The relationship between religion and politics, between church and state, has been a well rehearsed issue in Muslim thought and practice, because Islam emerged fully into history as a dual tradition of church and state, and because as such Muslims have been less sanguine than Europeans about making a rigid separation between the secular and the sacred, or between public ethics and private morality. By virtue of such history and by reason of the subsequent Western secular expansion in the Muslim world, there is continuing reaction among contemporary Muslims to the normative messianic claims of national secular governments. Some of that reaction has roots that long pre-date colonial rule and colonialism’s contemporary effects on Islamist movements.
