Religion and State - The Muslim Approach to Politics
The author argues that Muslims had never previously faced a material and cultural challenge such as the West presented them during the last two centuries; and that this modern-times challenge has been more severe for Muslims than for any other peoples. “Islam and the West, it can be argued, is a special case.” From this base, he sketches the Muslim leaders’ generally accommodationist responses to the West and the concurrent decline in Islamic influence. The leaders imbued the public sphere with an activist spirit and educated much larger numbers of students. But these “secularizing, centralizing, nationalizing” states also created impossible expectations of themselves that they completely failed to deliver on. This failure provided an opening for the shunted-aside Islamists to have their say. And the rest, as they say, is history. – Daniel Pipes

The Spanish Inquisition
The Inquisition has its roots in the Latin word 'inquisito' which means inquiry. The Romans used the inquisitorial process as a form of legal procedure employed in the search for evidence. Once Rome's religion changed to Christianity under Constantine, it retained the inquisitorial trial method but also developed brutal means of dealing with heretics who went against the doctrines of the new religion. Efforts to suppress religious freedom were initially ad hoc until the establishment of an Office of Inquisition in the Middle Ages, founded in response to the growing Catharist heresy in South West France.

The Spanish Inquisition set up in 1478 surpassed all Inquisitorial activity that had preceded it in terms of its reach and length. For 350 years under Papal Decree, Jews, then Muslims and Protestants were put through the Inquisitional Court and condemned to torture, imprisonment, exile and death.

How did the early origins of the Inquisition in Medieval Europe spread to Spain? What were the motivations behind the systematic persecution of Jews, Muslims and Protestants? And what finally brought about an end to the Spanish Inquisition 350 years after it had first been decreed?