Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 213
fessedly Muslim, and an Islamic state or society, whose laws are based
to a greater or lesser extent on the sharia. Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and
Turkey would be examples of the first, whereas Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Taliban Afghanistan, perhaps, from a certain perspective, the Sudan
and Pakistan, and fitfully Libya might all be argued—and disputed,
chiefly by each other—as Islamic states. “Jewish” and “Christian” do
not allow the same distinction. It is of no matter in the first case since
there is only one state or society that qualifies in either sense of the
word as “Jewish,” the State of Israel, even though it has no constitution
and many Jews cannot or prefer not to imagine it as Jewish in the
religious sense. There are, however, still many states where the majority
of the population professes Christianity, but only one surviving
state, the Holy See or State of the Vatican City, population 870, is
governed by a version of Church law.
Fundamentalists As the Faithful Remnant
Ibn Taymiyya has been a powerful ideological model for the theoreticians
of the modern movement called Islamic Fundamentalism,
or, as some prefer, Revivalism. Whatever the appropriate name,
this is the Muslim version of what is in fact a much broader phenomenon
called fundamentalism, a term that was originally applied
to Evangelical Christian sects in the 1920s. Fundamentalism,
whether Muslim or any other variety, is generally (though not invariably)
characterized by a series of positions that are at the same
time theological (Scripture is infallible); philosophical (Scripture is
not subject to so-called critical analysis); historical (it envisions a
return to origins); political (it advocates revolution in the name of
religion); and, of chief interest in the present context, sociological
(the movement is a “Church” within the “Church”).
Muslim political power, or better, the political power of Muslim
states has been on the wane for many centuries. One reading of the
descent from world empire to “developing states” sees it as the
result of an ideological attack from secularism, which is represented
in modern times by Western nation-states. The effects of the