Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

6. The Umma, Allah’s Commonwealth
THE HEBREWS were a “polity” from the outset, albeit
on the modest scale of an extended family or clan
that led an apparently autonomous existence among
the scattered tribes on the margins of the Middle Eastern
agrarian societies of the Stone Age. Eventually they
grew into something more substantial—as God himself
had promised—and the kingdom of Israel survived
politically in its exposed Palestinian home for more
than three hundred years. In the end, however, there
were too few Israelites for their “state” to be politically
viable in the Fertile Crescent of the seventh century
b.c.e., and in Babylonia in the opening decades of the
sixth century the Jews began their millennia-long experiment
in maintaining their identity and some degree
of integrity as a people under the political sovereignty
of others. For long periods those “others” were not the
Babylonians but their own monotheistic offspring, and
rivals, the Christians and Muslims.
Christians were born into the same politically subordinate
status as the contemporary Jews of the first century,
though they soon had to deal with their Roman
masters from a far more exposed position than had the
Jews. But the Christians, like Jesus himself, seem to
have developed no distinct policy toward the Roman
Empire in particular or toward worldly political power
in general. The Christian churches had, in effect, a
three-century period between Jesus and Constantine
before they had seriously to think about the secular