Islam och kristendom

Dan Burmawi


Islam is a political system that has a religion department.

The split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism was the product of centuries of theological and ecclesiological debate.

Questions about the nature of the Trinity (the Filioque clause), the authority of the Pope, and the relationship between church and empire were argued through councils and formal theological disagreement.

The Great Schism of 1054 emerged from incompatible theological and institutional claims.

The Protestant Reformation followed the same pattern.

Luther, Calvin, and others challenged doctrines like indulgences, justification, the authority of tradition versus Scripture, the nature of salvation.

In all cases theology came first; institutional separation followed. Violence followed these divisions, but it did not create them.

Christianity fractured because people disagreed about what was true.

Islamic sects came into existence in an entirely different way.

Islam did not fracture through theological debate. It fractured through power struggles, wars of succession, and political violence, after which theology was constructed to justify the outcome.

The first and most consequential split in Islam, Sunni versus Shia, had nothing to do with doctrine at the outset. It revolved around a single question: who gets to rule after Muhammad?

Muhammad left no succession mechanism. No council. No institutional separation between religious authority and political power.

When he died, leadership meant control of the state, the army, the law, and divine legitimacy, all at once. The result was immediate conflict.

What followed was a chain of civil wars: the Ridda Wars, the assassination of Uthman, the battles of al-Jamal and Siffin, the rise of the Kharijites, the murder of Ali, and the massacre at Karbala. Hundreds of thousands died, not over doctrine, but over who had the right to rule in God’s name.

Only after this bloodshed did theology harden.

Sunni doctrine evolved to legitimize whoever held power and to preserve order at almost any cost.

Shia theology evolved to sacralize dispossession, martyrdom, and stolen authority.

Theology followed blood. It did not precede it.

This pattern repeats throughout Islamic history.

Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ottomans, Safavids, each civil war produced a theological justification after victory or defeat. Belief adjusted to power, not the other way around.

Christianity fractured because people argued about God. Islam fractured because people fought over who gets to rule for God.

In Christianity, theology is primary, in Islam, politics is primary and theology is retrospective.

This is why Islamic sects, despite centuries of violence against one another, remain largely monolithic on the core elements: the Qur’an, Muhammad, and submission to divine law. The differences between them are marginal when compared to the scale of bloodshed that produced them.

This is why Islam behaves less like a religion in the and more like a political system that sanctifies power. Its internal divisions do not reflect competing visions of truth, but competing claims to authority.