ABSTRACT
Sayyid Qutb, ideological successor to the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a leading exponent of Islamic antisecularism, has called for the establishment of Islamic government. Secularism is antireligious and therefore immoral and atheistic. Stackhouse is referring to the historical development of European secularism, in which religious reformers reacted against the increasingly secular concerns of the papacy. As mercantile economy became increasingly important in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Europe and the popes and emperors continued to preoccupy one another, the Italian trade cities became virtually autonomous, dominating political and economic life in their respective regions. Europe’s Age of Religious Warfare is a fascinating laboratory of the dynamics of emerging nationalism. In a growing recognition of the nature of religious commitment, John Calvin asserted that Christians simply do not have the leisure to sit idly by while society is directed in an ungodly way.
