Machine summary:
The faith contributes only a psychic bond; it determines the at• titude of the spirit and defines the ethical aspects of its relation to social values of primary import ; but, in the government of the State, in the articulation in political ·and social norms of the peculiar necessities immanent in the cultural growth of a people and generally, in the vast sphere of secular utilities relating to the concerns of the corporate life in its broadest sense, Islam leaves to human initiative an almost unlimited scope of freedom to grow and shape its own types and processesof political organization.
The growth of Islam in Arabia, the growth of a polity in the Age of Faith and its propagation under the auspices of a great Arab State could not but influence the political culture of the nations subject to its imperial rule.
"* In the era following this creative epoch of her early history Islam was working with the cultural tradition of many nations of the ancient world ; and in the actual growth of the types of the States and their institutional equipment, all elements, Aryan and Semitic, Indian and Mongol,combined to found her systems of administration.
To it belong the official publication of the Qur'an, the first regular organization of the secular State, the settlement of the basic principles of the polity in its social, legal and political aspects and above all, the application of the Qur'an and the precedents of the Age of Faith to the problems of the rising Islamic Empire.