Under this guise with ‘celestial’ and ‘heavenly’ slogans...

Under this guise with ‘celestial’ and ‘heavenly’ slogans, they committed such heinous crimes, that people feeling suffocated by these injustices and crimes, eventually returned to the life prior to Christianity. The humanist thought, in truth, emanates from this return to man in place of God, this return to earth in lieu of heaven, and this return to worldly life in place of the otherworldly. This is the kernel of humanism, which insists that we have to replace God with man.

With the spread of the prevalent literature of the time, and through the efforts of the pioneering humanist writers such as Dante, the famous Italian poet and author, this trend gradually gained currency in all Western countries, and was propounded as a pivot with a wide array of dimensions and angles. Therefore, humanism is the mother of all other trends, which collectively constitute Western culture.

When we say “Western culture”, we do not only mean the west in the geographical sense, nor all the people living in the Western world, because there are those who have wholesome religious inclinations and other schools of thought. What we call “Western culture” is the culture of societies that stride toward non-divine values and atheism, for in some Eastern countries like Japan the same culture may also be dominant. So, we will focus on “westernized societies”.

Law in the humanist and liberal approach The root of Western culture, thus, is atheism and disbelief in God who has been removed from the mind of man. God is replaced by ‘man’ who has become the epicenter of all values. Anchored in this thought, values are created by human beings and cannot have any reality beyond the ideas of human beings. The law becomes something enacted by man and none else has the right to determine it. It is not God but human beings who chart their own destiny.

These are the main elements of humanism which led to the emergence of other trends that gradually grew from the same root. Two of its extremely important trends presently pitted against Islamic culture are secularism and liberalism. Naturally, when God is removed from the life of man, religion as a matter of course will have no role in the serious issues of life. Therefore, religion must be removed from the social scene and the realm of political and legal matters.

On the basis of this thought, even those who intend to formulate values in the name of religion, have to consider them only for their houses of worship and personal life.