Read Online Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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ecclesiastical hierarchy.
The upshot was a huge upheaval. Not only was Western Christendom irrevocably split between Protestants and Catholics. After more than a century of bloody religious wars within and between states, a new order was established that gave primacy to secular authority over religious (the principle of cuius regio, eius religio essentially left it to each of the various European princes to choose the faith of his realm). 3 Yet after the dust settled, the Western world was utterly transformed, with the Protestant nations often leading the way in the invention of new social, political, and cultural forms.
The German sociologist Max Weber argued in his landmark work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , that Reformation theology encouraged the godly to look for signs of divine grace in the success of their worldly pursuits. The sanctification of thrift and the cultivation of “capitalistic” virtues, he argued, fueled an economic revolution. Perhaps; or it may simply be that the universal literacy promoted by Protestantism spurred learning and productivity. Either way, from the middle of the seventeenth century, the Western world began an astonishing sequence of intellectual as well as economic and social revolutions: the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the American and French Revolutions. From here, we can trace not only the rise of modern science, but also the rise of capitalism and representative government, with its ideals of self-governance, tolerance, freedom, and equality before the law. Out of the changes wrought by the Reformation—in particular its emphasis on universal literacy—came a remarkable number of the things that made us modern.
In short, the liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.
Centuries later, Islam has had no comparable awakening. The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy, which predated the European Enlightenment, lies a thousand years in the past. While many Muslim nations have benefited from advances in science and economics, while they now have their gleaming skyscrapers and infrastructure, the philosophical revolution that grew out of the Protestant Reformation has largely passed them by. Instead, much of the Muslim world, both inside Muslim-majority nations and in the West, lives half in and half out of modernity. Islam is content to use the West’s technological products—there is even an app that will remind you when to say your five daily prayers—but resists the underlying values that produced them. (This, of course, helps explain the notorious lack of scientific and technological innovation that characterizes the entire Muslim world.)
This is not to say that there have not been sporadic attempts at change. As long ago as the eighth century, there were repeated efforts within Islam to incorporate ideas from Greek philosophy to make the religion less all-encompassing and inflexible in its demands upon believers. In the eighth to tenth centuries, for example, the Mu’tazila school of Islamic thought, which proclaimed the dignity of reason and argued that Islamic doctrine should be open to contemporary interpretation, flourished in Baghdad. But it was resoundingly defeated by the Ash’ari school, led by Imam Ash’ari, a former Mu’tazila believer who argued with the usual zeal of a convert that the Qur’an was the perfect and immutable word of God. The triumph of the Asha’ri school cemented a belief that, with the message of Muhammad, “History came to an end.” And that has been the endpoint for most debates within Islam down to our own era. Indeed, something very similar happened in the twentieth century.
We are constantly reminded that, at the start of the twentieth century, the Islamic, and particularly the Arab, world had a wide range of independent political publications and literary
The upshot was a huge upheaval. Not only was Western Christendom irrevocably split between Protestants and Catholics. After more than a century of bloody religious wars within and between states, a new order was established that gave primacy to secular authority over religious (the principle of cuius regio, eius religio essentially left it to each of the various European princes to choose the faith of his realm). 3 Yet after the dust settled, the Western world was utterly transformed, with the Protestant nations often leading the way in the invention of new social, political, and cultural forms.
The German sociologist Max Weber argued in his landmark work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , that Reformation theology encouraged the godly to look for signs of divine grace in the success of their worldly pursuits. The sanctification of thrift and the cultivation of “capitalistic” virtues, he argued, fueled an economic revolution. Perhaps; or it may simply be that the universal literacy promoted by Protestantism spurred learning and productivity. Either way, from the middle of the seventeenth century, the Western world began an astonishing sequence of intellectual as well as economic and social revolutions: the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the American and French Revolutions. From here, we can trace not only the rise of modern science, but also the rise of capitalism and representative government, with its ideals of self-governance, tolerance, freedom, and equality before the law. Out of the changes wrought by the Reformation—in particular its emphasis on universal literacy—came a remarkable number of the things that made us modern.
In short, the liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.
Centuries later, Islam has had no comparable awakening. The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy, which predated the European Enlightenment, lies a thousand years in the past. While many Muslim nations have benefited from advances in science and economics, while they now have their gleaming skyscrapers and infrastructure, the philosophical revolution that grew out of the Protestant Reformation has largely passed them by. Instead, much of the Muslim world, both inside Muslim-majority nations and in the West, lives half in and half out of modernity. Islam is content to use the West’s technological products—there is even an app that will remind you when to say your five daily prayers—but resists the underlying values that produced them. (This, of course, helps explain the notorious lack of scientific and technological innovation that characterizes the entire Muslim world.)
This is not to say that there have not been sporadic attempts at change. As long ago as the eighth century, there were repeated efforts within Islam to incorporate ideas from Greek philosophy to make the religion less all-encompassing and inflexible in its demands upon believers. In the eighth to tenth centuries, for example, the Mu’tazila school of Islamic thought, which proclaimed the dignity of reason and argued that Islamic doctrine should be open to contemporary interpretation, flourished in Baghdad. But it was resoundingly defeated by the Ash’ari school, led by Imam Ash’ari, a former Mu’tazila believer who argued with the usual zeal of a convert that the Qur’an was the perfect and immutable word of God. The triumph of the Asha’ri school cemented a belief that, with the message of Muhammad, “History came to an end.” And that has been the endpoint for most debates within Islam down to our own era. Indeed, something very similar happened in the twentieth century.
We are constantly reminded that, at the start of the twentieth century, the Islamic, and particularly the Arab, world had a wide range of independent political publications and literary
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