Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam

Sandro Magister's latest title is strange coming from a Catholic — Islam Has Its Luthers, Too. But Reform Is Far Away.

Mr. Magister laments "the refusal to interpret the Qur'an with scientific as well as theological methods." He says, "The fundamentalist currents inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, idealize the original Islam, taking it as their only model and refusing to apply to the Qur'an the criteria of scientific as well as theological interpretation." But was it not Luther and the other reformers who idealized what they saw as the original Christianity and eschewed the traditional Catholic interpretations of Scripture, adopting instead Sola Scriptura?

"The fruits of a critical interpretation of the Qur'an come almost exclusively from non-Muslim scholars," says Mr. Magister, quoting at length Michel Cuypers, "a Belgian member of the Little Brothers of Jesus." Much of what Fr. Cuypers says, however, undermines Mr. Magister's thesis.

He begins, for example, by noting, "The Islamic religion, in faith and law, is based on two fundamental normative sources: the Qur'an and tradition, the sunna." Catholicism, too, depends on Scripture and Tradition. Thus, it sounds very familiar to Catholic ears that "although the Qur'an is the primary and fundamental source of faith and law, tradition is no less important in the organization of Islamic faith and practice, because it presents itself as an illustration of the norms and values of Qur'anic revelation." As familiar is the idea that "tradition also feeds the Islamic collective imagination in a larger way, providing historical and cultural references and bringing back to life the exemplary first generation of believers." Fr. Cuyper mentions "two secondary sources of the law" which also sound familiar to Catholic ears: "the community consensus, ijmâ," and "rational effort, ijtihâd."

Fr. Cuyper says that "a reformist current emerged with Sayyid Ahmad Khân (died in 1898) in India, al-Afghânî (died in 1897), and Muhammad 'Abduh (died in 1905) in Egypt, and their disciples." These, "[i]n the name of the purity of the faith... thinkers supported only two normative sources of Islam, the Qur'an and tradition, thus excluding consensus and the ijtihâd." Not only that, they also "subjected the tradition to a more severe criticism" and "kept only a small number of hadîth, rejecting the traditions that offend reason or good sense."

Fr. Cuyper informs us that "the reformist position evolved in two divergent directions: one legalist and neo-fundamentalist, and one of secularist modernism, which abandoned tradition as a normative source." The Reformation initiated by Martin Luther has run the same course, to the opposing errors of fundamentalism and modernism, has it not?

Fr. Cuyper says that for the "legalist and neo-fundamentalist" camp, "the idealized primitive era became the model to imitate." He says, "The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1929) are the main representatives of this tendency."

Of the other camp, Fr. Cuyper says that "tradition loses its normative character" and "only the ethical and spiritual aspect is retained, as a form of wisdom and a source of inspiration." He says, "This is a 'sola Scriptura' that is not without influences from the Protestant model (some modernists are happy to be called the 'Luthers of Islam'). He then speaks of a "liberation from the shackles of tradition."

Now, unless Fr. Cuyper is a secret enemy of Islam, and wants to see its demise, I cannot understand how he would advocate "secularist modernism" in place of traditional Islam. While it is possible that he is a secret enemy of Islam, unknown in a postmodern sense even to himself, it is doubtful that a man who "spent twelve years in Iran, first in a leper colony in Tabriz and then studying Persian language and literature in Tehran" would be an enemy of Muslims, for the sake of whose souls it would be far better to remain within the confines of their traditional faith, rather than embrace "secularist modernism," even if this be more convenient for the West.

American Edward Feser was far closer to the target at the end of 2003 with this excellent article arguing "that those aspects of Islam that seem to put it unalterably at odds with the modern world are, for the most part, precisely those that it shares in common with Protestantism" — Does Islam Need a Luther or a Pope? The first two paragraphs:

It has become the conventional wisdom in the two years since 9/11 that the trouble with Islam is that, unlike Christianity, it never had a Protestant Reformation. The idea seems to be this: Christianity was (so it is held) rigid and authoritarian before Luther and company came along and paved the way for liberal democracy, science, and all things modern and good; Islam's problem is that it remains stuck in its "Medieval phase," still awaiting Reformers of its own.

This analysis dovetails nicely with the conceptions most people have these days of the Reformation, of traditional Catholicism, and of freedom and rationality and their relationship to authority and tradition. It is, for that reason, completely worthless. For such conceptions rest largely on clichés whose content owes less to actual historical fact than to the needs of Reformation and Enlightenment era anti-Catholic polemic.

Prof. Feser concludes, "The Taliban who dynamited those Buddhist carvings thereby demonstrated their kinship, not to the Medieval Catholics who venerated Plato, Aristotle, and other great writers of pagan antiquity, nor to the Renaissance Popes in their patronization of the arts, but to the Protestant mobs whose vandalism purged so many once-Catholic European churches of their stained glass, statuary, and beauty."