[pluma]

Maajid Nawaz would disagree with your assessment of Islam and Islamism.

For Christianity politics and religion used to be as inseparable as they are for Islam today. Not so long ago most heads of state were subject to the Vatican (whether ceremonially or literally) and granted their authority by divine privilege alone.

The separation of church and state in the Christian world is largely a relatively new phenomenon and ultimately dates back to the Peace of Westphalia (the 17th century is much closer to the present day than to the birth of Christianity) which established the counter-intuitive idea that it's okay for other nations to have other religious beliefs than your own.

For many Muslims today, Islam is Islamism, with varying degrees of urgency, but that doesn't mean you can't have Islam without Islamism or that you shouldn't make the distinction. Islam is just lagging behind Christianity when it comes to holy wars and acceptance of other faiths (even other sects of Islam itself). There are plenty of explanations for why that is the case and not few of them at least partially blame the West, but it's an evolution that's still happening in Islam and that needs to happen for Islam to peacefully coexist with other religions and the non-religious.

[pjc50]

Indeed. Not to mention that German politics has both a "Christian Democratic Union" and "Christian Social Union". Let's not pretend that the West is a nice cleanly separated secularist utopia.

[pluma]

True. The only secular countries in "the West" I can think of are Turkey and France. And sadly Turkey has very nearly abandoned their secular foundations by embracing Erdoğanism.

However despite Germany's faults at least Germany is not Christian by law. The reason Islam doesn't enjoy the same privileges as mainstream Christianity is that Christians are better organised and less sectarian.

The Catholic Church in Germany needs no explanation but the Evangelical Church in Germany is a union of Lutherans, Calvinists and other protestants. The Islamic sects are far too disunited to form an alliance like this. A single Islamic faith group (Ahmadiyya) managed to organise as a public corporation (i.e. a recognised religious group) and they only exist in two out of Germany's 16 states and represent a minority group compared to other Islamic sects.

To give you a better idea, here's the list of recognised religious groups in the most populous state of Germany:

http://www.bmi.bund.de/PERS/DE/Themen/Informationen/Religion...

Most of them are Christian, even including Mennonites and Jehova's Wittnesses. There are also numerous Jewish communities. There's even a Hindu temple. Yet not a single Islamic group. This isn't the result of a Christian bias, it's entirely on the Islamic communities.

[erikb]

That's a very new idea for my, so I have to think about it before I could argue for or against it. Thanks for opening up my mind for it.