Hitch gloats (like a fool)

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Nov 18 03:54:04 PST 2001


On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Brad DeLong wrote:


> If the parallel with Europe's Reformation holds true

FWIW, I don't think it does. I think Judaism is much more the comparison juste. Judaism never had a reformation. Instead relative cosmopolitanism and orthodoxy have waxed and waned side by side for thousands of years. And both religions are very similar today. Very orthodox Jews in Brooklyn go to schools that are exactly like madrassas, where they learn only religion, and nothing of modern science or history, and aren't allowed to own TVs. And in Manhattan there are second generation Lebanese Muslims who are as godless as second generation Polish Jews.

Besides the fact that history never repeats itself exactly, Islam seems to me to be missing several preconditions to a reformation exactly where it shares similaralities with Judaism. In both cases, despite their greater rhetorical fixation on being peoples of the "book," in fact they are peoples of the commentaries, which are endless and bottomless, and impress that fact upon their adherents. Secondly, studying the commentaries has always been a duty of all religious laymen. Holy men are generally revered as sages rather than as saints by others who all consider themselves students. It is almost the opposite of the absolute divide that marked pre-reformation Catholicism. For both these reasons, there is no instant explosive secret waiting to be discovered through the once-forbidden key of literacy. On the contrary, both religions have always been built around teaching as many members as possible to read the holy language -- that's what the religious schools that everyone's afraid of do. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in both religions there is no pope and no unified Church bureaucracy. What you have instead is a hopelessly tangled web of rabbis and imams.

For all these reasons, sectarianism at the shul or madrassa level has always been endemic. The extremest doctrines are no weirder now than they were 500 or 1000 years ago. But without a unified church, such sectarianism, while it can get heated against another sect, never presents the religion as a whole with the mortal all or nothing threat that it always presented to the Catholic Church, which either was the one and only infallible interpreter of the Word, or it wasn't. There are no floodgates to open in that way. Whereas Catholic history could conceivably be interpreted as a 1500 year struggle to keep those flood gates shut. There were a lot of reformations before The Reformation that got crushed after even longer struggles than 120 years, but which are now forgotten.

So if we assume the path to secularism and tolerance is a straight line (which it isn't) and had to choose one parallel (which we don't), it seems to me that the most probable path for the secularization of Islam would be that followed by Judaism, i.e., without a reformation, where the core values among the religiously educated of study and philosophy and disputation were widened to allow the encounter with traditions outside it. And where the floodgate is not literacy but rather the Law that covers every exigency of life -- and which, if proven wrong in one case, is wrong everywhere, or at the very least, very flexible everywhere. And where absorbing outside traditions and stretching the law leads, sometimes with astonishing speed, to religion becoming tradition becoming culture.

It also seems probable if not certain that the same process will generate counter-reactions, not just initially, but endlessly and forever, just like Judaism, and just like Christianity, for that matter. Except that maybe in an Islamic world where secularism dominates, we'll call them cults rather than fundamentalism, like we do when it happens with a David Koresh. And we'll say they have nothing to do with true Islam, just like we say he has nothing to do with true Christianity, which for some reason we're all sure of, even though we're not believers.

The important thing is not fundamentalism, which is not inherently violent. It can be as peaceful as a Hindu hermit or the Pennsylvania Dutch. The important variable in making it violent is its interplay with politics, states and aggrieved nationalism. And that was just as true for the Reformation as it is today.

Michael

__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list