The Post-Secular Age of the Neomodern in the Middle East

Abstract

This article is dedicated to an analysis of the current situation in the Arab world within the framework of Neomodernism theory and to the detection of the religious component of the socio-political process. According to Neomodernism theory, contemporary human society is at the point of transferring from the postmodern stage to a new one. This stage is characterized by the combination of three elements: the need for a new positive message, the archaic content of this message, and the use of postmodern tools to construct it. The religious factor plays a special and very important role in the socio-political process, which can be discovered by means of secular and post-secular ideas. After making some general observations the author tries to apply them to Middle Eastern reality and Arab-Muslim culture. As a result he outlines the principal traits of “Islamic secularism" and reveals the common post-secular trends of Middle Eastern and Western society. At the end of the article the author analyzes links between Neomodernism and post-secularism at the regional and global levels.