...
The next problem is sharia, Islamic law, a detailed body of instructions on how to run society that has no counterpart in Christianity. The precepts of Christian ethics contained in the Bible are nowhere near as specific, and even they are only ethics, not actually intended to be the statutory law of the land. Even sharia's closest equivalent in the West, the Jewish hallakha, is in the inventive hands of the Jews preposterously flexible by comparison. Sharia is a straightjacket for the society it governs, though one of a respectably high order by the standards of world history.
Some Muslims, most famously the secular nationalists who have run Turkey since Kemal Attaturk's post-WWI revolution, have faced this fact squarely and given up on it as a basis for modern society. This was what the Shah of Iran was trying to do when so rudely interrupted by the Ayatollah Khomeini. To greater or lesser degrees, it is what other Muslim societies have done, with Syria, Malaya, Indonesia and Iraq in the vanguard. The opposite extreme is represented by Iran and Saudi Arabia, and was represented by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The rigidity of sharia prevents the dynamic legal, and thus political, order of the West from emerging, but the rigidity of sharia is only its first problem. **Its other problem is that by making statutory law a direct dictate from God, it allows no philosophical, as well as practical, room for a secular state. We know this principle as the separation of church and state, which confers two essential benefits:
It protects the state from corruption by religion, enabling politics to proceed on its own terms and solve its own problems without getting caught up in religious dogma.
It protects religion from corruption by the state, preserving the ability of the spiritual sphere to be true to itself without succumbing to the temptation of resort to coercion in matters of faith.**
Christianity teaches that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. This enables Christians to make a clear distinction between the goods of this earth, which an intelligent atheist can discern and figure out how to obtain, and the metaphysical good of salvation, which is made known to us by revelation. The culmination of the pursuit of goods of the first kind is politics, of the second, religion. Reasoning about these two goods can go on independently because they are by nature different in kind. But when religion and politics are conflated, we run the risk of policy being made on a basis of dogma and of faith becoming an object of coercion.
This is precisely the predicament that Islam creates for nations that imbibe it deeply. To say that the earthly ruler is, as in classical Islam, the regent of God on earth is to step back in political philosophy to what were in the West the days of divine right monarchy. This is a stage prior to all the philosophical ideas that underpin democracy, individual rights, personal freedom, legitimate dissent, and the other essentials of modernity. And as Huntington points out, classical Islam rejects the idea of national sovereignty, the basic building-block of modern international order. It is only really comfortable with the ummah, or community of all believers.
There are also disturbing aspects about Islam purely as a religion, independent of any social consequences. For example, its conception of paradise with the 70 virgins, et cetera, is, to be quite blunt, repulsively crude and I do not think this is just a Western bias. Everything I have gathered in conversation with representatives of other traditions suggests to me that a serious Buddhist, Hindu or Chinaman finds this equally unattractive. The ultimate end of man should not be a teenage fantasy. It is, of course, a wonderful myth for motivating young men to become killers.
The principal case that Islam is not a defective civilization is that there exist Muslim nations that have not become societies pathological in one way or another. Logically, this cannot include nominally Muslim nations like Turkey that have rejected Islam as a basis for social order. Take Morocco, for example, not a place of great political trouble by Third-World standards, though the usual suspects are certainly trying. Some experts on Islam will tell you that Morocco exhibits the closest thing found on earth today to traditional Islam, it being the case that the nominally purer societies like Saudi Arabia in fact practice a puritanical variant, the now-notorious Wahabbism, that derives from innovations of the 18th century. Morocco had a relatively unbroken social continuity despite colonization and decolonization, and has since had a traditionalist but unfanatical monarchy practicing benevolent authoritarianism. It cooperates with the United States.
The example of Iraq, a highly secularized Muslim country that exhibits extreme political pathology, makes clear that secularism is no guarantee of reasonableness for Muslim societies. The counter-argument to this, in turn, is that Iraq is still a society formed by Islam, if not currently practicing it with great enthusiasm, and it is due to Islam that it failed to develop into a democracy or some other reasonable form of government.
It is probably true that human beings can, if they put their minds to it, put a politically reasonable gloss on any religion. But this is only true as a matter of bare principle; what they will actually tend to do when given a certain religious starting point is another matter entirely. And on these grounds it seems fair to conclude, simply as an empirical matter, that Islam has a disturbing tendency not to measure up to the standards of modern civilization. Whether an Islamic Reformation analogous to the Christian one can set this problem aright is a matter of speculation, but there is every reason for us to wish for one.