This fusion of the spiritual and the temporal offers an initial clue as to why a Muslim Reformation has yet to happen. For it was in large measure the separateness of church and state in early modern Europe that made the Christian Reformation viable.
The Lesson of Luther
Will a Muslim Reformation look exactly like the Christian one? No, of course not. But there are some important resemblances, and it is these that give me hope.
In October 1517, a somewhat obscure but very obstinate monk in the Saxon town of Wittenberg wrote ninety-five theses decrying the Church’s practice of selling indulgences for salvation. His name was Martin Luther and his words helped trigger both a theological and a political revolution.
The history of the Protestant Reformation is complex and must be heavily simplified here. Three crucial points stand out. First, unlike previous European heretics, Luther was able to exploit a new and powerful technology to spread his message: the printing press. Second, his key ideas—such as “justification by faith alone” and “the priesthood of all believers”—appealed strongly to a new and growing class of city-dwellers, whose literacy and prosperity made them impatient of the corrupt practices of the Roman Church. Third, and crucially, it was in the interests of a significant number of European states—among them England—to back Luther’s challenge to the pope’s 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 and scientific journals through which it was possible to exchange ideas and import advances from the West. The mid-nineteenth-century Syrian political thinker Francis Marrash, who hailed from Aleppo and studied medicine in Paris, had published writings about the importance of freedom and equality and the vital role to be played in the modernization of Arab society by education and “a love of country free from religious considerations.”4 This was not completely delusional. By the end of World War II, the central features of sharia had been replaced in many Muslim countries by laws based on European models. Polygamy was legally abolished, civil marriage introduced. Arabs were also embracing nationalism as well as a belief in the importance of pre-Islamic Arabic culture.
At the same time, Islam itself was increasingly being reinterpreted as part of a long continuum in man’s attempts to achieve social justice, even being used at times to validate socialist doctrines of redistribution and other efforts to remake society. An Egyptian thinker named Khalid Muhammad Khalid declared that true religion was possible only when social and economic justice existed, and he proposed among other things nationalizing natural resources, dividing up large estates, instituting labor rights, and fixing agricultural rents, as well as emancipating women and providing birth control. Other early-twentieth-century Muslim thinkers sought to reassess the linkages between seventh-century Islamic law and the modern state. In the twentieth century, men such as Ali Abdel Raziq, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, Nasr Abu Zayd, and Abdolkarim Soroush—all Islamic thinkers—proposed fundamental reforms.
Though few people today know the names of these men, their proposals and the ensuing responses have much to teach us.
Ali Abdel Raziq, an Oxford-educated Egyptian scholar and a professor at Al-Azhar University, was a devout Muslim and religious judge who argued that Islam should be completely separated from politics so as to protect it from political corruption. In his 1925 book, Islam and the Foundations of Governance, Abdel Raziq argued that Muslims could use their innate powers of reason to devise the political and civil laws best suited for their times and circumstances. What is more, he specifically rejected the idea of restoring a Muslim caliphate, so dear to modern radicals. “In truth,” he wrote:
This institution which Muslims generally know as the caliphate has nothing to do with religion. It has . . . more to do with . . . the lust for power and the exercise of intimidation that has been associated with this institution. The caliphate is not among the tenets of the faith. . . . There is not a single principle of the faith that forbids Muslims to co-operate with other nations in the total enterprise of the social and political sciences. There is no principle that prevents them from dismantling this obsolete system, a system which has demeaned and subjugated them, crushing them in its iron grip. Nothing stops them from building their state and their system of government on the basis of past constructions of human reason, of systems whose sturdiness has stood the test of time, which the experience of nations has shown to be effective
.
For positing these ideas, Abdel Raziq was dismissed from Al-Azhar. The university’s Supreme Council condemned and denounced his book, and expelled him from the circle of the ulema. He lost his title of alim, or learned man, and was forced into domestic exile, escaping a worse fate thanks only to his family’s prominence.
