Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is an Abrahamic religion based on prophecy, prophethood, and the revealed text. It began in sixth-century Arabia and spread rapidly to regions outside the Arabian peninsula. A hundred years after Mohammed had declared it a prophetic religion, Islam had spread to almost all the regions of the known civilized world. This early political success and the idea that the divine message for the proper ordering of society is complete and final account for the social pervasiveness of this religion. The first factor inhibits the handing over of spheres of life to nonreligious authority, and the second makes it difficult to offer rival versions of the blueprint. This social pervasiveness makes Islam especially interesting in the sociology of religion (Gellner 1983, p.2).

Islam is the second largest religion, with an estimated 1.2 billion adherents, constituting about 20 percent of the world population in...