Islam began as a martial, expansionist religion, with a theocratic tilt. Although it was tempered by philosophy, especially during the Middle Ages, when Averroes wrote commentaries on Plato and Al- Farabi explained Aristotle, there remained a strong tension between the fundamentalist understanding of the Koran, and more sophisticated readings.
There is no comparable pattern for our fundamentalists, who are obviously not going to reconstruct ancient Israel, and whose primitive church model does not involve conquest, but persuasion, nor aspiration to rule before the Apocalypse, but martyrdom. In any case, the mainstreams of our religions are non- fundamentalist and look to make religion and philosophy compatible.
Islam, by contrast, is subject to the problem that claims to fidelity to its original message might, in fact, persuade someone that piety requires militancy, which can easily become unqualifiedly fanatical. |
