Tom Holland wrote a response to Mehdi Hasan’s It’snotIslam piece.
He starts by pointing out that this drive to do away with the clutter of centuries of interpretation and clerical additions to go back to the Pure Unsullied Original is how Protestantism started.
The same impulse that prompted Luther to affirm the primacy of scripture over Catholic doctrine has also long been at work in Islam.
As far back as the 13th century, a scholar based in Damascus by the name of Ibn Taymiyya proposed that the surest way to know God’s purpose was to study the practices of the first three generations of Muslims: the “forebears”, or “Salafs”. Reports of what Muhammad and his earliest followers had done, so he argued, should always trump subsequent tradition. Like Luther, Ibn Taymiyya was condemned as a heretic; but he also, again like Luther, blazed a momentous trail.
Salafism today is probably the fastest-growing Islamic movement in the world. The interpretation that Isis applies to Muslim scripture may be exceptional for its savagery – but not for its literalism. Islamic State, in its conceit that it has trampled down the weeds and briars of tradition and penetrated to the truth of God’s dictates, is recognisably Salafist.
Calvin’s Geneva was a pretty harsh place too, you know.
When Islamic State fighters smash the statues of pagan gods, they are following the example of the Prophet; when they proclaim themselves the shock troops of a would-be global empire, they are following the example of the warriors of the original caliphate; when they execute enemy combatants, and impose discriminatory taxes on Christians, and take the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they are doing nothing that the first Muslims did not glory in.
Such behaviour is certainly not synonymous with Islam; but if not Islamic, then it is hard to know what else it is.
Quite. Other kinds of Islam are possible, but they’re far from inevitable. Quakers are one kind of Protestantism, and Westboro Baptist is another.
Admittedly the actions of those signed up to Islamic State are unlikely to have been inspired exclusively by religious teachings. Many of those fighting for Isis may indeed, as Hasan points out, be varnishing their taste for violence or power with a sheen of piety. But the same was true of those inspired by Luther’s teachings – not to mention the early Muslims themselves.
Luther’s teachings ended up leading to a lot of wars and slaughters. Religion just is a super-powerful brand of the kind of organizing principle that helps such things to happen.
To imagine that religious motivation can somehow be isolated from the complex swirl of ambitions, fears and desires that constitute human nature is to fall for an illusion: that religions, contingent as they are, and as subject to evolution as any other manifestation of culture, exist platonically as abstract ideals.
Engrave that somewhere. I just engraved it on Facebook.
It is not merely coincidence that IS currently boasts a caliph, imposes quranically mandated taxes, topples idols, chops the hands off thieves, stones adulterers, executes homosexuals and carries a flag that bears the Muslim declaration of faith. If Islamic State is indeed to be categorised as a phenomenon distinct from Islam, it urgently needs a manifest and impermeable firewall raised between them. At the moment, though, I fail to see it.
And if there were such a firewall…again, what about Saudi Arabia? Doesn’t that need a firewall too? And then on down the line? Boko Haram; Al-Shabaab; the Taliban; ad infinitum?
This may take some time.
“Luther’s teachings ended up leading to a lot of wars and slaughters. ”
Luther was an anti-semite and had many other flaws, but this verges on pro-Catholic apologetics. Surely, the same Catholic church that launched the crusades and slaughtered the Cathars didn’t need Luther to teach them religious violence.
In some ways, ISIS, with it’s desire to restore a central authority in the form of the Caliphate, has more in common with the Counter-reformation, than the Reformation. To them, modernism is the new heresy that must be defeated by increased fealty to the old traditions and zealous fealty to a central religious authority.
That’s not perfect either of course. The Counter-reformation never turned against the classical artifacts and ruins (and were quite fond of Aristotle and Euclid) but they still succeeded in stifling the Scientific Revolution in Italy.
Stripping away the layers of interpretation and examining the original texts for what they actually are may be a gateway to fundamentalism, but it was also the gateway to higher criticism and even atheism for many.
Yeah, I think the comparison with the Protestant secession is problematic. For a start, it ignores the fact that one of the major reasons why Protestantism took off was popular rejection of the Catholic church’s descent into barbaric despotism. The Popes weren’t just ignoring traditional texts, they were flagrantly violating the moral codes they insisted everyone should be following. And not just one or two bad Popes — the church had been that way for more than a century. Not to defend Protestantism, but it’s important to recognise that it was in large part a reaction to the excesses and cruelty of the established church. What we’re seeing with ISIS and the Taliban is the opposite. It’s a rebellion against the *moderate* face of Islam. ISIS and the Taliban aren’t appalled at the harshness and authoritarianism of the more secular Islamic states; rather, they don’t think those states are harsh and authoritarian enough.
“The same impulse that prompted Luther to affirm the primacy of scripture over Catholic doctrine has also long been at work in Islam.”
Yes, the impulse is the same, but that’s where the similarity ends.
The dilemma for Islam’a apologists is the nature of Islam itself, as originally practised and indeed, as it is practised in majority-Muslim nations today. Unlike Christianity or Buddhism, it was predatory and brutal, an ideology for gangsters.
