Nigeria Beyond Secularism and Islamism: Fashioning a Reconsidered Rights Paradigm for a Democratic Multicultural Society

Political ideologies devoted either to the elimination or exclusion of religion from, or to its imposition on, the public sphere, and which are prepared in either case to capture State Power to achieve their vision for Society, must inexorably deny to citizens fundamental human rights and civil liberties – in a globalizing world where sustainable societies must become more culturally heterogeneous and where the continuing rise of (public) religion is inevitable, so argues the author in this article. What is needed is a polity that privileges tenets of democratic pluralism, human rights and multiculturalism over and above secularism or any of its various oppositional frameworks (so-called political religions or 'fundamentalisms'). The author posits that a Secular State is incapable of guaranteeing fundamental human rights to its citizens within a democratic framework. Secularism never triumphed as the ideology of state without important civil liberties being abjured. At the same time, any State applying Shari'ah as public law, must not only deny to non-Muslims fundamental human rights, but will also eventually deny Muslims their self-determination at both personal and collective levels and will in due course cease to be a State. The author calls for a re-thinking of human rights in order to make them more acceptable universally across diverse cultures.