Islamic religious leaders Islamic religious leaders Islamic religious leaders have traditionally been people who, as part of the clerisy, mosque, or government, performed a prominent role within their community or nation. However, in the modern contexts of Muslims minorities in non-Muslim countries as well as secularised Muslim states like Turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh, religious leadership may take a variety of non-formal shapes. Compared to religious leaders/clerics of the other Abrahamic faiths, Islamic clergy are said to resemble rabbis and not priests. Unlike Catholic priests they do not "serve as intermediaries between mankind and God", have "process of ordination", or "sacramental functions", but instead
Relations between the Catholic Church and the state religious unity, anyone within the Church who did not subscribe to Catholic Christianity was seen as a threat to the dominance and purity of ""the one true faith"" and they saw it as their right to defend this by all means at their disposal. Beginning with Edward Gibbon in "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" some historians have taken the view that Christianity weakened the Roman Empire through its failure to preserve the pluralistic structure of the state. Pagans and Jews lost interest and the Church drew the most able men into its organisation to