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Religion, rights, and civil society - Challenges in the Islamic world - Islamism

5 important questions on Religion, rights, and civil society - Challenges in the Islamic world - Islamism

What model of governance did the Islam have?

Islam has always contained a strong theocratic dimension whereby temporal rule (regnum) was joined with leadership of the religious community (sacerdotium): This was the model of governance assumed by the Prophet Muhammad and it was continued for centuries under the caliphate.

What was the highest calling for Islamists?

Holy war against those who stood in the way of this restoration - be they infidel or coreligionist - became for Islamists their highest calling.
Deploring the erosion of religion in modern public life and the adoption of secular political and cultural values, they looked to the distant past for their model of this proper polity, to the age of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors.

What did late-twentieth century Islamists recall?

Late twentieth-century Islamists recalled that Muhammad was not only a prophet and teacher, but also a soldier who took up arms and led men into battle, and on this ground a small number of Islamists advocated the use of violence to further their vision of the primitive theocratic state.

How were secularizing Muslims viewed?

Secularizing Muslim rulers, and those who forged alliances with the West, as did the absolutist rulers of Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, were viewed as dupes and apostates from the faith who were to be rooted out and destroyed.

What did Islamists offer their followers?

Whatever the intellectual inconsistencies, Islamists offered their followers a sense of group identity anchored in the memory of past greatness, a world that existed only so long as Islam rejected the culture of the infidel, the civilization of the modern West.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

A Concise History of the World Since 1945 | 9781352010206 | W M Spellman

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