The Reform Islam Needs

We are engaged in a struggle to defeat terrorism. I have no advice on how to win that struggle, but I have some thoughts as to why it exists. It is not, I think, because Islam is at war with the West or because Palestinians are trying to displace Israelis. The struggle exists, I think, because the West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not. The story of that mastery and that failure occupies several centuries of human history, in which one dominant culture, the world of Islam, was displaced by a new culture, that of the West.

Reconciling religion and freedom has been the most difficult political task most nations have faced. It is not hard to see why. People who believe that there is one set of moral rules superior to all others, laid down by God and sometimes enforced by the fear of eternal punishment, will understandably expect their nation to observe and impose these rules; to do otherwise would be to repudiate deeply held convictions, offend a divine being, and corrupt society. This is the view of many Muslims; it was also the view of Pope Leo XIII—who said in 1888 that men find freedom in obedience to the authority of God—and of the provost of Oriel College, Oxford, who wrote to a faculty member in 1848 that “you were not born for speculation” but to “serve God and serve man.” If you think that there is one God who expects people to confess beliefs, say prayers, observe fasts, and obtain sacraments, it would be impious, indeed scandalously wrong, to permit the state to ignore beliefs, prayers, fasts, and sacraments.

In furtherance of these views, Queen Mary executed 300 Protestants, England and France expelled Jews, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled from Spain both Moors and Jews, the Spanish Inquisition tortured and executed a few thousand alleged heretics, and books were destroyed and scholars threatened for advancing theologically incorrect theories.

During this time, Islam was a vast empire stretching from western Africa into India—an empire that valued learning, prized scholars, maintained great libraries, and preserved the works of many ancient writers. But within three centuries, this greatest civilization on the face of the earth was in retreat, and the West was rising to produce a civilization renowned for its commitment to personal liberty, scientific expertise, political democracy, and free markets.

Freedom of conscience has made the difference. In an old world where knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested by standards of objective evidence. In Istanbul, Muslims printed no book until 1729, and thereafter only occasionally. By contrast, the West became a world in which books were published starting three centuries earlier and where doubt and self-criticism were important. Of course, doubt and self-criticism can become, as William Bennett has observed, a self-destructive fetish, but short of that calamity, they are the source of human progress.

The central question is not why freedom of conscience failed to come to much of Islam but why it came at all to the West. Though Westerners will conventionally assign great weight to the arguments made by the defenders of freedom, I do not think that the ideas of Milton, Locke, Erasmus, and Spinoza—though important—were decisive.

What made religious toleration and later freedom of conscience possible in England was not theoretical argument but political necessity. It was necessary, first in England and later in America and much of Europe, because rulers trying to govern nations could not do so without granting freedom to people of different faiths. In the words of Herbert Butterfield, toleration was “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer.”

The fighting occurred because different religions struggled to control nations. Here lay the chief difference between Islam and the West: Islam was a land of one religion and few states, while the West was a land of many states that were acquiring many religions. In the sixteenth century, people in England thought of themselves chiefly as Englishmen before they thought of themselves as Protestants, and those in France saw themselves as Frenchmen before they saw themselves as Catholics. In most of Islam—in Arabia and northern Africa, certainly—people saw themselves as Muslims before they thought of themselves as members of any state; indeed, states hardly existed in this world until European colonial powers created them by drawing somewhat arbitrary lines on a map.

The Muslim faith was divided into the Sunni and the Shiite; but Christianity was soon divided into four branches. The Protestant Reformation created not only Lutheranism but its archrival, Calvinism, which now joined the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches.

Lutherans, like Catholics, were governed by a priesthood, but Calvinists were ruled by congregations, and so they proclaimed not only a sterner faith but a distinctive political philosophy. The followers of Luther and Calvin had little interest in religious liberty; they wanted to replace a church they detested with one that they admired. But in doing so, they helped bring about religious wars. Lutheran mobs attacked Calvinist groups in the streets of Berlin, and thousands of Calvinists were murdered in the streets of Paris. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg settled the religious wars briefly with the phrase cuius regio, eius religio—meaning that people in each state or principality would have the religion of their ruler. If you didn’t like your prince’s religion, you had to move somewhere else.

