Islam’s Walls of Language
The cultural comparisons by which Mitt Romney distinguished himself when recently in Israel, flattering as they were to his Israeli audience and insulting to Palestinians, resulted mostly in global comment on Mr. Romney’s own cultural and intellectual limitations. They nonetheless introduced a subject few other American politicians know anything about, nor do, it seems, the staffs of NSA, CIA and other American political and military planners.
One cultural problem is Muslim theocracy, a fundamental element in Islam. The Quran’s authority over all of society has been a barrier to political and social progress. Even after Islam had become a great empire in the days of the Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates, it still functioned in the fashion of the monarchies of antiquity, which is to say that government was effectively the household of the caliph, subject to the norms of the Quran.
Christianity was different. It had separation of church and state, following the New Testament injunction that the things of Caesar belonged to Caesar, and the things of God to God, which was to say that the civil power had its place and rights in civilization, as did religion.
This was demonstrated in the year 800 A.D. when the pope crowned the Frankish king, Charlemagne, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. In the centuries that followed, there were often struggles between church and state, but each respected the legitimacy of the other. This distinction between state power and religion was never achieved in Islam. The caliph was the political as well as the religious ruler. In the modern Islamic nations, attempts to establish legitimate secular rule has always been blocked by the claims of religion, as is the case even today when the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaida and other ultra-orthodox Islamic movements struggle to impose Shariah law and banish secular rulers and political parties.
