It’s Separation of Church Aand State, Stupid

Leave the Middle East alone — those people have been fighting each other for a thousand years!

The “they’ve always been fighting” canard is one of the easiest dodges available to those content to let Iraq, and other Arab nation-states, collapse into anarchy or worse. As a guide to political analysis, however, it overlooks the real source of contemporary intra-Muslim conflict: governance.

Yes, there has been an on-going conflict within Islam since the debate over who would lead the Muslim community upon the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D. and the breaking away of the followers of Ali ib Abi Talib, the Prophet’s son-in-law, who became known as the Shi’a, or the followers of Ali.

However, there was an equally violent history of sectarian conflict in Christendom, from the time of the first Christian schisms to the campaigns of the Irish Republican Army. Academics who study International Relations commonly date the contemporary international system to the Peace of Westphalia, a set of treaties signed in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years’ War and started bringing to an end the long era of religious warfare within Christian Europe.

Since then, governance in “the West” has become increasingly secularized. The State is not a mechanism for rewarding co-religionists, nor is it viewed as a mechanism for imposing a preferred religious ordering on civil society. The fusion of church and state is what made Afghanistan under the Taliban a haven for Bin Laden. It’s what makes the prospects of an ISIS takeover of Baghdad so frightening. In religious regimes, the instruments of the State become mechanisms for promoting religion — and since the religion tends to move in zero-sum, good vs. evil, terms, religious states are uncompromising and, therefore, profoundly dangerous.  The instruments of state in the Muslim world have generally been used to divide and conquer, with religious identities providing both a handy mechanism for selecting those to be conquered and a convenient legitimating device for such conquest. This is certainly not unique to Muslim states: both the enslavement of Africans and the slaughter of indigenous peoples in the United States was often rationalized in religious terms.

What Western nation-states (or, to use a religious metaphor, Christendom) generally have — and what Muslim nation-states generally do not have — is separation of church and state.  Separation of church and state — that is, secular rather than sectarian governance — is one of the key things preventing the United States from degenerating into Iraq-like anarchy.  It’s ironic, then, that the Republicans, “movement conservatives,” and adherents of the Tea Party ideology — what I like to call “Tealiban” — are so deeply committed to fusing church and state in the United States into precisely the kind of theocratic tyranny they alternatively deride and fear when the church in question happens to be a Muslim one.

By: Russ Burgos

Interested in foreign affairs, global conflict, and political narratives and discourses