Christianity lacked Islam’s founding experience of political triumph

Evidence

This is all a very different story, of course, from the early struggles of Christianity: Jesus put to death by Rome as a criminal; his followers, a Christian minority in a pagan empire, persecuted for centuries. No wonder early Christians looked upon political and military power as evil, Rome as a reincarnation of the whore of Babylon. Later Christian authors write Rome into the divine plan (and subsequently, in the case of Isidore, write it out and replace it with the Goths), but there is really no positive image of political power in the New Testament. Medieval Christian kings will look back to the Old Testament for role models: the ancient Jewish kings, especially David. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the vault’s Islam-West opposition in a founding asymmetry: Islam begins politically victorious while Christianity begins persecuted — the structural seed of the later polemics Anidjar/Aziz trace. — connects to: Islam’s early fusion of religion and politics was not unique among world religions — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 316
• DEEPTHINKING: Tolan identifies a structural inversion: Islam’s inaugural military-political success vs. Christianity’s inaugural martyrdom shaped each tradition’s theology of power, and this asymmetry underpins later medieval Christian inability to comprehend a triumphant rival religion.