Why Islam doesn’t need a reformation

The Guardian ^ | Sunday 17 May 2015 | Mahdi Hasan

[Cronos]

In recent months, cliched calls for reform of Islam, a 1,400-year-old faith, have intensified. “We need a Muslim reformation,” announced Newsweek. “Islam needs reformation from within,” said the Huffington Post. ..After all, Christianity had the Reformation, so goes the argument, which was followed by the Enlightenment; by secularism, liberalism and modern European democracy. So why can’t Islam do the same?

Yet the reality is that talk of a Christian-style reformation for Islam is so much cant. Let’s consider this idea of a “Muslim Luther”. Luther did not merely nail 95 theses to the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg in 1517, denouncing clerical abuses within the Catholic church. He also demanded that German peasants revolting against their feudal overlords be “struck dead”, comparing them to “mad dogs”, and authored On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543, in which he referred to Jews as “the devil’s people” and called for the destruction of Jewish homes and synagogues. As the US sociologist and Holocaust scholar Ronald Berger has observed, Luther helped establish antisemitism as “a key element of German culture and national identity”. Hardly a poster boy for reform and modernity for Muslims in 2015.

...The truth is that Islam has already had its own reformation of sorts, in the sense of a stripping of cultural accretions and a process of supposed “purification”. And it didn’t produce a tolerant, pluralistic, multifaith utopia, a Scandinavia-on-the-Euphrates. Instead, it produced … the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Wasn’t reform exactly what was offered to the masses of the Hijaz by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the mid-18th century itinerant preacher who allied with the House of Saud? He offered an austere Islam cleansed of what he believed to be innovations, which eschewed centuries of mainstream scholarship and commentary, and rejected the authority of the traditional ulema.

[Secret Agent Man]

Personally my choice is a muslim annihilation. Short of that they are content to continue to become more rabid, more violent, and fanatical all for jihad and a false god that promises sex favors for eternity.

When you cure disease, you don’t leave a part of the diseased tissue in the body. You cut the entire diseased organ out. You wipe the entire infection out. You destroy all the parasites. If any are left they continue to grow again, often stronger because they survived the initial weaker attempt to remove them, and they got stronger.

[Secret Agent Man]

If the innocents are kaffir, muslims will say they are not innocent. And as kaffir it doesn’t matter because they aren’t any better than animals.

[Fai Mao]

“Martin Luther’s contribution was to entirely alter Christianity’s understanding of man’s place in the cosmos thus opening the way for the shift from medievalism to the modern era.

How true!
Most of the Catholics on FR today would have been burn at the stake or persecuted as heretics if it were not for Luther and the other early Protestants.

[RobbyS]

Mohammed was like Abraham, or Moses, or Joshua, or even Samuel. He never progressed morally beyond these men. The moral history of the Israelites really began with destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the Exile, and the return,all of which helped set the stage for the coming of Our Lord. That Israel would not be saved by a Great Warrior was shown by the career of the Hasmoneans, who did win independence for Judea from the Greeks and set up a kingdom as expensive as David’s but which fell prey to the same faults as the kingdoms of Israel and Judea. Just as they ignored and killed the Prophets, so the rulers of Israel did John and Jesus. Jesus was their only hope for anything like earthly salvation and they rejected him. and so again they suffered the fate of their ancestors. But their failure was their greatest success, although they still do not know it.

[SpaceBar]

There will be no peace until the last muslims collected in the wild end up stuffed and on display in a natural history museum.

[Pelham]

Nuke ‘em from orbit- it’s the only way to be sure.

[Cronos]

Why the Turks? They ended the sham Abbasid caliphate (the Caliph had been a figurehead for the Mamluks in Egypt for centuries prior to the Turk's taking the turban in the 1500s). They didn't have any changes to theology.

I think it's more than "Arab hegemony" -- there always was that, even under the Turks where you have a people who were originally slaves taking on the garb of Arabs, where you end up with people who are ethnically more related to Greeks and Armenians and Iranis (i.e. an indo-european people) calling themselves "Turks" and speaking a Turkic language

To a great degree what Wahhabism really is, is a sort of Counter-Reformation and a demand for return to Arab hegemony -- in the terms of a "reformation" -- mostly I would interpret this as "reforming" to capture the original essence. Just as various Christian groups claimed this in the 1500s, the Wahabbis claimed this in the 1800s. The difference is that early Christianity, no matter what we argue about theologically, early Christianity was peaceful, introspective -- early islam under Mo was NOT.

[Cronos]

Please note that since last year they do not call themselves ISIS (Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria) but call themselves just “the Islamic state” — we should call them that and not let liberals (who call themselves “progressives”) use newspeak against us

[Cronos]

Islam already resembles Protestantism in that it is decentralized, based on consensus of the community, and textual literalism. --> Not completely. What you describe is Sunni Islam. Shia Islam has its ayatollahs who lead -- not quite Popes, but different from Sunnis -- among the shia you also have Ismailis who follow the family line of the Aga Khan, the Bohris who have their own Syedna leader. Then you have Ibadis who have their own Imams. And I don't consider DRuze or Alavis to be Islamic -- more a syncretic religion

[Cronos]

The problem is that it historically has been the hadiths, and Islamic jurisprudence that hid Islam’s brutality. -- you are correct

[Cronos]

The Sufis to me seem more syncretic — like the Bekhtashis (or are they the same?) — combining aspects of Bhakti Hinduism with Islam.

