Classical Islam and Medieval Europe: A Comparison of Political Philosophies and Cultures

There were fundamental differences in political philosophy and culture between Islamic and westem-Christian or European civilization in the period up to c. 1500, notably concerning the nature of the political community, of religious law and of the mode of political discourse. These differences are mainly rooted in social rationality, public opinion, and notable works by philosophers, lawyers, and theologians. An important point in that era was that Europe was open to Greco-Roman influences and thus developed, as Islam did not, a notion of the legitimate secular state. Finally, the writer comes to the conclusion that through the passage of time the gap between Islam and the Christian West increased and, instead of converging toward each other in the course of modernity, each culture went its own way and distanced from the other.