Three years later, a new group began to emerge in Egypt under the leadership of a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Disgusted by what he believed was an excess of materialism and secularism, as well as the sight of Egyptians laboring for foreign bosses, al-Banna wanted a return to a precolonial era, when religion had been a comprehensive way of life—although he himself was largely self-taught and did not come from a learned, clerical background. Instead of fostering a new secular nationalism consistent with developments in Europe and elsewhere in the modern world, al-Banna wanted Muslims everywhere to join together in a larger community founded upon Islam and Islamic religious law. In al-Banna’s vision of the Islamic state, there would be no political parties, sharia would form the legal code, and only those who had a religious education would rule or administer the government. Schools themselves should be attached to mosques. In this way, Islam would be the guiding, unifying principle across the Arab Muslim world.
Hassan al-Banna is hardly a household name in the West, but the organization that he helped to found has become one: the Muslim Brotherhood. And his writings inspired some of the most familiar names of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, among them Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.5
The triumph of al-Banna over Abdel Raziq—in essence, the triumph of theocracy over reform—can also be seen in the fates of other twentieth-century Islamic reformers. The Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Mohammed Taha argued that Muslims should embrace the spiritual Islam of Mecca and let go of the Islam of Muhammad’s more warlike and political Medina period, which, Taha argued, applied only to that specific moment in time and not to subsequent generations. Taha also campaigned against introducing sharia in Sudan. Though he still believed there was no god but Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger, Taha was nonetheless hanged for apostasy in 1985.
More recently, Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian thinker, argued that human language had at least some role in shaping the Qur’an, thus making it not completely the uncorrupted word of Allah. For proposing a reinterpretation of the sacred text, he was deemed an apostate by an Egyptian court in 1995, and then forcibly divorced from his wife against his (and his wife’s) will, because he was now a non-Muslim, and a non-Muslim man cannot be married to a Muslim woman. After receiving death threats, Abu Zayd fled Egypt and went into exile in the Netherlands.
In Iran, the Islamic thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, though he supported the Islamic revolution of 1979, later argued that political power should be far more separate from religious leadership than it is today. For making this argument, Soroush received numerous threats, was forced to end his university teaching, and eventually found life so intolerable that he, too, moved abroad.
All of these would-be reformers based their arguments on Islamic theological grounds. But the ulema have not only resisted all such attempts at reform; they have time and again successfully threatened and bullied the reformers into silence or exile, where they have not actually secured their execution. And the method has been to return, always, to the Qur’an. Because the Qur’an is inviolate, timeless, and perfect, they argue, what is written in it cannot be criticized, much less changed.
That explains why, in Islam, reform has never had positive connotations and innovation is at all costs to be avoided. As Albert Hourani explains, after the appearance of Muhammad, “History could have no more lessons to teach, if there was change it could only be for the worse, and the worse could only be cured not by creating something new but by renewing what had once existed.”6 In other words, “reform” is simply not a legitimate concept in Islamic doctrine. The only accepted and proper goal of a Muslim “reformer” is a return to first principles. The hadith, the text containing the words and deeds of Allah’s Prophet, credits Muhammad with saying that his generation would be the best of all, the one that followed him the next best, and so on down.7 It is the precise opposite of the Western narrative of progress: in this version of history, instead of improving, each generation is worse than the one before. Only when, at the turn of every century, a renovator arrived, a mujaddid, could Islam revert back to its moment of perfection at the time of its founding, the time of Muhammad.8 In those terms, it is only the Medina Muslims who can represent themselves as the agents of a Muslim Reformation.
Today, the most notorious exponent of this kind of “reform,” in the sense of restoration, is the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which proposes to create a new caliphate where the only law is sharia. Adulterers there are stoned to death, infidels beheaded, and thieves mutilated. Indeed, much Islamic State propaganda is like a YouTube upload of a time-travel trip back to the seventh century. If these are the people who claim to be purifying Islam, what chance does real reform stand?
Who Speaks for Islam?
