158. Karen Armstrongfulfilment. The polity was therefore a matter of supreme im-
portance, and throughout the twentieth century there has
been one attempt after another to create a truly Islamic state.
This has always been difficult. It was an aspiration that re-
quired a jihad, a struggle that could find no simple outcome.
The ideal of tawhid would seem to preclude the ideal of
secularism, but in the past both Shiis and Sunnis had ac-
cepted a separation of religion and politics. Pragmatic poli-
tics is messy and often cruel; the ideal Muslim state is not a
"given" that is simply applied, but it takes creative ingenuity
and discipline to implement the egalitarian ideal of the
Quran in the grim realities of political life. It is not true that
Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern
secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is
true that secularization has been very different in the Mus-
lim world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as
benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philoso-
phers as John Locke (1632-1704) as a new and better way of
being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state
control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals.
But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a
brutal attack upon religion and the religious.
Atatiirk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, sup-
pressed the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear
modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterpro-
ductive. Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went un-
derground. Muhammad Ali had also despoiled the Egyptian
ulama, appropriated their endowments and deprived them of
influence. Later Jamal Abd al-Nasser (1918-70) became for a
time quite militantly anti-Islamic, and suppressed the Mus-
lim Brotherhood. One of the Brothers, who belonged to the
secret terrorist wing of the society, had made an attempt on
al-Nasser's life, but the majority of the thousands of Brothers
who languished for years in al-Nasser's concentration camps