Islamic Revolutionaries

In his brilliant Earthly Powers (3), Michael Burleigh cites a passage from Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution. Taking a note from Schiller about “how early modern religious wars spilled across political boundaries, which reminded Tocqueville of the ideological struggle between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries in late-eighteenth-century Europe,” Tocqueville drew a comparison between the revolutionary pursuit of human regeneration and the aims of Islam: 

“Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform of France, it lit a passion which the most violent political revolutions have never before been able to produce. It inspired conversions and generated propaganda. Thus, in the end, it took on that appearance of a religious revolution which so astonished contemporaries. Or rather, it itself became a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”

Rousseau exhibited a preference for Islam over Christianity quite explicitly. As Burleigh says, “In his more extended political writings, Rousseau discussed what he dubbed ‘civil religion.’ He revealed himself more admiring of Islam’s blurring of the sacred and temporal than of Christianity. He sought to transcend the potentially divisive duality of spiritual and secular powers inherent in Christianity (with hindsight its major saving grace), by separating each citizen’s right to an individual opinion on the afterlife from his duties as a citizen and moral actor in society. The latter was to have as much weight as the former” (78).

Jacobins and Islamicists: It seems a strange comparison, but perhaps highlights not how ancient Jacobins were but how modern Islamicist ideology is.