CAIRO: The fifth Conference of the Establishment of Secularism in Egypt was held on Monday morning under the title “Secularism is the Antithesis of Extremism and Fundamentalism†in cooperation with the forum of Ibn Rushd and the Middle East Forum for Freedom. The conference was headed by the prominent thinker Murad Wahba, the Chairman of the Ibn Rushd Forum. Most of the sessions revolved around his ideas and writings on secularism. Wahba delivered an opening speech to the conference on “Salafism, fundamentalism and secularism,” followed by the speech of Magdi Khalil, the Director of the Middle East Forum for Freedoms on “Democracy and Secularism.” The conference was held at the headquarters of the forum. Wahba called on the Egyptian intellectual community to be aware of their true role within Egyptian society. He said this role is “to mend the minds and purify them from the illusion of the having the real absolute truth, leading to the desired change,” adding that intellectuals “believe that their duty is to change the regime, and and the replacement of people with other people in power despite the fact that even this would not change the society, or develop it, it would only happen through changing minds.” Wahba said that the ongoing conflict in the region is not a conflict between secularism and fundamentalism, but it is a “conflict between the fundamentalists and each other,” referring to remarks by Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution that the future of the Middle East is Islam, which Wahba said “implied that Islamic fundamentalism put themselves on the line in conflict with fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism.” He noted that secularism can not be imposed by force from the top down, as was the case in Turkey, “which was imposed by the secular army on the society, without real change to occur at the intellectual level, and the result we see that Turkish secularism is incomplete because it is not based on the evolution of secular society as was the case in Europe through four centuries.” He called on Egyptian intellectuals to pay attention to these details as they write and comment on Egyptian society. He added that the central idea in his philosophy is a “struggle against the possession of absolute truth, because the belief in the possession of truth leads to trying to impose it on the society,” adding that “there are two options in this case, either sliding towards backwardness of the society, given the absolute power of the owners of the ultimate truth, or the society being far from the idea of absolute truth, spreading the accusations of heresy and blasphemy and then leading the society to a violent conflict.” He stressed that religious fundamentalism is responsible for the suffering of the isolation of Egypt from the world, pointing out that secular thought “depends on thinking in the relative to what is relative and not what is absolute. The sense of solutions to social problems without resorting to religious scholars or clerics because religious opinions and fatwas hamper the social development,” adding that “development is a relative issue that needs to be changed continuously and we have to be far from fatwas of scholars, because they are absolute and obstructive.” Wahba called on the need for the presence of secular ideologies throughout the public sphere and through various means of technology such as the Internet, satellite channels, adding that “secularists must have a satellite channel where they can express their views.” BM
