No, I think we're on the same team when it comes to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the essence of humanism. I just have a totally different approach to analysing the Islamic world, I think.

I think that "Islam" is a big part of the problem, not because it is "bad" but because it is completely innapropriate as a cultural and political context for the Modern Middle East.
I'm afraid I don't really understand what you're trying to get at here.

I don't think it's a coincidence that as the power of the Islamic word has waned of the last half milenium we have seen increasingly harsh applications of religious law,
Not necessarily, and even though the idea of the waning power of the Islamic world for about 500 years has been pretty popular (even within academic circles), it doesn't necessarily correspond with historical events. For example, the Safavids (and subsequently the Qajarites and Pahlavis) were relatively powerful in their immediate areas. The fall of the Ottoman Empire, which has often been described as being continuously in decline, has also been overstated; there were several periods in the Late Ottoman Empire that were actually periodes of greater power.

What happened to the Islamic world is generally described as a continuous current; around 1250, with the fall of Baghdad, the once mighty and scientifically advanced world of Islam entered a period of decline which coincided with the decline of scientific inquiries throughout the Islamic world and a period that was dominated by religious orthodoxy and piety. As I said, this image is at best only half true. There were many later periods of greatness, especially under the Safavids.

but Islam doesn't do subservience to other powers the way Christianity and Judaism can
Surely, this is true as in that Islam (as a political concept) has a very strict set of rules that apply to all people living under Islamic rule, including non-Muslims (the oft-quoted "dhimmis"). However, the exact way of dealing with non-believers isn't a matter that has seen general consensus, even since the founding of Islam. The particularly notorious Kharijite sect outright forbade any form of dealing with non-believers. To what extent this is "Islamic" depends on Muslim scholars to decide, really.

However, there are terms in Islamic jurisprudence that deal explicitely with secular law, in particular "qanun", which is a corruption of Greek "kanon". This is particularly used for Ottoman law though (as they introduced the whole millet-system).

what you say is true but also a very recent concept
Fragony is absolutely correct. Fundamentalism as we know it is no older than the 1850's, generally. It was around the same time that several Islamist politicians and philosophers rediscovered the Crusaders; before that, it was regarded as simply another event in Muslim history, and not particularly an example of Muslims versus Christians (or East versus West). In particular, the image of the Crusades was used by Sultan Abdulhamid II.


In short, my view of the subject is that we should look at "Islamism" very critically. Even though anti-Islamic as well as Islamist activists will pretend that it is an ancient movement which finds its roots in the very first days of Islam, this is very much removed from the truth. It's about as Islamic in origin as the celebration of Muhammad's birthday (which, incidentally, is not).