The House of Government

Both Jesus and Muhammad were apocalyptic millenarian prophets (in the broad sense of predicting an imminent and violent end of the world followed by a permanent solution to the real-ideal problem understood as a coming together of heaven and earth). The most important difference between them—in addition to the obvious ones of time, place, and audience—is the fact that Muhammad, whose ministry was much longer (about twenty-two years) and much more successful at attracting followers, found himself in charge of a growing state and a conquering army. Jesus never left the confines of a small egalitarian sect unencumbered by women, children, and property; never became king of the Jews by either popular acclaim or formal recognition; never got to rule the nations during his first stay on earth; never outlived the poised-on-the-brink intensity of the last days; never saw his disciples form a self-sufficient society; and never had a chance to explain what a complex polity should look like. Muhammad, whatever his original intentions, had no choice but to do all these things. God was no longer a virtual Big Father with a monopoly on knowing “how ye move about and how ye dwell in your homes”: thanks to Muhammad and his immediate successors, he became the uncontested legislator of a large empire, with the power to enforce his rules on how human beings should move and dwell, love and hate, live and die.⁴²

Islam inherited a sacred beginning that was well-developed legally, politically, and militarily—and thus much more similar to the Jewish golden age of King David’s reign than to the New Testament story of the ministry and martyrdom of a mendicant preacher. It is also much better documented than its two predecessors, providing a would-be fundamentalist renovator with a ready-made (if obviously contested) blueprint for a proper Islamic state. All human societies periodically recover and relive their sacred beginnings: the “traditional” ones do it through ritual; the Axial ones imagine—each in its own way—a total or partial resacralization of human existence. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which represent the institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies, such attempts at resacralization are associated with renewed expectations of imminent fulfillment. In post–Second Temple Judaism, episodes of intense messianic hope were not uncommon, but, in the absence of a Jewish polity to reform or liberate, were relatively muted. Indeed, the viability of the Mercurian (“middleman minority”) specialization of diaspora Jews depended on their continued existence as strangers in Egypt/Babylon/Rome. After the collapse of that specialization, radical Jewish fundamentalism reemerged with great force (or was redirected into communism and other new dispensations). In Islam, renovation movements have been both frequent and diverse, but the political ideal rooted in visions of the Prophet’s reign has remained stable and within reach. Most latter-day Islamic states are not fully legitimate because they do not live up to the Prophet’s model; most restorations are political revolutions with explicit agendas; and most Muslim political “utopianism” is scrupulously historicist. The Abbasid and Safavid empires began as militant millenarian movements seeking divine justice. The possibility of nonpolitical politics, or of a perfectly just, this-worldly state composed of mortal men and women, is one of Islam’s most fundamental assumptions.⁴³

The founding act of political Judaism was an escape from slavery, and most of the Hebrew prophetic and apocalyptic tradition is about the imminent, violent destruction of “Babylon,” real or symbolic. In Islam, foreign rule is worse than an abomination: it is not a part of the formative experience or the traditional conceptual repertoire (except when a bad Muslim ruler is the functional equivalent of an infidel, as argued by the Wahhabis, among others). Early Islam’s Babylon was “Rum” (Byzantium), an evil empire to be conquered, not an evil conqueror to be destroyed. When, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most Muslims found themselves in a world governed and defined by non-Muslims, the millenarian intensity of the response was reinforced by the sheer novelty of the experience. In the words of Osama bin Laden, “the umma is asked to unite itself in the face of this Crusaders’ campaign, the strongest, most powerful, and most ferocious Crusaders’ campaign to fall on the Islamic umma since the dawn of Islamic history.”⁴⁴

Christianity’s sacred beginnings are limited to Jesus, his sect, and his teachings (the Old Testament tradition serving as a prophecy to be realized or prologue to be transcended). There is no guidance on how to run a state, an army, or a justice system, no clear indication of what life outside the sect should look like. The point, of course, is that there should be no state, no army, no justice system, and no life outside the sect. Or rather, the point is that there should be no state other than Jesus’s millennial reign, no army other than the heavenly host of Armageddon, no justice other than the Last Judgment (salvation or damnation), and no life other than the eternal kind. All Christian societies are improvisations (concessions, inventions, perversions) to a much greater degree than their Judaic or Muslim—let alone Confucian—counterparts. Most earnest attempts at returning to the source of Christianity have led to a radical denial of non-sectarian (nontotalitarian) forms of human existence. At its sacred core, Christianity is incompatible with politics, but, unlike Hinduism or Buddhism, it foresees—and, in some sense, remembers—a redemption that is collective, violent, and this-worldly. Imitation of Christ suggests a sectarian or monastic existence (in the world but not of the world); faith in Christ’s prophecy suggests the expectation of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God.

This congenital condition has three principal consequences. The first is the inbuilt tension—unique among Axial civilizations—between the City of God and the City of Man (“the church” separable from the state and the state separable from the church). The second is the variety and flexibility of political institutions with a potential claim to divine legitimacy. The third is the essential illegitimacy of all these institutions. The fact that Jesus did not envisage a just society before the End meant that, in the meantime, any society might qualify. Or none could. All avowedly Christian states have to mount a more or less unconvincing defense of their Christian credentials; all have to contend with more or less convincing millenarian challenges.

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During the Middle Ages, such challenges bubbled up repeatedly and often violently, but the church managed to isolate and suppress them as heresies, incorporate and discipline them as monastic orders (that is, legalized and institutionalized sects), or contain and channel them into more acceptable activities, such as the extermination of Jews and Muslims (most prominently during the first two crusades).⁴⁵

The Reformation was a massive revolt against the rites, symbols, and institutions that claimed to mediate between Jesus’s prophecy and life in the world. Few were warranted and, ideally, none would remain. As Luther wrote to the Duke of Saxony, “If all the world were true Christians, that is, if everyone truly believed, there would be neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the Sword, or law.” But all the world was not made up of true Christians—indeed, “scarcely one human being in a thousand is a true Christian.” Accordingly, and on a strictly temporary basis, “God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual [government], which fashions true Christians and just persons through the Holy Spirit under Christ, and the secular government, which holds the Unchristian and wicked in check and forces them to keep the peace outwardly and be still, like it or not.” Each had its own subjects, laws, and procedures. “Secular government has laws that extend no farther than the body, goods and outward, earthly matters. But where the soul is concerned, God neither can nor will allow anyone but himself to rule.⁴⁶