Secularism is the philosophy of alienation. How so? In my previous meditation, I described secularism as the sacralization of the immanent: a misplacement of transcendence (the immanent being the dunyā). The consequence is the alienation of the self from itself and the alienation of the self from God because the world, man, and God are recreated, as though ex nihilo in the image of the secular. The secular other– through his gaze – “shatters my world by sucking me into his projects and shearing me of my unique possibilities.” Kierkegaard explains, “And in this encounter, he strives to affirm himself by rendering me into a possibility for him.” To shear man of his “unique possibilities” is to strip man of his existential uniqueness: the desire for transcendence and drive to the sublime (what Paul Tillich calls spiritual self-affirmation). Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman explains that man, in his primordial nature, is a vertical being (al-tawājud) that exists in two worlds: the seen and the unseen and in his deformed state, man is a horizontal being (inwijād) dwelling only in the mundane and immanent world. These “unique possibilities” are illustrated eloquently by Ali Shariati, who explains, through the Qur’an, that man is constituted by a dual nature for he is created from both clay and the spirit. The former is sedentary, drawn to the worldly and mundane, whereas the latter ascends towards the sublime. The tension between these two constitutive elements in man is a perennial struggle.
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