I have been following the correspondence on Islam. It seems that many throughout the Western world try to apply terms to Islamic society that just do not fit. Terms like 'secular' and 'religious', 'moderate' and 'extremist', 'church' and 'state' make sense in a Western environment but are simply irrelevant to the Islamic world. If we care to study the career of the founder of Islam, it is not that difficult to grasp its nature.
The Prophet Muhammad was born into the Arabian external proletariat of the (Eastern) Roman Empire when relations between the Empire and Arabia were coming to a crisis. At the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries, the saturation point had been reached in the impregnation of Arabia with cultural influences from the Empire through the cumulative effect of a long-continuing process of social radiation.
Some reaction from Arabia on the Empire, in the form of a counter-discharge of energy, was bound to ensue; and the destinies of both parties to the Arabo-Roman interaction were deeply involved in the open question of what direction this imminent Arabian recoil would take and what plane of social activity it would choose for its principal field of action. It was the career of Muhammad (c. AD 570-632) that gave these questions their historic answers.
There were two features in the social life of the Roman Empire in Muhammad's day that would make a particularly deep impression on the mind of an Arabian observer because, in Arabia, they were both conspicuous by their absence.
The first was monotheism in religion. The second was law and order in government. Muhammad's life work consisted in translating each of these elements in the social fabric of Rum into an Arabian vernacular version and incorporating both his Arabised monotheism and his Arabised imperium into a single master institution - the all-embracing institution of Islam - to which he succeeded to impart such titanic driving force that the new dispensation, which had been designed by its author to meet the needs of the nomads of Arabia, burst the bounds of the peninsula and captivated the entire Syriac world from the shores of the Atlantic to the Eurasian steppe.
This life work, on which Muhammad seems to have embarked in about his 40th year (c. AD 609), was achieved in two stages. In the first, Muhammad was concerned exclusively with his religious mission; in the second stage, the religious mission was overlaid, and almost overwhelmed, by the political enterprise.
Muhammad's original entry on a purely religious mission was a sequel to his return to the parochial life of Arabia after a partial withdrawal into the exotic life of a caravan trader between the Arabian oasis and the Syrian desert ports of the Roman Empire along the fringes of the North Arabian steppe.
The second or politico-religious stage in Muhammad's career was inaugurated by the Prophet's withdrawal (Hijrah) from his native oasis of Mecca to the rival oasis of Yathrib (thenceforward known as Medina: 'the City' [of the Prophet]). In the Hijrah - which has been recognsed by Muslims as such a crucial event in the Prophet's career that it has been taken as the inaugural date for the Islamic Era - Muhammad left Mecca as a hunted fugitive.
After a seven-year absence (AD 622-9), he returned to Mecca itself, not as an amnestied exile, but as lord and master, not only of Mecca itself, but of half Arabia. It will be seen that the first stage in Muhammad's career is comparable with that of Solon and the second stage with Caesar's.
The Empire that Muhammad founded on his return from Medina to Mecca can bear comparison with the empire that Caesar founded on his return from Gaul to Rome; for although, at Muhammad's death in 632, his political heritage was still no more than a barbarian principality in the no-man's land beyond the Arabian limes of the Roman Empire, the founder's companion and second successor 'Umar (ruled 634-44), who survived Muhammad by a dozen years, lived to expand the Caliphate into a framework for a reintegrated Syriac universal state by conquering the Roman dominions in Syria and Egypt with one hand and the entire domain of the Sasanian Empire with the other.
Under the successive regime of the Umayads and the 'Abbasids, this great empire remained "a going concern" for some 300 years; and this immense political achievement was the outcome of Muhammad's political success during the second or politico-religious stage of his career.
Muhammad's overwhelming political success has undoubtedly made a deep imprint on Islam - the great institution founded by Muhammad. This imprint has lasted down to our own day; and it comes out clearly in the contrast between Islam and Christianity; for, broadly speaking, each of the two religions has tended in its attitude towards politics, to follow the course that its founder indicated either by precept or by example. The Christian Churches have been guided, on the whole, by the injunction to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" (Matt. xxii. 21).
In Islam, on the other hand, the relation between the religious and the political elements of the institution is not that of a belated and artificial union. In Islam, the two elements cohere in an original and organic unity; so that, in Islamic sociology, such dichotomies as " religious and secular", "ecclesiastical and civil", "clerical and lay" have no application. In Islamic society, Church and State are actually identical; and, in this undifferentiated social entity, the secular interest and the secular spirit have hitherto predominated over the religious. This can be explained if we study Muhammad's political career in which he was so triumphantly successful.
