The Secularism Misunderstanding

The standard Western narrative of secularism usually starts in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Faced with devastating wars of religion, European powers hit on a brilliant workaround: separate political and military affairs from religious disputes, and let sovereign states mind the secular shop. Even then, the compromise had limits. The famous rule of cuius regio, eius religio meant that a ruler still dictated the faith of their subjects, granting equal status only to a select club of major Christian denominations. Over time, this evolved into the modern Western expectation that the state and civil life should be scrubbed clean of religion entirely, sometimes tipping past neutrality into outright hostility toward public faith.

Yet this model of secularism is largely a regional specialty, ill-equipped to describe pluralism in other parts of the world. Consider the 16th-century Mughal Empire, where Emperor Akbar governed a deeply diverse population through *sulh-i-kul*, or universal peace. Rather than banishing religion from public life, Akbar institutionalized religious tolerance by weaving individuals of various faiths directly into the highest echelons of administrative and military power.

Where the Western model often treats secularism as the absence or minimization of religion, the Mughal model treated it as state-mediated accommodation. Religious identity was not a private matter to be hidden from the state, nor was it a barrier to exercising power. Instead, the state actively managed a mosaic of competing beliefs.

This reveals a persistent tension in how we think about pluralism. Is secularism the neutral absence of religion, or is it an active, state-managed framework that must constantly intervene to balance competing faiths? By treating the Western blueprint as the default definition, we obscure the various ways human societies have successfully shared space without ever pretending religion wasn't there.