Here (as we used to see in the papal domains) the Church is the
State, and the State the Church. They both are one. And in this we have
another cause of the backwardness and depression of Mohammedan society.
Since the abolition of the temporal power in Italy we have nowhere in
Christian lands any such theocratic union of Caesar and the Church, so
that secular and religious advance is left more or less unhampered;
whereas in Islam the hierarchico-political constitution has hopelessly
welded the secular arm with the spiritual in one common scepter, to the
furthering of despotism, and elimination of the popular voice from its
proper place in the concerns of State.
[Sidenote: The Koran checks progress.]
And so, throughout the whole range of political, religious, social, and
domestic relations, the attempt made by the founder of Islam to provide
for all contingencies, and to fix every thing aforehand by rigid rule
and scale, has availed to cramp and benumb the free activities of life
and to paralyze the natural efforts of society at healthy growth,
expansion, and reform. As an author already quoted has so well put it,
"_The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey it is to abandon
progress_.
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