The Duality of Arab Secularism: A Reading into the Significance of Presenting the Cross to Trump

In a scene embodying the close fusion between religious symbolism and political decision-making in the West, the Greek Archbishop presented a symbolic gift to former US President Donald Trump—a "Holy Cross"—accompanied by a message of explicit significance: "With this cross... America will never be defeated!".

This scene confronts us with a fundamental question regarding the double standards practiced by proponents of secularism in our Arab world. While they exhaust us day and night with slogans of separating religion from politics, claiming that mixing the sacred with the mundane is the cause of backwardness and conflict, we see them retreat into total silence regarding these practices in major Western democracies.

This incident exposes the falsehood of the Arab secular discourse that attacks Islamic identity under the guise of the "civil state," while the superpowers they take as models find no grievance in invoking religious symbols to bolster their national strength and international policies.

It is an invitation to reflect on how religion is employed in the Western public sphere, and to compare that with the systematic attack launched by some Arab intellectuals against any manifestation of religiosity in the affairs of the Ummah.