To many outsiders the radical/moderate division is defined in terms of Shiites and Sunnis, the two major branches of Islam. Shiism, dominant in Iran but the minority sect in most other places, is indeed more hospitable to radicalism.
It was conceived in opposition to the political heirs of the Prophet Mohammed, the Shiites believing his immediate successor should have been his son-in-law, Ali, not an unrelated associate.
Shiites recognise a hierarchy of mullahs and ayatollahs as their leaders and reject any secular authority.
Sunnis, who make up 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims, are more ready to accept systems in which religion and politics can coexist, for they have no structure of earthly religious leaders.
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Yet analyzing fundamentalism only along Shia-Sunni lines is simplistic. Not all Shiites are radicals or revolutionaries, and some Sunnis, like the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, are as ready to use violence as Khomeini’s cadres.
Neither Shiites nor Sunnis draw the kind of distinction between politics and religion that Christian cultures do.
The biblical dictate to “render under Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” is foreign to Muslims. It is mixing of politics and religion that makes Islam so confusing and often so threatening to non-Muslims.
The melding of the religious and the temporal goes back to Mohammed, the Arabian leader who founded Islam in the seventh century.
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He spread its tenets not simply by preaching the word but also by conquering and converting with the sword.
Moses never reached his Promised Land and Jesus’s Kingdom wasn’t of this world, but Mohammed went on to rule with armies and taxes and Islamic laws.