Perhaps the explanation is to be found in the nature of the social milieu into which Muhammad happened to be born. If it is asked why he did not "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" the obvious answer is that, unlike Jesus, Muhammad did not happen to live under Caesar's jurisdiction.
Whereas Jesus was a member of the internal proletariat of the Roman Empire, and, as such, was at the Roman government's mercy, Muhammad was a member of the external proletariat whose home was in the no-man's land outside the Roman frontiers and beyond the reach of Caesar's arm.
The extreme difference of milieu explains, at least in part, the extreme difference between the earthly fortunes of these two prophets who in addressing themselves to their fellow men, each "claimed to be the messenger of their God, bringing a strange message, wholly subversive of their former beliefs and practices: claiming, in short, to be their dictator, though dictating not his own words', but God's" (Margoliouth, D.S.: Mohammedanism, p. 51).
We may add that Jesus, in spite of his rendering unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and in spite of his refusal to allow his followers to resort to violence to save him from arrest, was nevertheless put to death by the Roman authorities. His mortal offence in Roman eyes was that "he taught... as one having authority" (Matt. xxvi, 51-4) - an attitude which no sovereign power is willing, in the last resort, to tolerate in any of its subjects.
Muhammad's attitude, in proclaiming his prophetic message, was the same; and assuredly he would have met the same fate at the same early stage if he had been conducting his prophetic mission inside, instead of outside, the Roman frontiers, either in Jesus's day or in his own. In this situation, it would have made no difference to Muhammad's immediate personal fortunes whether, when the Roman authorities had sought his life, he had chosen the path of non-resistance or had turned tail.
Had Muhammad been living under Roman rule, his mission would have resulted in his losing his life, whatever line he had taken in dealing with the Roman authorities; and we can only conjecture on the historic analogy of Jesus and the Christian Church, that if Muhammad had lived in these circumstances and had died, as Jesus did, without offering resistance, then Islam might have become something different from and spiritually higher than, what it has become in fact.
The historic development of Islam is a consequence of the fact that Muhammad's career, in his actual circumstances, developed quite differently. Instead of sealing his prophetic message with his blood by becoming Caesar's victim, it was Muhammad's ironic destiny to compromise and debase his prophetic message by becoming an Arabian Caesar himself.
No doubt, when he accepted the fateful invitation to organise a government in Medina, Muhammad assured his conscience that he was acting as single-heartedly as ever in the cause of God. Had not God laid on him the duty of conveying the revelation of God's truth to his fellow men? And would he not be executing this duty if he embraced this heaven-sent opportunity of providing the new religion, whose path had been obstructed for ten years by human force majeure, with a human political vehicle without which, as ten years' personal experience showed, Islam would make no further practical progress?
No doubt, Muhammad reasoned with his conscience thus; and no doubt he was deceiving himself in yielding to his arguments; for, in the event, the temporal power with which the Arabian Prophet endowed - or encumbered - his Islam at this crucial point in his career has proved to be not a vehicle but a prison-house, which has confined the spirit of Islam ever since.
The truth, then, seems to be that, in the invitation to Medina, Muhammad was confronted with a challenge to which his spirit failed to rise. In accepting the invitation, he was renouncing the sublime role of the nobly unhonoured prophet and contenting himself with the commonplace role of the magnificently successful statesman.
The prospect of effective practical action, which the call to Medina opened up for the Prophet's long repressed and thwarted practical genius, blinded the Prophet's vision. For even on the eve of the worldly call, in the second phase of his 13-year worldly failure in Mecca, Muhammad had been content with the faithful performance of a prophet's duty, as shown by his apostrophe to the idolaters: "Is aught else laid upon God's messengers but a plain delivery of the message?' (Koran, Surah xvi, verse 35)
This simple understanding and acceptance of his prophetic mission were thrown to the winds by the Prophet when a new career was offered to him in the alien political sphere; and, in the language of worldly wisdom, this volte-face was amply "justified by success".
The Prophet's latent political genius was so transcendent that the modest office of 'honest broker' in an anarchy-ridden Arabian oasis was transformed in his hands into the sovereignty of a state that was destined to eclipse the Empire of Rome and emulate the Empire of the Achaemenidae.
This tragic worldly success of the founder of Islam - a success that was pernicious for the institution he had founded - points to the truth that, for a prophet, to be felix opportunitate mortis (Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 45) is the highest good and to be capax imperii (Tacitus, Histories, i, 49) the unkindest gift that the gods can bestow upon him.