This is getting easier to write.
http://www.ozpolitic.com/wiki/index.php?title=Political_History_of_Islam#Western...Church and StateIslam is perhaps the greatest lesson in the importance of the separation of church and state, or more broadly, religion and government. Muhammed and the Caliphate (Islamic state) that he helped to create demonstrate, on a grand scale, everything that can go wrong when religion comes under the control of government, or vice versa. In Muhammed's case, they both came under the control of one man, with nothing to balance his power. To further his quest for power, Muhammed practiced genocide, forced conversion, collective punishment, forced mass migration and established a society that used every method of coercion to cement Islam as both the apparatus of state and the only tolerable religion. He institutionalised slavery, in particular sex slavery, under a set of policies that, when the Caliphate ceased expanding, created a massive and continual demand for slaves on the international market.
Western Civilisation before IslamMuhammad was born into a power vacuum. The gradual collapse and disintegration of the Roman Empire over the previous few centuries had created the closest thing in history to a Mad Max style post apocalyptic nightmare. Living standards dropped drastically. Smaller and smaller empires fought each other for the remnants of Roman glory. When the Song dynasty in China reached similar living standards to those at the peak of the Roman empire, about 1000 years ago, western civilisation was still stuck in the post apocalyptic nightmare. The difference now was that the west was once again united under an enourmous empire - the biggest the world had ever seen. Far from a resurgence in living standards, the west experienced continued stagnation under the yoke of Islam (despite the preference among Muslims to refer to this time as the Islamic golden age). Living standards in the west did not reach, or even come close to those under the Roman Republic and Empire until well into the industrial revolution.
http://www.ozpolitic.com/articles/heavy-legacies-our-past.html#romeCloser to home, the power vacuum was even more pronounced. Despite lying just to the south of the birthplace of western civilisation, the Arabian peninsula was still torn between efforts at settled communal living and wandering tribes. There was no central government. Jews, Christians and various non-Abrahamic religious groups and tribes existed side by side, if not always peacefully. Even large cities existed without centralised control, governed by Arabic customary law between competing tribes. The need for a central authority was acknowledged, and it was one of those cities that Muhammad used to launch his empire. In a very short period Muhammad swept all of this aside. The region around Mecca and Medina was ethnically cleansed of all non-Muslims shortly after his death. It was one of the most rapid and drastic social transformations ever achieved, and it was imposed from above by ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who stood in the way (although Muslims like to insist it was achieved by mass voluntary conversion). It took another thousand years to subdue this empire.
Immediately after Muhammad's death, his empire continued to spread at the same breakneck speed it had towards the end of his career. It spread west along the coast of North Africa until it hit the Atlantic, the North into the Iberian peninsula. It spread east to the modern boundary between Pakistan in India. With the exception of the Iberian peninsula, the Islamic state swept aside diverse communities of Jews, Christians and all sorts of pagans. For the most part they ceased to exist in a very short period of time. Those that remained have faced 1400 years of oppression and constant harassment, and to this day face the threat of a lynch mob if they speak out against Islam.
The Islamic state grew to a grand scale in a mere 120 years. It conquered what at the time was almost the entirety of western civilisation. Much of the rest was depopulated by constant slave raids. The Mediterranean coastline had, by it's nature, allowed relatively unrestricted trade along it's entire coastline. When the Roman Empire took control over the region and reigned in piracy, trade flourished. When the Caliphate took control, people fled the coastline of southern Europe, or were transported en masse into the Islamic state as slaves. The rest of Europe had only recently been introduced by the Romans to settled civilisation (France and Britain) or was never subdued (Germany and lands to the east), remaining under the control of wandering and destructive tribes. The world that we know it today was shaped by the people on the fringe of western civilisation. The reshaping of the world was so dramatic that Muslims can, without any sense of irony, complain about "the west" interfering in middle eastern geopolitics. The west today is synonymous with Europe, America and the various colonies they established, but for the first 11000 years of western civilisation America was unknown and Europe was a tribal backwater.
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