Putting Secularism's Teleology in Its Place

Abstract Euro-American discourse on secularism has come to construe it as the foundation of modern democracy and as a civilizational asset of the West. Secularism's teleology posits the secular as an epistemological space in which Western societies have arrived through a successful and completed process of secularization, which the religious and racialized Others of Western modernity must duly follow. Taking Jürgen Habermas's conception of the secular and his imperative to translate religious into secular languages as examples, I first unpack the critical temporal elements of this secularist conception of democracy. Second, I critique this account by analyzing the negatively dialectical understanding of democratic practice, history, time, and translation in the works of the contemporary Moroccan intellectual and historian Abdallah Laroui. I argue that he offers us a more challenging, self-reflective way of conceptualizing the secular and the (Islamic) religious beyond civilizationalist framings.