Overextending The Mundane.

In Christianity, the divine and the mundane combine. Jesus was both a god and a human. The clergy in a church is sacred so, they too are divine. Churches that carry sacraments are sacred as well. The pope is sacred. And, historically, once sanctioned by the church, the ruler too is sacred. In all these instances, what is material, worldly and mundane gets intertwined with what is sacred. In Islam, the two are not the same. The Imam is not sacred, the message in the Quran (the words of God) is. So, he has no spiritual authority unless his instructions are exactly in line with the Quran. In a famous historical anecdote, Umar, the second Khalifa was once challenged by a woman on a declaration he had made on women's inheritance during his caliphate. As the story goes, the woman had insisted that Umar, who was both the spiritual and political leader of the ummah, had instructed against what was written in the Quran. Umar subsequently, not only changed his opinion but also publicly accepted his mistake. Similarly, the Prophet, was a man; a human. A blessed, special human but a human nonetheless. His actions and words held authority not because they were attributed to his being but because he was connected to God via the angel Gabriel. Hence, his actions and words were seen as orchestration by the lord himself. The Prophet, himself emphasised his non-spiritualness in his lifetime, especially in his last sermon. After his demise, the same was insisted upon by his companions. As the famous tale goes, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, explicitly stated that the divine lay in the Quran which was the word of God. And, that divine was not limited to the mundane condition of death.

Of course, this is not to say that some elements in either religion work differently. As in, there are indeed segments within each religion that challenge the aforementioned descriptions. The protestant ethic for one is rooted in the conception that religion is a private affair and does not require validation or structuration by institutions and authorities beyond the self. Indeed, the protestant churches are not sacred. But, these very beliefs stem out of the protest against the enmeshing of the divine and the mundane. Luther was reacting against this very assumption when he laid foundation for the protestant movement. The protest translated into the European religious wars that, even today, orient how religion is understood in these societies. In comparison, because these...