But the problem grew worse as more dissident groups appeared. To the quarrels between Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans were added challenges from Anabaptists, Quakers, and Unitarians. These sects had their own passionate defenders, and they helped start many struggles. And so wars broke out again, all advancing religious claims overlaid with imperial, dynastic, and material objectives.

In France, Catholics killed 20,000 Huguenots, 3,000 in Paris alone. When the Peace of Westphalia settled the wars of the sixteenth century in 1648, it reaffirmed the old doctrine of following the religion of your ruler, but added an odd new doctrine that required some liberty of conscience. As C. V. Wedgwood put it, men had begun to grasp “the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”

In England, people were both exhausted by war and worried about following a ruler’s orders on matters of faith. Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the successful Presbyterian revolt against the king, was a stern believer in his own faith, but he recognized that his beliefs alone would not enable him to govern; he had to have allies of other faiths. He persuaded Parliament to allow liberty “to all who fear God,” provided they did not disturb the peace, and he took steps to readmit Jews into the country and to moderate attacks on the Quakers.

When Cromwell’s era ended and Charles II took the throne, he brought back with him his Anglican faith, and challenged this arrangement. After he died, James II came to the throne and tried to reestablish Roman Catholicism. When William of Orange invaded the country from Holland in 1688, James II fled, and in time William and his wife, Mary, became rulers. Mary, a Protestant, was the daughter of James II, a Catholic. A lot of English people must have wondered how they were supposed to cope with religious choice if a father and daughter in the royal family could not get the matter straight.

The following year, Parliament passed the Toleration Act, allowing dissident Protestant sects to practice their religion. Their members still could not hold government office, but at least they would not be hanged. The Toleration Act did not help Catholics and Unitarians, but as is so often the case in British law, their religious practices, while not protected by formal law, were allowed by administrative discretion.

Even so, the idea of a free conscience did not advance very much; after all, “toleration” meant that a preferred or established religion, out of its own kindness, allowed other religions to exist—but not to do much more. And William’s support for the Toleration Act probably had a lot to do with economic motives. Tolerance, he is supposed to have said, was essential to commercial success: England would acquire traders, including many Jews, from nations that still practiced persecution.

The Toleration Act began a slow process of moderating the political impact of organized religion. Half a century before it was passed, Galileo, tried by the Roman Inquisition for believing that Earth moved around the Sun, was sentenced to house arrest. But less than a century after the law was adopted, Adam Smith wrote a much praised book on morality that scarcely mentioned God, and less than a century after that, Charles Darwin published books that denied God a role in human evolution, a claim that profoundly disturbed his religious critics but neither prevented his books from being wildly popular nor deterred the Royal Society of London from bestowing on him its royal medal.

Toleration in the American colonies began slowly but accelerated rapidly when our country had to form a nation out of diverse states. The migration of religious sects to America made the colonies a natural breeding ground for religious freedom, but only up to a point. Though Rhode Island under the leadership of Roger Williams had become a religiously free colony, six colonies required their voters to be Protestants, four asked citizens to believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, one required belief in the Trinity and two in heaven and hell, and five had an officially established church. Massachusetts was a theocracy that punished (and on a few occasions executed) Quakers. Maryland was created as a haven for Catholics, but their freedom began to evaporate as Protestants slowly gained the upper hand.

America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had many religions and some tolerance for dissenting views, but not until the colonists tried to form a national union did they squarely face the problem of religious freedom. The 13 colonies, in order to become a nation, had to decide how to manage the extraordinary diversity of the country. The colonists did so largely by writing a constitution that was silent on the question of religion, except to ban any “religious test” as a requirement for holding federal office.

