The Structural Difference Between Christianity & Islam

Sherman Jackson has an amazing book called Islam and the problem of black suffering, fantastic book, even the intro of that book is like worth most of the books on your bookshelf. And in it, he talks about some of the structural differences between Islam and Christianity, especially at the ecclesiastical level is the ecclesiastical level, meaning the policy, the church body. And if you look at these, they're represent two different paradigms. Christianity was always a paradigm of totalitarianism of top down control of enforcement. And so since the beginning, basically with the destruction of sort of the Jewish Christianity of the old church, and James, you know, both, et

cetera, once it went, Paul and onwards, and all the council's et cetera, et cetera, especially with the conversion of the Romans, it's extremely controlling extremely top down and it's so significant to European history, like that's their experience, right with religion, but the problem is that completion right so they take the experience that they had with Christianity and then scale that up to say, well, all religion is like this, it Sam has a completely different history. And in fact, the history of Islamic sort of that, first of all, we don't have an official clergy, we don't have a centralized system. Other than that, it actually was public reason before there was public reasons,

which is quite amazing. Honestly, how did fifth opinions become normative? How did the mega hub form? How did how did even a scholar attain to recognition as a luminary in their field, it was all through public reasoning, meaning that it was open access. It was informal, it was literally just when we're talking about meritocracy, like full meritocracy, and full social mobility. And if you could do it, you could do it. And you were recognized by your peers and all the other scholars and the masses, as that guy's got it and it was never able to be co opted by government control. It was always exceeding the authority of the government figures. You have the very very pinnacle moment of

EMA Matic being approached by the ambassador to be to make his math have standardized and him refusing, right? It's such an important moment. And then you have the only Inquisition in our history for the Nazis trying to impose it upon EMA, Achmed. And the creation of the Koran him resisting all four of the fifth emails spent time in jail, right is like, like, this is a very, very different history than the ecclesiastical totalitarianism of Christianity. So that's what it that's what it is, honestly, and this is something that I go and I go in more in detail with with my paper on perennialism, specifically, this conflation that Europeans historically make due to their own

experience, they universalize that experience, and they basically say, Well, this is all religion or human nature, right? When in reality, it was the consequences of sort of the way that the church was set up, and particular to that, right. And it wasn't anything that was necessarily beyond that. We've never known that in our history, right? The closest analog you could find is like, probably and cooled off, but even then, that's not really like the cheapest supreme judge. But that doesn't even really come close at all, because you still have these decentralized networks over them and move to us and you know, legal scholars that the jurists it always exceeded and was unwieldly to

government power. And if you want a good book that goes into this, part of it is while HELOCs restating Orientalism goes into some of these things in some in a nice level of detail. It's not the main point of the book, but one or two of the chapters really goes deep into just how independent and how decentralized and how autonomous the scholarly class was throughout Islamic history until basically philosophical liberalism came along and then took over the Muslim countries and their organization.