Islam is a religion, obviously enough, and with that non-Muslims in the West seem to believe that they know enough about it. This is a mistake, however, because while Islam is indeed a religion it is also more: a culture, a way of life, and an identity. In this, Islam is quite different from Christianity.

In Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam, Anthony Shadid writes:

It was the devotion that struck me time and again in my travels in the Muslim world — faith infusing life, defining it and directing it at a level outsiders often find difficult to comprehend. Typically, we in the West identify ourselves by race, gender or hyphenated ethnicity, placing religion squarely in the corner of personal belief.

In the camp at Bandi Khana, and across the Muslim world, that personal belief is identity, often more important than race or nationality. There is room for misperception in missing the scope of that identity. To look at Islam only as a set of fixed beliefs and doctrine runs the risk of misunderstanding the dynamic of the faith and the way it appeals in our time to a young, jobless man in Egypt, a woman activist in Turkey or a fighter likely to die on the plains of Afghanistan.

Christians are certainly devout in their beliefs, but even the most fervent Christian typically has forms of identity outside of their religion. Muslims do as well, but they don’t seem to loom as large as they do for Christians in the West. This is how Westerners tend to misunderstand Islam: they underestimate it in a way because they fail to properly appreciate that it means so much more for Muslims than their Christianity does for them.

Because it is so much more than just a collection of doctrines and beliefs, the appeal of Islam is both broader and deeper than many in the West appear able to comprehend. It is precisely this sense of Islam as an all-encompassing identity that allows Islamists to attract the fanatical devotion to their cause. The West will not be able to adequately meet the threat posed by Islamism without first understanding how and why Islam itself is more than a religion and cannot be simplistically compared to Christianity.

 

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