Islam - the religion of peace

[trish]

Rather than say you are wrong about Rome, I would suggest you alter the perspective. The Roman Empire was both created and retained through military force, but also through the co-option of local elites into the higher strata of Rome where class was as important a form of social stratification as it had been in Greece. Whether this buttressed existing local elites, or created new ones who saw an opportunity and took it, is too varied an issue to be debated here, but it is also the case that there were urban riots and rebellions (eg, Spartacus) some of which rejected Roman power, others 'merely' complaints about living standards. Thus Rome can be seen to have been an 'informal Empire', a model copied by the British in, for example, West Africa, where a limited military presence enabled the Empire to function through a mixture of local elites and Christian missionaries, all of whom formed part of the economic nexus that tied the relationship together, just as the Roman Empire successfully used universal forms of coinage and literacy to establish lines of communication and transaction that linked the centre to the periphery. Recalticance could be fatal -the claim that 770,000 troops were sent to defeat the 20,000 or so Carthaginians cannot be truly verified, yet there are no records from Carthage because it was all but wiped off the face of the North African Earth.

So far, this is pretty much the way I see it.

Ideologically, all of the three monotheist religions thus challenged Rome, challenging the plethora of Gods with one absolute and all-powerful God -Plato's 'pure form' in another sense-, but replacing fatalistic inertia with individual purpose and salvation. Thus Jesus was rejecting the temporal power of Rome and insisting that spiritual power was all that mattered, because if you believed in his mission, that commitment to a personal God who would save your soul, it would enable you to have both a personal relationship with God, and form ties with a community of people who shared your belief. All of the rituals and practices common to religion follow. The ancient pagan religions did not offer this personalized salvation and eternal life, but note too how pagan rituals became absorbed into Christian practice much as happened with the Jews and Muslims. Indeed, from this perspective, you can see how unoriginal Muhammad's core message is. We may never know where the idea of one God began, Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt was a monotheist, and may even have been murdered by the pagan priests who saw this as a threat to their livelihoods, and while it did not catch on everywhere, it has clearly had universal appeal. It is also argued that Buddha by offering a concept of personal salvation or release from the material world, is part of the same trend toward the individualization of religious thought.

The emphasis Jesus was said to have placed on the spiritual nature of His message would have allowed Christianity to co-mingle with the other religions in Rome’s empire in spite of it being a monotheistic offshoot of Judaism. [After all, Judaism was monotheistic and yet had a place within the empire.] One could give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s (the material world is immaterial after all) and retain what really mattered (spiritual salvation).
Christ’s crucifixion was the reaction of a Roman “governor” of far flung satellite member of the Empire to a minor (perhaps only perceived) threat to their client’s (Herod’s) hegemony in the region. In hindsight, probably the wrong reaction. But does this single martyrdom and the wonderful message of spiritual salvation explain the exponential spread of Christianity throughout the next one thousand years? The later Church quite self-consciously propagated a self-reproducing, memetic form of Christ’s monotheism. Good News. Spread the Word. Be ye Fishermen of Men. Missionaries. Miracles. Promises. Wherever Christians went, the coupling of intolerance for other deities and missionary zeal snuffed out all other religions while subsuming their more recalcitrant practices.

In the case of the USA, 1776 was a 'bourgeois' revolution that took the English Revolution to a new level, but are these not revolutions led by money in the sense that people, regardless of their faith, resent taxes that are taken from them but which do not then get spent on the society in which they live? Ideologically, there was nor rejection of Christianity in America; even in the fiercely anti-clerical revolution in France, resentment was aimed as much at the spendthrift monarchy as it was the Church, again, because many people saw them as leeches living off the blood of the people; an intimate relationship between Church and state did not exist in America as it did in France, and particularly in Russia.

I certainly wouldn’t deny the motivations, forces and inducements behind the U.S. revolution were multitudinous and that economic self-determination was of primary importance to the merchant class and the wealthy. It should be noted, however, that a significant portion of those classes who took an active role in the revolution were deists. Even many self-educated frontiersmen, such as Ethan Allan, were staunchly atheistic. The U.S. Declaration of Independence makes a reference to Nature’s God, not the God of Abraham. The concept of “Nature’s God” is a weak brew of pantheism, agnosticism and atheism for eighteenth century atheists and agnostics who felt uncomfortable coming out of the closet. This enlightenment approach to religion undeniably influenced the early founders of American democracy to craft a secular government, much opposed by many Christians at the time.

[Stavros]

I don't disagree with what you say, but I do wonder if you and others are attempting to force a clean break between the religious and the secular where the reality is that one morphs into the other, so that no clean break is possible. This attempt is particularly noted with Islam where people who clearly detest it claim that it is in many ways different from the other monotheist faiths, or for that matter, any religion, when it is not. Seen from the perspective of the history of ideas, you cannot separate out the secular from the religious as if they came from different sources, because the sources are the same and defined in relation to each other; thus the two are doomed to be related for all time. It thus becomes a matter of choice, and that is political.

