Martin Luther's Rycina Chrystusa i Antychrysta. Wikicommons .Some rights reserved.We keep hearing calls for an ‘Islamic Reformation’, assumed to be the remedy for a fundamentalist Islam behind the conservative Salafi brand as well as the Jihadist. Islam, under these assumptions, generates problems because it had not been ‘reformed’. The assumed model is the Christian Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Protestant reformers, Luther, Calvin and their followers. Informed writers on religion and history have pointed out the problematic nature of these suppositions, with regard to the histories of both Christianity and Islam.
I argue here that Islam has undergone many reformations, in radically different directions: Wahhabism, much like Protestant reforms, urged a return to the scriptures and prophetic traditions and a rejection of ‘corrupt’ and heretical practices of saint worship and visitation of tombs, Sufi mysticism and ceremonies, and sectarian doctrines, principally Shi`ism. In contrast, a modernist and rationalist reformation was a powerful strand in public life, politics and culture from the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, in the Ottoman, Arab and Iranian worlds. These different kinds of ‘reform’ were institutionalised in various ways, recounted below. Liberal/ modernist reforms are now available in public space, but not attractive to most religious Muslims because they do not fit in with their social and psychological needs and outlooks. Liberal/ modernist reforms are… not attractive to most religious Muslims because they do not fit in with their social and psychological needs and outlooks.
The Protestant Reformation was not a liberal enterprise: it was the original ‘fundamentalism’, which is the derivation of the label ‘fundamentalism’ for Islam. The Christianity that was being ‘reformed’ was that of the Catholic Church, one that was based on Church authority and hierarchy. Worship is conducted through rituals and ceremonies celebrated by its priesthood, and claiming the authority to dispense salvation. The Reformation was to challenge these assertions of authority and uphold, instead, the authority of ‘the Word’, the Bible, literally interpreted and preached. The Word rather than the Church Fathers was the source of all authority and the individual believer was to read the Bible and follow it according to her conscience. Salvation was by divine grace and not by authoritative dispensation via a priest. As such, it dispensed with elaborate ritual and ceremony, images and tunes, considered as heretical (note the parallels with Salafi Islam), in favour of an austere preaching and worship, based on the literalism of reading the scriptures in the vernacular languages. Hellfire was the sanction against sin, and salvation was by seeking divine grace, and not by priestly dispensation. When Protestants ruled, as in Calvin’s Geneva or in the Lutheran principalities, they instituted stern punishments for sin and heresy.
