Muslim Scholar: No Separation of Church and State in Islam

BREITBART.COM: A prominent American Muslim scholar has argued that differences between Islam and other faiths run deeper than most suspect, and extend even to the question of separation of church and state.

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

Syrian Poet Adonis: Progress Impossible in the Arab World without Separation of Religion and State

France Struggles to Separate Islam and the State

ABC NEWS: Riots broke out over a full-face Islamic veil. A woman may have lost her unborn baby in another confrontation over her face covering. Tensions flared over a supermarket chain's ad for the end-of-day feast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

France's enforcement of its prized secularism is inscribed in law, most recently in a ban on wearing full-face veils in public. Meant to ensure that all faiths live in harmony, the policy instead may be fueling a rising tide of Islamophobia and driving a wedge between some Muslims and the rest of the population.

Yet ardent defenders of secularism, the product of France's separation of church and state, say the country hasn't gone far enough. They want more teeth to further the cause that Voltaire helped inspire and Victor Hugo championed, this time with a law targeting headscarves in the work place.

A new generation of French Muslims — which at some 5 million, or about eight percent of the population, is the largest in Western Europe — is finding a growing voice in a nation not always ready to accommodate mosques, halal food and Muslim religious dress. Political pressure from a resurgent far-right has increased the tension. » | Elaine Ganley, Associated Press | Trappes, France | Monday, July 29, 2013