I wrote this for the comments section in a post on Sciolist, but it's way too long and I'd have to break it up into umpteen pieces, so I'm posting it here instead.

Passerby comments:

For the most part, you're right. The important thing to realize is that this is a cultural and conceptual distinction, not a historical one. As you note, even to ask the question is a foreign concept to Islam, just as it is a foreign concept to us to not ask the question. In the Christian culture, we've had the notion of what is God's and what is Caesar's right from the beginning. It is part of our political vocabulary to discuss church and state as two different entities. That's not to say that it has been our political tradition to keep those entities separate -- sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren't. The point is that in the Christian cultural vocabulary they are distinct concepts and it is meaningful to discuss their separation or non-separation.

In Islam, it's the other way around. It is a distinctly modern and Western-influenced idea to even consider the question of separation of church and state. Note that this is equally true whether one favors separation or opposes it. Yes, Islamic secular liberalism is a modern idea, but so is Khomeini's velayat-e faqih: The government of post-revolutionary Iran, with its clerical class dominating the state apparatus, is a modern invention, with no real precedent anywhere in Islamic history. Islamism, I would argue, is an equally a modern phenomenon.

To the Islamic mind, government is a manifestation of God's will, just as nature is in our mind. But that doesn't make government the business of the church, any more than agriculture is for us. Everything is God's business, including government. The notion that some things are religious business and others are not is a Western idea, deriving from our notion of the church as a separate institution. In Islamic language, there's no real equivalent to "the church" at all. There are churches (mosques), but they are just buildings, and there are individual teachers and schools, but there is no political institution that might be called "the church" to be separated or not separated from the state. (Again, Iran's velayat-e faqih is the (partial) exception, and it is distinctly modern.)

Just as Christian culture's definition of church and state as distinct concepts doesn't equate to a history of always having them separate, Islamic culture's conceptual conflation of the two doesn't equate to a history of always having them combined. Take a look at the historical record, and it's easy to see that, however they chose to label it, there are huge swathes of Islamic history where the great states were not dominated by the church at all. (And again, to even state it that way is inaccurate, because "dominated by the church" has no meaning.)

The Abbasid caliphate at its zenith was overwhelmingly irreligious, in our sense of the word, as is readily seen in all that romantic Persian poetry with its jugs of wine and thou. (Those baffling wars over mu'tazilah which dominate the 9th century were a struggle over how religious the caliphate should be. I found mu'tazilah even more inscrutable than Byzantine iconoclasm, but I know I ought to try studying it again, since it's an important element of the whole Sunni-Shi'a split.) The Ottoman empire was also essentially secular for most of its history, in spite of its pious beginnings.

The legal fiction of the single ummah with the caliph as its leader was never abandoned, of course, but it was barely a century before the Caliphate was de facto fragmented, and as often as not the caliph had no more actual power than the Holy Roman Emperors would. For more than 500 years -- from the sack of Baghdad (1258) till Küçuk Kaynarca (1774) -- the title of caliph was essentially meaningless. The independent kings didn't call themselves kings, but that's essentially what they were.

There are certain political structures which are naturally stable, independent of the intellectual culture that surrounds them. What differs is how the structures are conceived and how power is justified philosophically. Thus, while we have the divine right of kings, the Islamic world has God's appointed imam; while we have democracy based on consent of the governed, they have jumhuriyya based on the Prophet's statement that "my people will never agree in error"; and while we have Marxist-Leninist dictatorships, they have Islamism.

The concept of church and state is not the only distinction between our political culture and Islam's. Equally significant, I think, is the Western notion that law is the creation of the government. In Islam, it's the other way around: law is the creator and the government is its creation. The source of law, of course, is God, but again that doesn't make it "religious law" in the Western sense of being ruled by a clergy; it's just a different way of conceiving political structures.

I know there are many out there who will disagree, possibly including Doug, but to me it's clear that Islamism is not a religious phenomenon. It is a political phenomenon, and the religious rhetoric that accompanies it is, like jumhuriyya and the rest, simply the natural expression of it in the political vocabulary of the Islamic culture. Viewing it this way explains a lot of apparent contradictions. For one thing, it no longer seems so strange that the most devoted Islamists are young men with university education. This is entirely consistent with the pattern of violent revolutionaries in any culture.

In one of his books, M.E. Yapp has a wonderful discussion of the creation of a culture of anti-Westernism in countries of the Islamic world in the 1960s and thereabout. He associates it with specific local economic disruptions and the demographic groups affected thereby. I can't remember the details, but I remember finding it very illuminating. (Certainly more illuminating than the garbage put out by today's political pundits....) I'll have to find that at the library and read it again.

Getting back to the separation of church and state, I realize I haven't really answered the question. I don't think one can answer the question, because one has to ask: what is "church" and what is "state", and immediately there is a basic translation problem because none of the Islamic languages have a real equivalent for either term. So even aside from the whole political discussion, you can't really even parse the question intelligently. Bernard Lewis's The Political Language of Islam has an excellent discussion of this problem, which I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in both words and comparative religion.

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