 |
| An early Protestant representation of Church-State relations between the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor |
Last week, in
his annual Christmas address, Pope Francis prayed for
victims of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. His prayers for both Christian
and Muslim victims of the jihadis’ violence were a fitting tribute to one of
the most dismal aspects of 2014. But the pope’s words also offered a striking
contrast between the manifest humility of the Vatican — back on the good side
of what seems like a decades long good-pope/bad-pope routine — and the savagery
of a newly declared caliphate.
This contrast
led some observers
(like, say, Bill Maher) to declare we should stop being so
politically correct and state the obvious: Islam remains stuck in the Middle
Ages. And even those who found this particular formulation too crude were still
struck trying to explain why it seems that so many Western countries have
figured out how to separate Church and State, while Muslim countries from Saudi
Arabia to Egypt to Turkey continue to struggle.
One of the
most enduring explanations is that the Islamic world really needs its own
Reformation — a Muslim Martin Luther to bring the religion of Mohammed into
modernity. It’s an argument that Thomas
Friedman and various others have been making for over a decade.
In the last year aloneFetullah
Gulen and Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi were added to the short list of potential Martin
Luthers. Many analysts and critics of Islam seem committed to the idea that, be
it a reclusive Turkish preacher or a authoritarian Egyptian general, there must
be someone out there who can straighten out the confusion over church and state
in in the Muslim world and finally help Islam make the jump from totalitarian
fundamentalism to enlightened, liberal religion, from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to
Pope Francis.
But
before Western observers start applying lessons from European history to the
Muslim world, a little self-reflection is in order. Wasn’t the Reformation an
attack on the Catholic Church? Didn’t Martin Luther, the man who began it, once
write a book called Against the Roman Papacy: An Institution of the
Devil? Indeed, every time a Western writer identifies an Islamic Martin
Luther, it highlights an unresolved question about Western society itself: Is
today’s modern Christian world a triumph of Protestantism over the pope or a
reflection of Christianity’s more secular essence, inherent in Protestantism
and Catholicism alike?
For the rest of my belated and not all that original take on this issue check out the full article at Foreign Policy: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/02/islam-will-not-have-its-own-reformation/
