Writing in Friday’s LA Times, Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, states that Western suppositions that all religions are basically the same and want the same things is fundamentally wrong.
These differences, Hamid contends, run all the way from views of the sacred text (Muslims believe that every single word of the Qur’an comes directly from Allah) to an understanding of the nature of the state and its relationship to religion.
Hamid declares that the difference between Christianity and Islam regarding the state stem from the differences in each faith’s central figure. Whereas Jesus preached giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, Muhammad united faith and the state in his own person.
“Unlike Jesus,” Hamid states, “Muhammad was both prophet and politician. And more than just any politician, he was a state-builder as well as a head of state. Not only were the religious and political functions intertwined in the person of Muhammad, they were meant to be intertwined.”
“To argue for the separation of religion from politics, then, is to argue against the model of the very man Muslims most admire and seek to emulate,” Hamid argues. » | Thomas D. Williams PhD | Saturday, September 10, 2016
