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terms of facts, all this is irrefutable. The power struggle in the
Muslim world has been as violent and unprincipled as anywhere else
in the world; Muslim rulers have as a rule been as pleasure-loving
and self-seeking as their counterparts elsewhere. But these facts
need to be placed in what I for one regard as the proper
perspective. This cannot be done unless we grasp the ventral point
that Islamic society, as Gai Eaton has put it in his Islam and the
Destiny of Man 1 is theocentric and
not theocratic. The distinction is important and it is truly
extraordinary that it has been missed in most of the writings of
Islam.
The centrality of the state in human
affairs is a modern development. Traditional societies regarded the
state as no more than a necessary evil since large societies could
no longer be managed on the old tribal basis. In the case of the
Hindus, this proposition is widely accepted despite the theories
modern apologists have propagated in the past one century. It is
generally accepted that as a self-regulating community, the Hindus
have not been unduly dependent on the state and indeed that they
have managed to preserve their identity under prolonged foreign rule
on that strength.
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