The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, by Michael Walzer (Yale University Press, £16.99)
When the Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran in 1979, secular leftists around the world reacted with confusion. How could religious atavism be mobilising millions in a country that had become more western, modern and, apparently, secular under the rule of the Shah? Michael Walzer’s new book, which is based on lectures he gave at Yale University in 2013, is in part about the conundrum that religiously inspired political movements pose for the secular left.
Walzer is interested specifically in what he calls the “paradox of liberation,” in which successful movements of national liberation are followed by religious revivals, often of a millenarian character. He takes three historical examples: India after independence in 1947, Israel after the creation of the Jewish state the following year and Algeria after the French left in 1962. Struggles for national liberation are often anti-religious, since religion, as Jawaharlal Nehru argued, is a form of accommodation with foreign rule. But in all three of these cases, Walzer notes, “the backwardness came back.”
What are secularists to make of this? For some, particularly Marxists, the problem is that the secularists in those national liberation movements weren’t secular enough. They didn’t detach themselves thoroughly enough from the traditionalist views tolerated by the old colonial powers. But what, Walzer asks, if the reverse is true and there is a strong connection between religious revival and the “negation” of tradition with which national liberation almost invariably begins? And if, as historical experience suggests, traditionalist worldviews can’t be “negated, abolished or banned,” then, Walzer argues, they need to be “engaged.” But what that would mean politically, he doesn’t specify. And, in any case, it is not obvious that radical Islamists, Hindu nationalists or Israeli settlers are ready to be engaged.