[Cronos]

Bluejean is correct — they are not “doomed to failure” — remember that barbarians can destroy civilisations

[Cronos]

Martin Luther's contribution was to entirely alter Christianity's understanding of man's place in the cosmos thus opening the way for the shift from medievalism to the modern era. -- I'm not sure Martin Luther saw it the way you did. He and the other reformers did want to harken to an "early Church".

[Cronos]

Good points about the scientific method. however, not quite true about the first amendment based on Luther because you had freedom of speech and religion in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth well before the rest of the world and this was not due to the reformation but predated it (as there were orthodox, catholics, jews, armenians, tatars etc. in the P-L commonwealth)

[Cronos]

Though prior to Jesus' time you did have a separation of Jewish kings and Jewish High priests. Even in Jesus time you had Herod and his offspring as secular rulers and the High priest as the religious ruler

And in Hinduism you do have a separation between Kshatriya (warriors) and brahmins (priests)

[matt1234]

Here’s what I see from this “distinguished” author all the way down to the lowly Tsarnaev parents: people who are arrogant, intransigent, and totally unwilling to accept fault or criticism. Dealing with small numbers of such people in polite, western society is a nuisance. Dealing with masses of such people domestically or abroad is an existential threat.

[Cronos]

If you look at Islamic history in Spain, you see that the initial flush of persecution floundered after some time and the rulers let Christians practice. They were then deemed as soft and replaced by the Almohads who became soft in turn and were replaced by the Almoravids

Islam only turns more violent. They don't have movements like Quakers or Mennonites.

[Cronos]

Fai Mao — please don’t make this into another Catholic v/s Protestant fight thread — we have enough of them on FR. Let’s point out corollaries to what we know but focus on the threat that is Islam

[Cronos]

The Tsarnaev parents — I’m not sure I see that. I don’t know quite frankly WHAT I see

[nathanbedford]

As a Christian of the reformed persuasion with family roots in Irish Catholicism to frame in stark relief my competing familial roots in southern fundamentalism, I take very seriously questions concerning the relationship between man and God.

Every day on these threads we see some proposition or other debating a fine point of Christian theology and that is all to the good. Sometimes Catholics seek to undermine Protestant doctrine and sometimes Protestants counterattack. Sometimes passions rise but it is more than the separation of technology that keeps us from violence; somewhere in our culture we have come to assume that the other fellow has a right to be wrong about his religion.

We have considered in thread after thread that how one believes, how one regards the essential nature of man whether as a child of God or not, has the most profound influence of any factor in determining that man's politics. We say we are in a culture war in American and the roots of that war comes from an understanding or a misunderstanding of the relationship of God and man (or whether there is even a God) but our war so far is not a shooting war. We are exercised, for example, over homosexual marriage but there is a cultural consensus that no matter how wrongheaded the next Supreme Court's decision might be, we will not resort to an inquisition-as close to an inquisition as recent actions seeking to punish people who will not provide services to homosexuals' in their marriage ceremonies, that is still centuries away from the Inquisition and light years away from stoning homosexuals in the world of Islam.

I like to pretend to wit and sometimes observe: Unitarians don't care what the faithful believe as long as they don't believe it very much and charismatics don't care what the faithful believe as long as they believe it a whole lot. My point is that these groups have a different approach to rigidity of doctrine than do, for example, Southern Baptists who care very much about what one believes. Nevertheless, we have come to a consensus in this country and indeed since the Holocaust in Europe, that people by and large should be left alone to believe as they will. Yes, there are obviously tensions about growing anti-Semitism and there is certainly a reaction to Muslim immigration but the official position of the governments in Europe and the modus vivendi in these countries is one of toleration.

The West, that is the Christian West did not emerge from the Middle Ages to this place without real bumps in the road. The Reformation was bloody, the religious wars of the 15th and 16th century were brutal (my ancestors' town near Heidelberg from which they emigrated to America claims in its webpage that only one of the wars after the 30 Years War was more devastating than World War II!). But the Christian West experienced more than just a Reformation-that was a quarrel about the true understanding of God and therefore how life and faith should be organized-it experienced the Enlightenment which shifted man's understanding of the world from a system of Revelation to a system of scientific inquiry. Reformation alone was a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for the modern age, we needed the enlightenment as well.

Islam has never benefited from an enlightenment it still operates under a belief system that all true knowledge is revelatory. This not only deprives Islam of modernity in the technological sense, it fetters Islam to ignorance, intolerance, brutality, and stupidity. It condemns Islam to unremitting, unrelenting war against infidels and apostates. It condemns 1 billion people to a miserable life in a dark age. It threatens us.