Poetry

Scruton begins by describing the deep and enduring cultural differences between Western and Islamic civilizations. First and foremost, the tension that has always existed in the West between religious and secular authority has no parallel in Islam. Thus the Christian Biblical admonition, “Render . . . unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” contrasts “radically,” says Scruton, with the Koranic vision, in which “nothing is owed to Caesar.” The Greek city-state, Roman law, Augustine’s concept of the duty of civil obedience for the clergy, and the medieval distinction between the regnum (kingship) and the sacerdotium (priesthood)—the “uneasy coexistence of Emperor and Pope on the ‘universal’ thrones of medieval Europe”—are all cited by Scruton as examples of secular-religious divisions that existed in the West long before the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but have been absent in the Moslem world.

Scruton draws a major distinction