Stato religioso vs. Stato laico: un dibattito arabo

[Autom. eng. transl.] For more than a century, the debate on the relationship between politics and religion has cyclically returned to appear on the Egyptian cultural scene. Between the 1980s and the 1990s two shaykh Yousef al-Qaradawi were on the Islamist front, and on the secular front Farag Foda, an intellectual born in 1945 who, as an agronomist by training, chooses journalism and activism for human rights as a true vocation. Qaradawi presents secularism as structurally incompatible with Islam, using and exaggerating arguments used since the beginning of the 20th century by thinkers like Muhammad 'Abduh. Foda instead becomes famous for a series of publications and public disputes in which it supports the need to separate religion and state by polemizing with the increasingly pervasive presence of political Islam.