When the first Congress adopted the Bill of Rights, it included the odd and much disputed ban on passing a law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The meaning of that phrase is a matter of scholarly speculation. James Madison’s original proposal was that the First Amendment ban “any national religion,” and in their first drafts the House and Senate agreed. But when the two branches of Congress turned over their slightly different language to a conference committee, its members, for reasons that no one has satisfactorily explained, chose to ban Congress from passing a law “respecting” a religion.

The wall between church and state, as Jefferson called it in a letter he wrote many years later, turned out to be controversial and porous, as Philip Hamburger’s masterful new book, The Separation of Church and State, shows. But it did guarantee that in time American politics would largely become a secular matter. And that is the essence of the issue. Politics made it necessary to establish free consciences in America, just as it had in England. This profound change in the relationship between governance and spirituality was greatly helped by John Locke’s writings in England and James Madison’s in America, but I suspect it would have occurred if neither of these men had ever lived.

There is no similar story to be told in the Middle Eastern parts of the Muslim world. With the exception of Turkey (and, for a while, Lebanon), every country there has been ruled either by a radical Islamic sect (as with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mullahs in Iran) or by an autocrat who uses military power to enforce his authority in a nation that could not separate religion and politics or by a traditional tribal chieftain, for whom the distinction between church and state was meaningless. And the failure to make a theocracy work is evident in the vast popular resistance to the Taliban and the Iranian mullahs.

But where Muslims have had to end colonial rule and build their own nation, national identity has trumped religious uniformity. When the Indonesians threw off Dutch rule and later struggled to end communist influence, they did so in a way that made the creation and maintenance of an Indonesian nation more important than religious or political identity. India, home to more Muslims than much of the Middle East, also relied on nationalism and overcoming British rule to insist on the creation of one nation. Its constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion and promises the free exercise of religious belief.

In the Middle East, nations are either of recent origin or uncertain boundaries. Iraq, once the center of great ancient civilizations, was conquered by the Mongols and the Ottoman Turks, then occupied by the British during the First World War, became a League of Nations protectorate, was convulsed by internal wars with the Kurds, torn apart by military coups, and immersed in a long war with Iran. Syria, a land with often-changing borders, was occupied by an endless series of other powers—the Hittites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and the French. After Syria became a self-governing nation in 1944, it was, like Iraq, preoccupied with a series of military coups, repeated wars with Israel, and then, in 1991, with Iraq. Meanwhile, Lebanon, once part of Syria, became an independent nation, though it later fell again under Syrian domination.

These countries today are about where England was in the eleventh century, lacking much in the way of a clear national history or stable government. To manage religion and freedom, they have yet to acquire regimes in which one set of leaders could be replaced in an orderly fashion with a new set, an accomplishment that in the West required almost a millennium. Though many Middle Eastern countries are divided between two Muslim sects, the Sunni and the Shiites, coping with this diversity has so far been vastly less important than the still-incomplete task of finding some basis for asserting and maintaining national government.

Moreover, the Muslim religion is quite different from Christianity. The Qur’an and the hadith contain a vast collection of sacred laws, which Muslims call shari’a, that regulates many details of the public as well as private lives of believers. It sets down rules governing charity, marriage, orphans, fasting, gambling, vanity, pilgrimages, infidelity, polygamy, incest, divorce, modesty, inheritances, prostitution, alcohol consumption, collecting interest, and female dress.

By contrast, the Christian New Testament has rather few secular rules, and these are best remembered as a reaffirmation of the Ten Commandments as modified by the Sermon on the Mount. One can grasp the whole of Jesus’ moral teachings by recalling only two things: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

As Bernard Lewis has pointed out, the differences between the legal teachings of the two religions may have derived from, and were certainly reinforced by, the differences between Muhammad and Jesus. In the seventh century, Muhammad was invited to rule Medina and then, after a failed effort to conquer Mecca, finally entered that city as its ruler. He was not only a prophet but also a soldier, judge, and governor. Jesus, by contrast, was an outsider, who neither conquered nor governed anyone, and who was put to death by Roman rulers. Christianity was not recognized until Emperor Constantine adopted it, but Muhammad, in Lewis’s words, was his own Constantine.

