Muslims Don’t Need a Reformation
Jason Kuznicki on Aug 20th 2007
Diana Muir in Sunday’s Washington Post:
Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof and Mansour al-Nogaidan are among the well-intentioned people who have called for an Islamic Reformation. They should be careful what they wish for.
The Protestant Reformation did precede the things these men admire about modernity in the West, including women’s emancipation, political liberty, scientific breakthroughs, the wealth and opportunity created by the Industrial Revolution, and permission to think freely regarding God. But all this came later, and the Reformation was only part of what brought them about.
The Reformation was a time of intense focus on God and what He requires of people. As a movement, it was enthusiastic, narrow and far from tolerant. It and the Counter-Reformation brought two centuries of repression, war and massacre to the West. It’s unlikely that anyone who lived through it would consider wishing a Reformation on Muslims.
Christianity became tolerant almost in spite of itself, and it only did so when the other alternatives had been exhausted… [T]he Enlightenment is the true intellectual origin of tolerance as we know it, and, while there could not have been an Enlightenment without a Reformation, it is a serious mistake to confuse or equate the two…
Until the Enlightenment, wherever an official tolerance existed, it was almost always a particular and revocable license to practice one specific minority religion, and to do so only under highly restrictive conditions. In a sense, these were merely truces in the fighting, often agreed to simply because it was impossible to eradicate the religious minority. These early and frankly misnamed “tolerances” were in no sense predicated on the notion that an individual has a moral obligation to seek the truth for himself, unconstrained by the civil authority.
This last is what we now expect, and until the late seventeenth century, nothing even close to it could be found in Europe.
The great reformers — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox — all urged fire and the sword. The thinkers of the Enlightenment — Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Hume — agreed that on these terms religion was at best a sham and at worst a profound cruelty. We owe religious tolerance not to the Reformation, but to a humane and cosmopolitan reaction against the Reformation.
Filed in The Belfry, The Bureau
Weren’t there some exceptions in seventeenth century North America, in Rhode Island and (to some extent) Pennsylvania?
Yes, but talking about the colonies as an example of Reformation tolerance is kind of tricky. I’m of the opinion that people came to America to get away from all the bloodshed and brutality going on in Europe at the time(The big anabaptist migration, I think, bares this out), though it is true that some groups who came here used similar treatment against their own dissenters. In fact, Williams was fleeing from the Massachusetts bay colony, wasn’t he?
[...] Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty quotes (himself) writing: Until the Enlightenment, wherever an official tolerance existed, it was almost always a particular and revocable license to practice one specific minority religion, and to do so only under highly restrictive conditions. In a sense, these were merely truces in the fighting, often agreed to simply because it was impossible to eradicate the religious minority. These early and frankly misnamed “tolerances” were in no sense predicated on the notion that an individual has a moral obligation to seek the truth for himself, unconstrained by the civil authority. This last is what we now expect, and until the late seventeenth century, nothing even close to it could be found in Europe. [...]
Islam had seen its Reformation. If the key aspects of the Reformation are a stripping away of centuries of extraneous traditions, a return to the ‘essence’ of the faith, and a focus on the founding document, the Reformers are the Salafists (Wahabbis) and some other movements that are influenced by the Salafists.
Islam has seen its experiments with tolerance. In Andulusia or Bagdad during our High Middle Ages, there was a form of religious tolerance as well as a flourishing of learning and culture. More recently, Lebanon practiced an interesting tolerance with power explicitly allocated according to religion; this was in the context of a cultural flourishing compared to most of its neighbors. Lebanon, at the time, had limited impact from Salafist ideology and had large numbers of religious dissenters.
Leading to our own founding, George Fox and Roger Williams both wrote a number of books about the other. Each condemned the other for advocating religious tolerance but failing to practice it. But they, and many dissenting groups, supported some form of tolerance in principle (if not in practice). In a colony founded largely by religious dissenters, a truce was needed and the tolerance principle provided one. The Reformation should get some credit for religious tolerance only because it bred so many dissenting groups.