The idea that Christianity was born under a foreign military occupation and had to compromise with it & Islam didn’t and went on to make it’s own empire is correct.
But the author’s assertion that Islam can be nothing but theocratic—”it lacks separation of church and state”- is far from accurate. In the first place, the first Muslim civil war was fought over the question of whether government was secular (Sunni’s) or theocratic (Shi’a) and was resolved in favor of the secular side. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims past and present theoretically & practically confirm secular over theocratic government is not a minor footnote, the author paints with a very wide stroke here.
Muslims did have institutions besides the basic Caliphate structure, in fact the Arabs borrowed quite heavily from the Roman/Byzantine tradition in the early (Umayyad) years, going on to absorb the Sassanid modes of government in latter (Abbasid) times. Successive Muslim kingdoms and empires mixed and merged those traditions with their own according to their specific tradition (Turkish, Berber etc) well enough to rule over vast swathes of the old world and their numerous peoples and traditions for well over a millennium, continuing to this day. So the claim that “Islam” lacked/s institutional ingenuity/flexibility is moot. All ‘civilizations’ have up and down periods, history is not so simple as to be explained from first principles yet.
He makes another inaccurate assertion; that Europeans left the Middle Easterners and co. in the dust because of “separation of church and state”.
The advancements in science and technology the Europeans used to gain an edge with weren’t hindered by the church by the sixteenth century or thereabout when the Ottomans began receding. In fact some of those discoveries were made by men of the church in the first place. My point being; church and state as in “political and religious power lying in separate hands” isn’t what gave the Europeans an advantage, my own opinion is that geographic and ethnic factors played that role but that’s a post of it’s own so I’ll stop here.
As an exercise, does “give unto Ceaser …” explain why say, the Chinese succumbed (Unequal Treaties, Opium Wars)? Does democracy? The United Kingdom is both a democracy and fairly prosperous, but current china is an authoritarian ‘People’s Republic’ and seems poised to be even more prosperous. Yes there are differences in scale but then wasn’t Qing China -the guys who lost the Opium Wars- much larger and more populous than the British Isles back then too? Whatever it was that made the British beat the Chinese back then or makes China ascend so quickly today as to leave All of Europe combined let alone the UK in its dust, it’s clear that simplistic answers like “Separation of Church and State” or “Favorite Ideology” are not sufficient if you want to say something meaningful about history.
maybe some evolutionary history?