Jesus asked Christians to distinguish between what belonged to God and what belonged to Caesar. Islam made no such distinction; to it, Allah prescribed the rules for all of life, encompassing what we now call the religious and the secular spheres. If a Christian nation fails, we look to its political and economic system for an explanation, but when a Muslim state fails, it is only because, as V. S. Naipaul put it, “men had failed the faith.” Disaster in a Christian nation leads to a search for a new political form; disaster in a Muslim one leads to a reinvigoration of the faith.

Christianity began as a persecuted sect, became a tolerated deviance, and then joined with political powers to become, for well over a thousand years, an official religion that persecuted its rivals. But when officially recognized religions stood in the way of maintaining successful nations, Christianity slipped back to what it had once been: an important faith without political power. And in these extraordinary changes, little in the religion was altered, because almost none of it imposed secular rules.

Judaism differs from Christianity in that it supplies its followers with a religious doctrine replete with secular rules. In the first five books of the Bible and in the Talmud, many of these rules are set forth as part of a desire, as stated in Exodus, to create “a holy nation” based on a “kingdom of priests.” In the five books of Moses and the Talmud are rules governing slavery, diet, bribery, incest, marriage, hygiene, and crime and punishment. And many of the earliest Jewish leaders, like Muhammad later, were political and military leaders. But as Daniel Pipes has noted, for two millennia Jews had no country to rule and hence no place in which to let religion govern the state. And by the time Israel was created, the secular rules of the Old Testament and the desire to create “a holy nation” had lost their appeal to most Jews; for them, politics had simply become a matter of survival. Jews may once have been attracted to theocracy, but they learned from experience that powerful states were dangerous ones.

Like the Old Testament, the Qur’an is hard to interpret. One can find phrases that urge Muslims to “fight and slay the pagans” and also passages that say there should be “no compulsion in religion.” The Arabic word jihad means “striving in the path of God,” but it can also mean a holy war against infidels and apostates.

Until the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism, there were efforts by many scholars to modernize the Qur’an by emphasizing its broadest themes more than its narrow rules. Fazlur Rahman, a leading Islamic scholar, sought in the late 1970s and early 1980s to establish a view of the Qur’an based on Muhammad’s teaching that “differences among my community are a source of blessing.” The basic requirement of the Qur’an, Rahman wrote, is the establishment of a social order on a moral foundation that would aim at the realization of egalitarian values. And there is much in the Qur’an to support this view: it constrained the rules permitting polygamy, moderated slavery, banned infanticide, required fair shares for wives and daughters in bequests, and allowed slaves to buy their freedom—all this in the name of the central Islamic rule: command good and forbid evil.

But many traditional Islamic scholars insist that only the shari’a can govern men, even though it is impossible to manage a modern economy and sustain scientific development on the basis of principles set down in the seventh century. Bernard Lewis tells the story of a Muslim, Mirza Abu Talib, who traveled to England in the late eighteenth century. When he visited the House of Commons, he was astonished to discover that it debated and promulgated laws and set the penalties for criminals. He wrote back to his Muslim brethren that the English, not having accepted the divine law, had to make their own.

Of course, Muslim nations do legislate, but in many of them it is done furtively, with jurists describing their decisions as “customs,” “regulations,” or “interpretations.” And in other nations, the legislature is but an amplification of the orders of a military autocrat, whose power, though often defended in religious terms, comes more from the barrel of a gun than from the teachings of the prophet.

