Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations, could be used as a sociopolitical ideology to unite the whole of the Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism. Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, as he argued, the intellectual foundations upon which the West was built had in fact been borrowed from Islam. Ideals such as social egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit and preservation of knowledge had their origins not in Christian Europe, but in the Ummah. It was Muhammad's revolutionary community that had introduced the concept of popular sanction over the ruling government while dissolving all ethnic boundaries between individuals and giving women and children unprecedented rights and privileges.