Islam • 157was hard for Muslims to know how to respond to the West, be-
cause the challenge was unprecedented. If they were to partic-
ipate as full partners in the modern world, Muslims had to
incorporate these changes. In particular, the West had found it
necessary to separate religion and politics in order to free gov-
ernment, science and technology from the constraints of con-
servative religion. In Europe, nationalism had replaced the
allegiance of faith, which had formerly enabled its societies to
cohere. But this nineteenth-century experiment proved prob-
lematic. The nation states of Europe embarked on an arms race
in 1870, which led ultimately to two world wars. Secular ide-
ologies proved to be just as murderous as the old religious big-
otry, as became clear in the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet
Gulag. The Enlightenment philosophes had believed that the
more educated people became, the more rational and tolerant
they would be. This hope proved to be as utopian as any of the
old messianic fantasies. Finally, modern society was committed
to democracy, and this had, in general, made life more just and
equitable for more people in Europe and America. But the
people of the West had had centuries to prepare for the demo-
cratic experiment. It would be a very different matter when
modern parliamentary systems would be imposed upon soci-
eties that were still predominantly agrarian or imperfectly
modernized, and where the vast majority of the population
found modern political discourse incomprehensible.
Politics had never been central to the Christian religious
experience. Jesus had, after all, said that his Kingdom was not
of this world. For centuries, the Jews of Europe had refrained
from political involvement as a matter of principle. But pol-
itics was no secondary issue for Muslims. We have seen that
it had been the theatre of their religious quest. Salvation did
not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just so-
ciety in which the individual could more easily make that ex-
istential surrender of his or her whole being that would bring