All this makes even more remarkable the extraordinary transformation of Turkey from the headquarters of the Ottoman Empire to the place where Muslims are governed by Western law. Mustafa Kemal, now known as Atatürk, came to power after the First World War as a result of his success in helping defeat the British at Gallipoli and attacking other invading forces. For years, he had been sympathetic to the pro-Western views of many friends; when he became leader of the country, he argued that it could not duplicate the success of the West simply by buying Western arms and machines. The nation had to become Western itself.

Over the course of a decade or so, Atatürk proclaimed a new constitution, created a national legislature, abolished the sultan and caliph, required Muslims to pray in Turkish and not Arabic, urged the study of science, created a secular public education system, abolished religious courts, imposed the Latin alphabet, ended the practice of allowing divorce simply at the husband’s request, gave women the vote, adopted the Christian calendar, did away with the University of Istanbul’s theology faculty, created commercial legal codes by copying German and Swiss models, stated that every person was free to choose his own religion, authorized the erection of statues with human likenesses, ended the ban on alcohol (Atatürk liked to drink), converted the mosque of Hagia Sophia into a secular museum, authorized the election of the first Turkish beauty queen, and banned the wearing of the fez.

You may imagine that this last decision was over a trivial matter, but you would be wrong. The fez, the red cap worn by many Turks, conveyed social standing and, because it lacked a brim, made it possible for its wearer to touch the ground with his forehead when saying prayers. Western hats, equipped with brims, made this impossible. When the ban on the fez was announced, riots erupted in many Turkish cities, and some 20 leaders were executed.

Atatürk created the machinery (though not the fact) of democracy and made it clear that he wanted a thoroughly secular state. After his death, real democratic politics began to be practiced, as a result of which some of the anti-Islam laws were modified. Even so, no other Middle Eastern Muslim nation has undergone as dramatic a change. In the rest of the region, autocrats still rule; they deal with religion by either buying it off or allowing it to dominate the spiritual order, provided it keeps its hands off real power.

On occasion, a fundamentalist Islamic regime comes to power, as happened in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Sudan. But these regimes have failed, ousted from Afghanistan by Western military power and declining in Iran and Sudan owing to economic incompetence and cultural rigidity.

The touchstones for Western success in reconciling religion and freedom were nationalism and Christianity, two doctrines that today many sophisticated people either ignore or distrust. But then they did not have to spend four centuries establishing freedom of conscience. We are being optimistic if we think that, absent a unique ruler such as Atatürk and a rare opportunity such as a world war, the Middle East will be able to accomplish this much faster.

Both the West and Islam face major challenges that emerge from their ruling principles. When the West reconciled religion and freedom, it did so by making the individual the focus of society, and the price it has paid has been individualism run rampant, in the form of weak marriages, high rates of crime, and alienated personalities. When Islam kept religion at the expense of freedom, it did so by making the individual subordinate to society, and the price it has paid has been autocratic governments, religious intolerance, and little personal freedom.

I believe that in time Islam will become modern, because without religious freedom, modern government is impossible. I hope that in time the West will reaffirm social contracts, because without them a decent life is impossible. But in the near term, Islam will be on the defensive culturally—which means it will be on the offensive politically. And the West will be on the offensive culturally, which I suspect means it will be on the defensive morally.

If the Middle East is to encounter and not merely resist modernity, it would best if it did this before it runs out of oil.

There is a modicum of truth in this article, but I'm sorry to say that James Q. Wilson is an anti-Catholic bigot of the first water. Several times he comes out with cliches about Catholic intolerance and killing, never noting that the intolerance and killing were very much a two-way street. Queen Mary burned Protestants; Queen Elizabeth hanged, drew, and quartered Catholics. French Catholics killed Huguenots; French Huguenots killed Catholics. The Spanish expelled the Jews, but only after having fought a dreadful Islamic invasion for hundreds of years, which put them in the frame of mind that "either you are with us, or against us." In the 30 Years War, Catholics and Protestants killed each other indiscriminately, and in the end to no purpose.