[trish]

I do think there are some, a few of the so called “new atheists” for example, who seem to think the lines between the religious and the secular can and should be sharply drawn. I do not think they can be, for the reasons you cite; namely

Seen from the perspective of the history of ideas, you cannot separate out the secular from the religious as if they came from different sources, because the sources are the same and defined in relation to each other...

My main concern here was to emphasize that Islam is no more incompatible with secular government than is Christianity; that the governments of the West and those of the Middle East were formed, not just under the influences of two distinct branches of the Abrahamic tradition at different stages of historical development, but at different times, in different geographies, under different social conditions, different institutions, different philosophies and under different geopolitical and economic circumstances. Moreover, the governments and political and economic circumstances under which each of the two religions have evolved and now continue to evolve, have shaped and are now shaping the futures of those religions. Over the past few centuries secular governments and Christianity have been learning how to co-exists. Am I right in thinking that to date Islam has not really had the benefit of such an experiment?

[Stavros]

Over the past few centuries secular governments and Christianity have been learning how to co-exists. Am I right in thinking that to date Islam has not really had the benefit of such an experiment?

No.
There are numerous examples of co-existence at the religious level, and examples of what might be called 'secularist' government although it is a slippery term.
The Ottoman Empire is regarded by some as the last Caliphate, although the actual status of the last Sultans is disputed, or at least their effective rule as Sultans. That aside, the 'Young Turk' revolution of 1908 began a long experiment with secular government that has only been challenged since Erdogan's rise to power, giving an emphasis to Islamic issues which the military, who see themselves as the guarantors of Turkish identity disagree with.

In Iran, the attempt by the Shah in the 1960s to expropriate the property of the Shi'a Ulema, and the 'White Revolution' gave that country a secular appearance which meant that much of the opposition voiced its concerns in the language of Islam and thus enabled the Mullah's to form the backbone of what became the Islamic Revolution.

In Jordan, and also the West Bank -including the period between 1948 and 1967- Christians and Muslims co-existed without a problem, and still do, and, for example, you can buy alcohol in many places in Jordan and the West Bank.

Lebanon has a curious constitutional arrangement dating from the late 1940s which parcels up every government job among the 19 or so confessional groups in the country which means no single religion or confessional group dominates.

Both Iraq and Syria under their respective Ba'ath parties were considered secular states, indeed, according to some, that is what was wrong with them. The same was true of Egypt under British rule, and on through the nationalist revolution of 1952 until after the assassination of Anwar Sadat when Mubrak began appointing Islamists to positions in education and the justice system to appease the opposition, a form of window dressing which he actually came to regret.

The Yemeni revolution of 1962 actually overthrew a religious form of government, by a long line of Zaydi Imams, and became a sort-of secular government, but was split when Britain lost control of the Aden protectorate in the late 1960s and it became a separate 'Socialist Republic' supported by the USSR and where, as in Afghanistan, women had equal rights, and so on.

So while you may not have a secular form of rule as you understand it in the US, many Middle Eastern governments have not been overtly religious -so the religious government experiment is quite new, and is seen as a response to the failures of Arab Liberalism, Arab Nationalism, and the Arab Socialism of Hafez el-Asad and Saddam Hussein, if you call that socialism.

[trish]

Thanks for the examples: Even more evidence that Islam, like its sibling, Christianity, is not incompatible with secular government.

[Stavros]

The worrying trend is the fetish among the so-called radicals that any form of non-Islamic government -as defined by them- is incompatible with their version of the state. The fact that Muhammad lived among Christians and Jews and, indeed, derived a lot of his ideas from them, is either considered irrelevant, or carefully expunged from the record, just as the unelected crooks who run Saudi Arabia have erased so much of the diverse history of the Hejaz they invaded in 1925. This corrupt, violent and unelected ally of the USA practices the ideology of a man (Abdul Wahab) who became so confused and distressed with the diversity of Islam as it had developed between the death of Muhammad and the 18th century, that he dismissed it all as a perversion. His own brother said he was mad, but this complete dismissal of everything that does not fit with a simplistic version of the faith appeals to those who can't be bothered to read, or who rely on the interpretations of the faith which reinforce the mono-cultural argument which apparently has no complications. It is not much different from Leninism which sought to end politics itself by making argument pointless -the cadres received their daily dose of knowledge from the central committee, what was there to discuss? Saudi Arabia, one of the USA's closest allies in the Middle East -spends $60 million on Syria, $60 billion on weapons, but still relies on the armed forces of Pakistan to help out with its latest local war in the Yemen, perhaps because so many of the lads in the Kingdom's own army are the sons of Yemeni immigrants...with friends like these...