Islam is often held up by Western commentators as a particulary pernicious religion from the perspective of the possibility of political secularism. The lack of differentiation between the religious and the political in Islam is said to be uniquely dangerous, leading to the sort of situations such as exist in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan where the primacy and privilege of religion has played a major role in causing great injustice and suffering.
The dangers of an institutionalised conflation of faith and politics is undeniable, but that this is a unique issue for Islam would seem debatable.
Historically, of course, there has always been an intertwining of religion and politics in the West. The Pope is, and always has been, a head of state (no matter how dubious that position now is). Similarly, the clergy have always been a powerful section of the ruling class, with, for example, Anglican bishops sitting in the House of Lords in the UK.
The changes in the West since the Enlightenment are widely held as having fundamentally altered all that, however, ostensibly leaving us in a healthily secular environment - the very sort of environment that Islam is held up as being such a threat to.
However, the recent paedophile scandal within the Catholic Church casts some doubt upon this idea. A fundamental feature of this scandal is evidence for the same belief in the primacy and privilege of religion within the Western systems it has occured in as is bemoaned in Islamic ones. Throughout the scandal the tacit assumption has been that the problem of child-rape that involves clergy is in some way different from secular child-rape. The Church has attempted - and, on the whole, been allowed - to keep investigations and punishments (rare as they are) internal to its organisation. For example, a bishop (of Bruges) has admitted publically to the rape of several boys with no repercussions at all.
Here then is clear evidence of a privileged situation for religion in the Western political/legal system. Western commentators could thus afford to be less smug about their perceived superiority to their Muslim targets and to bear in mind the closeness in underlying attitudes to religion and society that, in many contexts, exist.