The idea of freedom was carried into the Renaissance and the modern world by CHRISTIANITY. And that included Catholicism. Catholicism preserved the best of the classical legacy. Long before the modern age, St. Augustine was already talking about Christians living in two cities. Their primary allegiance was to the City of God, but they also owed a duty to the City of Man, as long as it did not conflict with their primary religious obligations.

The whole of the middle ages was given over to a struggle among Popes, Bishops, Emperors, and Kings for ultimate power. Thankfully this struggle gave people more freedom than they ever would have had under a single rule. Paradoxically it was the Reformation that for a while married secular to religious authority more closely than it had ever been before.

In contrast, Islam has NO history of separation of Church and State, priest and king. The Muslim ideal is a single supreme authority, who imposes Sharia Law. It's a good question whether Islam can "modernize" the way Christianity and Christians have, because modernity, although it conflicts with Christianity in some regards, is nevertheless fundamentally a product of Christianity. Equally, freedom in the modern world is a product of Christian patterns of thought.

It is not, I think, because Islam is at war with the West or because Palestinians are trying to displace Israelis.

Well according to the Islamics they are at war with the west, it is called Jihad. According to the Palestinian State Charter they are trying to displace the Israeli's. No more, no less. Calling evil good and then trying to come up with a feel good counter explanation is not going to help.

The Islamics know that their culture is corrupt, they know that they lie, they know that living in any Islamic Dictatorship sucks compared to about anywhere else in the world, They do NOT care. Islam allows them their sin, Pride, lust and hate is just more valuable to them than peace, humility and love.

Heck a good portion of western culture is abandoning the good values of life to indulge their evil. Why should we be suprised that Islam, who has been down that road for 1400 years now is trapped in a backwards evil society? Aids, abortion, murder, the divorce rate, government gun control and outragous taxation are all fruits of America's abandonment of moral values.

Want to know what freedom from religion as preached by the atheist's looks like? Look at Islam. A religious dictatorship that forces evil on the populace. In mankinds history atheism has never been the final result of any of man's social experiments. Dictatorship is. Marxism is a religion, so is socialism. But the flavor of opression, that you can count on.

The final result of this run from the truth of morality is going to be a world wide dictatorship with absolute control over the citizens life. In return for slavery, you will get to trash your life and be told it is a good thing. Homosexuality will be said to be a valid life style, even though homosexuals are frankly disgusting. Ever seen a Gay "Pride" parade? The descent into sexuality as the meaning of life is animalistic at best, and deadly at worst.

The United States of America, founded on religious freedom as a Christian Nation was a bright and shining example of what man can achieve. Just one generation ago, no religion was illegal in the United States, now only Christianity is banned from schools, where in place of morality being taught to the children, Islam and homosexuality is taught, with our tax dollars paying for the priviledge. Too bad the freedom was used to ban Christianity and freedom by those who prefer slavery.

There is such a thing as good and evil, they canot exist in the same place at the same time. When good was in control, evil was illegal, now that evil is in control good is illegal. Now all men must make a choice, stand with your morals or fall without them.

An impressive article. One can quibble about a few points, about emphasis here or there, or about fairness to this or that group in the selection of examples. But on the whole, the things it says are quite accurate and very important to understand the present state of the two civilizations and at least some of the clash between them resulting from their differences. I think it all needs to be said, very much so, and very often. Because I suspect the level of flat ignorance about these matters in the general public, both here and in the Islamic world, is pretty high.

Where would I put the quibbles? One sensitive fellow detected a protestant bias, but I suspect that is just second hand "whig history" stemming from his sources. Which tended to whitewash anything in the direct lineage of classical liberalism, as it first developed in the English speaking countries.

Thus he mentions the crucial importance of Locke for the development of limited government, which is perfectly true, but presents it as advocacy of tolerance, which is not. Locke had no room for tolerance of "papists", and the sad history of Ireland under British rule, long after England had gone "whig" and took to congratulating itself on its broad minded enlightenment because of it. Which I mention not to pick at old wounds, but merely to point out that we got here by a tortuous road, not by one group of men becoming angels and eventually being followed by everyone else.

