It's not so much the Enlightenment that marks the split between Middle East and West.Uzique wrote:
it's not the word of law that western society is bound to - though the law is pretty much a synecdoche for what we are truly bound to.
western society is bound to a religious reverence for Reason. to the point of ir-reason. we think everything can be dealt with within the realms of the reasonable, the rational, the logical. we have very little time since the enlightenment for irrationalism (or romanticism if you will), despite the evidence that is it clearly a large force in our economic-market system and everyday life. law is just an extension of our blind following of so-called reason (to the point where the laws and orders we follow are perversely irrational).
if you were continuing the generalisation, you could just simply say that the middle-east hasn't had a giant enlightenment philosophic tradition that places reason at the centre of human experience. thus they're far more comfortable with spiritualism and forms of social norm and government rule that don't follow western reason's handmaid, individualism.
More the Western emphasis on the Rule of Law, with the "separation of church and state" as a prime example.
The West plays lip service to governance by Reason, in about the same measure as the Middle East plays lip service to governance by Sharia.
Both may be the romantic stated intent, but both are a thin veil covering the reality; adherence to established (written) rules, and submitting to established authority, respectively.
(with the word 'submitting' particularly chosen, as that is the literal translation of the word Islam).
To pick a single word for the two cultures,
The word for the West is Bureaucracy.
The word for the Middle East is Submission.