No Islamic propagandist would genuinely desire that the Kuffars actually understand Islam, so instead, ‘true’ Islam (as practised by the Salafists) is presented as an aberration.
“If Islamic State is indeed to be categorised as a phenomenon distinct from Islam, it urgently needs a manifest and impermeable firewall raised between them. At the moment, though, I fail to see it.”
Agreed, Islam and IS are inseparable.
@1 latveriandiplomat
“Stripping away the layers of interpretation and examining the original texts for what they actually are may be a gateway to fundamentalism, but it was also the gateway to higher criticism and even atheism for many.”
That really depends on the nature of the original texts, and probably it also requires some residual Greco-Roman culture, doesn’t it?
diplomat @ 1 – heh yeah, I’m a big Catholic apologist.
Of course the church was violent, and there was plenty of persecution, but the church was hegemonic, so there weren’t religious wars in the sense there were after the schism.
Ophelia, I agree that the Catholic apologist line was way off target, but lvd’s right that it *read* like Luther’s demand to return to traditional values was the root cause of the religious wars that followed. And it wasn’t really that at all. It wouldn’t have mattered what Luther’s theology said, it was all about the schism itself. If Luther had been a free-love-and-hugs kind of a guy, the Protestant movement still would have triggered vicious religious wars because it undermined the authority of the central church.
I’d also disagree that “there weren’t religious wars in the sense there were after the schism” because prior to the secession the Church waged the Albigensian and Arognese Crusades (wars against other Christian sects in Europe — in the case of the Albigensians, a very peaceful sect), and the Northern Crusades (which were ostensibly about fighting pagans around the Baltic but sometimes drifted into fighting Eastern Orthodox Christians when the mood struck).
My thoughts are that the only really important difference between the religious wars that broke out after the Protestant schism was that for the first time in more than a millennium, the church was in serious danger. All the previous crusades mentioned had been malicious bullying by Papist forces that had no chance of being overthrown — even if the Crusade had been lost militarily (which was unlikely), there was no existential threat to the Church itself. After the schism the role of the church as arbitrator of divine rule in Europe was at stake.
Addendum: also, the Catholic Church turned towards Biblical literalism after the secession, largely in response to the Protestant claims to scriptural purity. This is one of the reasons why heliocentrism was acceptable and even supported by cardinals when Copernicus wrote De Revolutionibus but was a matter of high heresy when Galileo wrote The Dialogue About Two Worlds. (One of the few things I will give the Catholic Church credit for was its subsequent drift away from literalism over the next 2-3 centuries. Many of the Protestant churches refuse to abandon literalism to this today.)
Chris, ah well that wasn’t what I meant. At that point in the post I wasn’t talking about the Return to Purity, I was just responding to the bit about being inspired by religious teachings.
I did think of the heresy-hunting wars but those weren’t civil wars in the same way – they were smaller scale and more local. The difference between a police action and a civil war. At least that’s what I was thinking; it may be all wrong.
@5 chrislawson,
Generally agree with your comments, with one exception–
“…there was no existential threat to the Church itself.”
From the 7th century until the 18th century, there was a very serious existential external threat to the Church, it was Islam, particularly from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans where the Orthodox Church had been reduced to Dhimmi status. The Eastern Roman Empire had been completely extinguished, that was the nightmare for the Western Church and Medieval Europe. Internal divisions couldn’t be tolerated as the Church was the only universal political institution in the West. It’s easy to forget, after 300 years of Western supremacy, how precarious the position of Western civilisation had been for more than a millennium. The incorporation of Rome in the Ummah is still on the agenda for the the fanatics in IS, it’s rather depressing that such a revelation seems to have puzzled some Western commentators.
RJW, you’re absolutely correct. I should have been clearer that I was only including wars waged by the Catholic Church or its surrogates against other Christians. In terms of existential threats, the Ottoman expansion was definitely the greatest threat in Christian history, followed by the Protestant secession and Julian the Apostate’s quixotic attempt to disconnect the Roman Empire from Christianity. Other than those, I don’t think there has been any serious threat to Catholic existence. Even the fall of Rome to the Germanic tribes turned out not to be a threat because the invaders all wanted to make themselves into Romans for the prestige and preferred to take over the Papacy rather than destroy it…which is the only reason the Church in the West survived several centuries of occupation.
Different people are disputing ISIS claims to be ‘Islamic’ for very different reasons. The US state department is disputing the claim because they need to work with Muslim allies to defeat ISIS and want as many as they can. Muslim clerics dispute the claim to defend their own position. etc. etc.
ISIS is certainly succeeding in using Islam as a recruiting tool. But that does not mean that people are reading the Koran and deciding to join ISIS. Rather the reverse. A couple of the teens running away to join ISIS were carrying Islam for Dummies.
And ISIS is certainly not promoting the idea that people should be reading the Koran and finding truth in it for themselves as the Protestant churches did at the start of the Reformation. Quite to the contrary they are insisting on their own interpretation.
To see the root cause of the reformation, go visit the Vatican and see St Peter’s basilica. The popes reduced northern Europe to penury to build the place.