Another place I would quibble has to do with his Islamic history, which is considerably "thinner" than his presentation of the development of tolerance in the west. He says there wasn't political diversity or country divisions within Islam. That is not really true. It is more involved than that.

The Umayyad dynasty moved the capitol from Arabia to Syria, while the ruling family shifted, and the Shia split as a result. So did the Khajirites. Eventually the Umayyads were replaced by the Abassids who moved the capitol to Baghdad, which they did because they balanced Arabs with Persians. Then came Turks, and they set up military Sultans over religious caliphs. The Mongols smashed the Islamic east after that, and in their wake the Turks came to dominate the mideast, while the Moguls ruled northern India.

The rest of the Islamic world did not simply go along with this, however, and revolts split away Fatamid Egypt, and seperate again Muslim Spain and north Africa. Many of these developments had parallel religious ones (Fatamids and Shia "Twelvers" rather than "Seveners", Abassids and Mutazilite theology, legal literalism and Almohad Spain, etc).

The general picture is thus not a monolithic unified state with religion and politics united. Instead, they did not really settle the principle of political or religious succession, and factions formed around dozens of views on those subjects. And grew more numerous, accumulating over time. Islam in its most vigorous stage diversified by "secession". It proved easy again and again for a section to develop a different view of religious legitimacy than the rest, and break off as an independent polity on that basis. In theory all recognized the idea of one caliph, but they sometimes disagreed about who that was.

The Turks changed that somewhat, reimposing a greater degree of political unity than had been there before their arrival. That development went along with a state-religion split of a sort, however. Leading generals became sultans, the de facto powers, reducing the caliphs to figureheads, much like prime minister - king or shogun - emperor relations elsewhere. Eventually the pretence was no longer kept up and the sultans became caliphs in name, as well. Still, it was a real and enduring political distinction in the Islamic world. There is the leading military power, and there is religious legitimacy, and they do not always coincide, though sometimes they do.

This point is important to understand later Arab nationalism and the attraction of religious legitimacy for it. Because the leading military power was Turkish, while religious legitimacy could plausibly be presented as an Arab commodity. Indeed, the history of the dynasties is one of old rulers receeding to religious authority as new nations achieve the real military power (Meccans, all Arabs, Persians, Turks).

When the Saudis want a religious basis for the state, it is a way of underlining they do not wish to be superceded by Turks again, on a basis of secular political power. It is not really such an accident that Ataturk was the one able to create a secular state. The Turks rode into Islam late, on the basis of military prowess. It was their "long suit", internally.

The tension between the worldly needs of political expediancy and the more abstract demands of religious legitimacy has been the dominant factor in internal Islamic politics since the Umayyad dynasty, very soon after the time of Muhammad. The same tension is there for a Musharraf today.

Islamic government has been overwhelmingly monarchic. Religion has been the populist principle, countervailing the power of the court by the possibility of any holy firebrand coming along and leading a mutiny. Ambrose Bierce once wittily remarked that absolute monarchy is that form of government in which the leader does whatever he likes, provided it is exactly what potential assassins demand of him. The Assassins were a medieval Islamic sect.

In some respects Islam is set up for limited monarchy, with religion providing the higher law and the monarch simply enforcing it as an executive. That has been the form religious scholars have sought. But rulers have proved more independent minded than that, while populist leaders have substituted secession or conspiracy for elections.

So there is a lot of cynical political unscrupulousness, sitting rather uneasily with competing sectarian religious ideas. It is never entirely clear whether the true believers are using the warlords to impose their theocratic dreams, or the warlords are using the pious blather of the true believers to whitewash their naked power grabs. Usually both, or the decision between them depends on who laughs last - and can be reversed tomorrow. Call that, "seperation of church and state, Islamic style".

I did not say it was promising material. But at any rate, not the monolith of united state and religion that the article seemed to present.

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