A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Christian Shades of Modern Political Islam
These political and ideological conflicts of the Reformation, then, highlight
themes that first emerged in the early days of Christianity. Heretical issues from
that early period nearly all resurfaced in more potent form in the sixteenth
century, this time driven by the new social and economic imperatives of
emerging European urban centers, thriving mercantile activity, new nationalisms,
and the political ambitions of nascent nation-states and rulers. Islam grapples
with quite similar issues, indicating to us the abiding nature of these concerns
across religions. And these struggles are taking place at a time of intense
pressure and stress in the Muslim world. Any religion institutionally linked to
the state order faces similar dilemmas: the relationship between religion and
political power, the role of compulsion in morality, and the problem of
implementing moral values in society and governance through political action.
Yet, when religion is liberated from state or official control, it will quickly be
used as a political tool to challenge the state and demand reform—in the name of
religious values.
WE HAVE SEEN in earlier chapters how struggle for control of religious
doctrine was an essential element in the struggle for power. The Reformation
represents the high point of that struggle in the West. In the past, Islam’s
religious figures could never really determine the leadership and policies of state
power in the way Christianity did for fifteen hundred years in the West. It is
today, with the “reformation” of Islam, that the story is changing. With the
emergence of modern fundamentalists, Islam is no longer the exclusive purview
of the state; “lay” clerics exercise ever greater voice and influence, for better or
for worse. These self-trained theologians challenge the state over the
proprietorship of Islam. “It is not your Islam, it is my Islam,” as one street
placard put it. It is the fundamentalists, trained or untrained, who seek to apply
Islam and lend it relevance—to use it as an instrument for political and social
reform, to change or overthrow the state that they see as serving neither Islam
nor the people.
So in looking at fundamentalist Islam today, we’re not dealing with some
strange religious product of the Middle East. Islam and Christianity show
remarkable parallels of development here as similar forces come into play—
typical of the evolution of most religions in attempting to coexist with power. In

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a modern democratic era, it should be no surprise that “the people” are
attempting to take control of their religions out of the hands of the elite, or the
state, that dominated it for most of history. That same thing would have
happened in an Eastern Orthodox Middle East, without Islam. These are features
of an “Islamic Reformation.” For better or for worse.

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