Among the most pressing questions of our day is this: Can secularism - the separation of organized religion and politics - withstand the rise of religious fundamentalism, which blurs the two realms?
Paradoxically, secularism must survive if faith is to have a hope in hell. At its best, secularism is bad for dogma and good for faith.
Whatever the risk of being excommunicated by doctrinaire rationalists, I defend faith. Science helps us appreciate all that we can do. Faith helps us appreciate what we should do. Ethics, in turn, grants meaning to progress.
My own faith as a Muslim gives me values that compete with materialism. I cannot say that the material world is always hollow and the spiritual sphere always hallowed. Such a claim would be too simplistic.
Rather, it is the tension between the mundane and the mysterious that I love. In that tension, I find the incentive to keep thinking, growing, stumbling, reconsidering and discovering - like a self-respecting scientist would.
Faith does not stop exploration. Dogma does. This difference is crucial. Faith, by its nature, is secure enough to handle questions. Dogma, on the other hand, is threatened by questions. By definition, dogma is rigid, brittle, often brutal, and therefore deserves to be threatened by questions.
Dogma can afflict every belief system, including secularism. Witness much of Western Europe today. There, people are calcifying the Enlightenment principles of social tolerance and individual liberty into an orthodoxy according to which anything goes. What is being tolerated includes the tolerance-trashing bigotry of Muslim fundamentalists.
Throughout Western Europe, diversity is the new dogma. And in its dogmatic form, diversity reflects not the most humane side of secularism, but its most strident: a theocracy of the sensitive, where asking questions about what other people believe - an exercise once known as inquiry - now so often invites inquisition.
In such a context, we need less dogma and more faith, bearing in mind that self-assured faith welcomes questions. I am not arguing that religious faith ought to merge with organized politics. But it can be a constructive companion to partisan politics.
Using a parliamentary metaphor, I see God-free parties as government and God-conscious faith as the loyal opposition, constantly prodding the government but never being allowed to bully it. Once religious bullying begins, government has not just a right but also an obligation to intervene for the sake of human dignity.
Put another way, secularism works when it is imperfect and reflects our complicated humanity. Only then can it affirm that each of us is, in fact and in law, human.
Three years ago, for example, the king of Morocco joined Muslim feminists to revise outdated religious statutes. Taming the bullies of the clerical class, the king overhauled sharia law so that now, on paper at least, Morocco's women have equal access to divorce, child custody and alimony.
The same cannot be said of Israel, where women seeking divorce must still go to rabbinical courts and frequently wind up with the shaft. Who, except government, can right this wrong?
But to stay in power, Israeli government coalitions need ultra-religious parties. So one interpretation of Judaism gets away with dehumanizing women and not a few men. Exactly because the dignity of all God's children must be protected, organized religion must know its place.
We, as human beings, should know our place, too. This brings me to the ultimate reason that people of faith need to champion secularism. Heretical as it sounds, secularism reminds us that none of us is God.
According to the Abrahamic religions, God alone knows fully the Truth. That is why we have to be humble enough to accommodate multiple perspectives. In short, to recognize God's infinite wisdom is to accept our limited wisdom - and therefore let a thousand flowers bloom.
Pluralism of perspective can only thrive in a secular society, which clears space for all of us to worship, or not, as our personal consciences demand. Both theocratic and scientific fundamentalisms breed humiliation by marginalizing personal conscience.
Secularism breeds a competition of consciences. It demands not humiliation but humility by asking each of us to share oxygen with the other.
I, as a faithful Muslim, cannot imagine a more peaceful yet practical way to pay tribute to the Almighty instead of the Almighty's self-appointed ambassadors.
And there are many more like me. Gallup research of eight Muslim-majority countries finds that, on average, 60 per cent of those surveyed want mullahs out of the constitution-writing business. Which tells us that to be a Muslim secularist is not a marginal position. Nor does it make you an atheist.
Let the good word go forth that, even as leaders spout dogma, ordinary people seem to favour faith. Maybe secularism has a prayer after all.
Irshad Manji is a senior fellow with the European Foundation
for Democracy and creator of the documentary Faith Without Fear.