced as a foundation for compassion and virtue, it enriches individual lives and the moral fabric of society. It honors the insight that each human contains all of humanity.