Luther’s Reformation was launched against a hierarchical ecclesiastical establishment. When the pope sought to anathematize him, Luther could retort: “I am called a heretic by those whose purses will suffer from my truths.” Islam is different. Unlike Catholicism, Islam is almost entirely decentralized. There is no pope, no College of Cardinals, nothing like the Southern Baptist Convention—no hierarchical structure, no centrally controlled system of ordination. Any man can become an imam; all it takes is a self-professed knowledge of the Qur’an and followers.
I am always intrigued when on college campuses there are heated demands that an imam or scholar of Islam be present when I speak to offer the “correct” interpretation of Islam. That was the demand of Yale’s Muslim Student Association in September 2014, when I was invited to the university’s campus to give the Buckley Lecture. But whom did they have in mind for this role? A Saudi cleric? An American convert? An Indonesian? An Egyptian? A Sunni? A Shiite? A representative of Islamic State, perhaps? Or how about Zeba Khan, an American Muslim of Indian descent, who was educated at a Jewish day school while also attending a mosque in Toledo, Ohio, where men and women prayed side by side, and who in 2008 started the group Muslims for Obama? Or perhaps they would prefer the British-born lawyer turned imam, Anjem Choudary, who favors the imposition of sharia in Britain and has looked forward to seeing the black flag of IS flying over Parliament? All can legitimately claim to speak for Islam. There is no Muslim pope to say which of them is right.
In my own Harvard seminar room, a Muslim woman from Egypt became very argumentative. She came to some sessions of my study group and not to others, but was always ready to contradict whatever I was saying. Finally, I asked her about a point that had been made in the assigned reading. She replied: “I haven’t done the assigned reading. I don’t need to. I already know everything.” This goes to the heart of the matter. Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.
One of the fiercest critics of my course was a female Sudanese student. Despite never actually attending a single session of the study group, she was completely convinced that everything being said in the classroom was a serious affront to Islam. She was one of a number of Muslim students who lobbied the Kennedy School authorities to have my study group terminated. When one of my colleagues made the point that academic freedom—the freedom to teach and learn about viewpoints and ideas that are fundamentally at odds with others’ beliefs—is the cornerstone of the Western university, she reacted with perplexed hostility. Academic freedom was a concept that seemed to her deplorable if it permitted any questioning of her faith.
To understand this hostility, it is important to recognize that the long traditions in Judaism and Christianity of passionate debate and agonizing doubt are largely absent in Islam. The
re are no great schisms within the Sunni or Shia branches (a division that was not originally theological in nature, but was essentially a dispute over succession). Instead, there is conformity. There is no Reform or Reconstructionist Islam, as there is in Judaism. Rather, like the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, Islam is still persecuting heretics.
Consider this admonition from a Roman Catholic professor of theology, David Bonagura, who notes that Catholic worship is often considered more “stoic” compared with the “energy” of Protestant services, but who goes on to say that these “different styles are pathways to faith,” adding that “we need not think our preferred religious experience should be shared by everyone else.”9 How many Muslim clerics today would dare say such a thing?
In no other modern religion is dissent still a crime, punishable by death. When a conservative Jewish rabbi said in a Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Washington, D.C., that Orthodox Judaism needs female rabbis, he was not denounced. A few people in the audience even applauded. When Pope Francis broached the idea of toleration for homosexuals within the Catholic Church, there was heated disagreement, but no violence, and no one called for his overthrow or death.
By contrast, consider the case of Hamza Kashgari, a twenty-three-year-old Saudi man, who in 2013 was accused of blasphemy and threatened with death for having openly challenged the authority of the Prophet Muhammad. What did Kashgari do that was so reprehensible? On the eve of the Prophet’s birthday, he addressed a series of tweets directly to Muhammad. In an almost immediate response, Saudi sheiks took to YouTube to demand his execution; a Facebook group demanding his death had ten thousand “friends” within one week—not surprising perhaps when one considers that Saudi Arabia’s homegrown Twitter heroes are clerics such as Muhammad al-Arifi, who cannot enter any European nation because of his unabashed support for wife-beating and his hatred of Jews. (Al-Arifi has 10.7 million Twitter followers.)