Dundee member Tony Black will be talking about his new book - The West and Islam

From the 7th to the 11th centuries, western (European) and Islamic political
thought were in several ways similar: in their theories of sacred monarchy
and the interdependence of religious and political authority.

Then, in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the papacy set out to
control kings, using scripture and other religious arguments. There was,
however, a backlash: some kings, with popular support, argued that church
and state should be separate (as in the gospel text about Caesar and god).

But kings could no longer rely on religious arguments since these had been
used to support papal control. Therefore their supporters turned to secular
arguments: that states arise from nature, and that royal authority comes
from popular consent. In the 12th century there was also a revival of Greek
and Latin learning in Europe, and new developments in logic and dialectic
(philosophy).

This produced systematic defences of democratic, largely
secular political power. After the Reformation, this was developed into
fully modern-western political theory by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau.
In the Muslim world, by contrast, in the eleventh to twelfth centuries,
Greek-style philosophy, which had been used in political philosophy, began
to be discredited.

There was a move towards relying exclusively on religious
texts and their accredited interpreters (the `ulama). Then in the sixteenth
century, a Shi`ite revolution in Iran produced a movement by clerics
(mullahs or `ulama) to control secular power. And in this case, the clerics
succeeded: Shi`ite clergy became the recognized leaders of society.

Thus, in both Sunni and Shi`ite Islam, it became difficult to argue political
positions other than those acceptable to the authorized, or self-authorized,
interpreters of the religious canon. This remains largely the position
today.