I said Islam as a political religion but what I should’ve said was Islam as an imperial religion. Though I disagree about Islamic law not being changed by political actors. Islamic Law only really ossified in the 11th century of which the closing of the gates of Ijtihad is a neat and tidy but more obfuscating than revealing example. Since that was more a final nail in the coffin of Islamic legal flexibility caused by the growing weight of previous Islamic rulings and the development of the Islamic fiqh that derived legitimacy from earlier scholars than the death itself.
Yeah I agree with that overall tendency. And it isn't as though itjihad was particularly innovative. Lots of Westerners, and some liberal Muslims, think that itjihad is a halal way to do bid'ah but that's not true and a lot of what was being reasoned through during that period, at least in Sunni Islam, was not particularly progressive or transformative. Why, the Muta'zila, who used itjihad the most, were very stringent and inflexible with regards to the application of Shari'a.
Even then though Islamic rulers would often just pressure the clergy under their rule to make the rulings they want. Islamic law being a decentralised legal system did admittedly mean there was a limit to how these rulings transmitted past the capital regions. Though I suppose that doesn’t matter too much to your average ruler that just wants an excuse to drink alcohol beverages.
I disagree that alcohol was ever considered legal or that there were scholars who would excuse this. Closest we got to something like this was an implicit qiyama (or aborgation of Islamic law) by the Ottomans through the ideology of the World Pole and the assertion that the Ottoman Caliph constitute a temporal qutb. But that isn't a case of finding imams who sign off on whatever laws they like but rather that religious authority was vested in the sultan himself as a sort of implicit "Pope" so to speak. I have not seen a case where a ruler would find an imam to validate laws passed to support their vices and other such things. Alcohol still remained prohibited, at least on paper, for thousands of years in the Islamic world.
Heck I probably should’ve been even more clearer in saying that the centralising impulses of Imperial Islam that had it opposed to the development of corporate structure and non-state institutions that could be the foundation of secularism come from the nature of the Caliphate’s Roman inheritance (being a quick usurpation of territories held by an extant eastern empire) vs the West wherein feudal anarchy and the dissolution of Western Roman administrative structure into fractured forms that were then coopted meant non-state institutions like guilds could have a lot more relative power and independence than those in the Islamic world.
Well we need to clarify things further.
My contention is not necessarily that Islamic empires were centralized. They were obviously not. Especially the Caliphates and the Ottomans, whose domains were so vast and diverse than any sort of centralized government a la France or even China was nothing more than a fantasy. The Abbasids, for a significant stretch of time, was nothing more than a loose coalition of constantly fighting warlords who received
de jure governorship from the Abbasid Caliph in proportion to their
de facto power. In many respects, the Islamic world for most of its life, was heavily decentralized to a significant degree. This obviously differs from polity to polity (with smaller polities like the Buyids obviously being more centralized relative to monsters like Timur's empire) but the general reality is that the empires were decentralized. I see no reason to view the HRE, for instance, as uniquely decentralized when the Abbasid central government was at the whims of its own supposed "governors" and dealt with constant rebellions.
What I am really talking about is an
ideology and I believe that this constitutes the main distinction between the anarchies of Europe and the Islamic world. The Islamic world inherited the Iranic-Roman institution and concept of a universalist, centralized government in which authority emanates from that authority and encompasses the world. The institutions and governmental structures inherited from the East Romans and Sassanids by the Arabs during their initial conquests were oriented around maintaining that sort of empire (despite the diversity and the geography of the region not facilitating, until the modern era, centralized control). Moreover, one of the many holdovers from pre-Islamic Arabian traditions was a sort of strong belief in domination hierarchy; the notion that the "strong", whatever that means at the time, should be obeyed by the "weak" and, if positions change, it goes the opposite way as well. This creates a culture of opportunism where even ones own governors could be depended upon as they may have their own ambitions and strike you when they seen an opportunity as we saw with, for instance, Salah al-Din's rise to power or the rise of his father.
So, even if one were some kind of small warlord managing Damascus, you would try to run your government with the ideology that you were strong and that you had to heavily centralize your control to the best of your ability, using institutions such as centralized tax collection and governorships to maintain your centralized empire. This ideology was both unsuccessful just due to sheer practical considerations and prohibited the rise of non-state institutions. Moreover, it led to intense instability as only one person can have universal authority and strength is something that varies from context to context, often depending upon charisma more than anything meaningfully physical. When there was no "top dog", so to speak, the Islamic world became highly unstable due to the ideology of its rulers and authorities.
In contrast, Feudal Europe operated very differently. It was highly legalistic in the sense that authority was derived and solidified through reciprocal duties and obligations between lords and their vassals, codified through oaths, written documents, and oral transmission. Moreover, this reciprocity was generally, though obviously more volatile than that, obeyed and supported by the nobility and other authorities. Feudal lords, rather than seeing other authorities as competition which must be destroyed or made to submit unilaterally to them, sought to vassalize them through forming various different contracts and agreements with them (i.e. see the reaction to the rising fortunes and power of urban areas in Europe with charters and alliances such as the Lombard League or the ways in which some lords vassalized tribes). This provided nobles and other polities within this patchwork of treaties and agreements a measure of autonomy while also maintaining connections or relations to other nobles. And so this was an anarchy that, ironically, created a stability of borders that was never seen in the Islamic world for instance.
While Feudal Europe was a society of warlords bound by the law, the Islamic world was a society wherein warlords saw each other as mutually exclusive competitors. To use international relations terms, Islamic warlords saw authority as indivisible while feudal warlords did not.
However, I doubt that is the source of secularism. Feudalism was basically destroyed after the Hundred Years' War, from what I understand, and it was shoddily reconstructed afterward in the centralized monarchies that followed (something like venal offices in the French ancien regime could never exist in the High Middle Ages for instance). Secularism followed soon after but the source still evades me.
Hah good luck with that. People have been arguing about that for a while. There is a lot of literature on the subject. There’s no real clear answer. Most attribute the roots of secularisation to the Reformation though differ in the specific cause about it.
When I mention "secularism", I am not talking about separation of church and state (which is already a mainstay of Christianity anyways). I am talking about, as the OP mentions,
atheistic ideas. That is to say, a lower enthusiasm or reliance upon religion and less of an ideological commitment to it. This happened in Europe, which may have made true separation of state from church a more popular desire, but it did not happen in the Islamic world. The challenge of the OP is to find a way for that mass conversion to happen as early as the 1600s to 1700s (relatively around the same period when it started to happen in Europe).
