| Right, Nono, the Enlightment, like Protestantism, Darwinism and other uniquely western experiences have not been shared by Muslims. Islam requires the mass be only in Arabic (like Catholics until after Vatican II). The Koran must only be written in Arabic and Allah's word cannot be rendered in any other language, just as monks illuminating across Europe felt about the Bible and Latin before Guttemberg. Disagreeent with religious authority once carried a death sentence or tongue cutting in Europe too, now its only where Islamic fundamentalists hold control.
The church/state separation is something which has evolved. For a long time after the fall of Rome the only ones who knew how to write were the monks and priests. They rendered the law and issued the sentence. Eventually the Catholic Church recognized temporal authority rested in the sovereign's hands. Gradually governments wrested from the Church monopolies in marriage, burial, birth and other essentials. With the Church's cutting down to size other faiths could emerge challenging religious interpretations. This has barely happened in Islam. Nowadays many completely modern Muslim governments still enforce with ordinary police breaches of religious law. A woman plaintiff's word in an ordinary contract dispute (if they were allowed to even contract) is not worth as much as the male defendant's because the clerics say so.
I think Muslims have some catching up to do with their religion before they reach the levels of enlightened tolerance and humanist integration thuroughly ingrained in western culture through Christianity. However modern means of communication and the Christian experience suggest this will take less than the 6 centuries lead the west has on them in matters of religion. |