Islam organizes worship communally rather than through a clerical hierarchy

Evidence

Similarly he claimed that Christians honoured their Church because they had Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and so on, whose excommunications the rich, the powerful and the people all feared alike. It was not so with the Muslims: ‘their Bishops are poor men, and so are their priests; and they have wives and children, and really the greater proportion take part in trades .. .’ What this author here so clearly but not altogether intentionally reveals is the popular character of Muslim worship, the organisation of the religious duties which constitute it, communally rather than clerically. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines a core structural contrast: Islam’s priestless, communal worship versus Christendom’s clerical hierarchy.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who studies comparative religion or Islamic institutions — the observation that medieval polemic unwittingly documented Islam’s genuinely communal, non-clerical worship organization.