The Clash of Secularism and Religion: Revisiting the Westphalian Model in Afghanistan

Before the coming of the Westphalian state in 1648, religion played a critical role in shaping political landscapes. Within the scope of Westphalia, the state established a secular model by taking sovereignty over religious affairs and creating strict distinctions between the practice of religion in both public and private affairs. With secularism as the normative necessity of a modern state, the relevance of religion appears to decline in international relations. Meanwhile, time and again the Muslim societies in the Global South have contradicted the contemporary notion of a Westphalian state whereby they feel that the secular legal system does not correspond with Islamic jurisprudence and values. Attempts by Western powers to incorporate these societies within the fold of their idea of a modern or a secular state have often led to revolts, finally setting the re/rise of traditional or religious powers in a state. In the global south, attempts by colonial powers towards institutionalizing the state structure which was part of their geopolitical interests saw the expansion of the Western world’s narratives of ‘secularism’—because for them the developing world did not fulfill the standards of a political unit as visualized and defined by the ‘Global North’. Among the countries of the global south, Afghanistan can be taken as a case study to understand this complex interplay of religion and secularism in a post-Westphalian world. The construction of Afghan nationalism lay at the heart of concerns of powerful countries who wanted to bring the Western world’s narrative of ‘secularism’ and ‘nation-building’ to Afghanistan. In the name of imparting secular views, Afghanistan—a country with harsh and extreme topographic conditions was exposed to a top-down model of nation-building process that did not suit the socio-political and cultural realities of the country. Such attempts have repeatedly led to the rise of state infrastructures, which are more concerned with developing a Westphalian notion of a secular or a modern state, overlooking the existence of traditional power authorities like religious or tribal groups/institutions. This paper, therefore, attempts to investigate the following questions: 1) Did the religious and secular cleavage in the developing world widen after the Western world intervened and influenced the political infrastructures? 2) Did the Westphalian model in Afghanistan fail because it was a top-down approach that ignored/othered the pre-existing traditional and religious identities within the political landscape? 3)Finally, the paper attempts to understand how repeated efforts to incorporate a Western model of secularism into Afghanistan saw the revivalism of religious/tribal institutions from time to time that re-defined the institutionalization of the state’s socio-political structure.