A comment on Bernard Lewis and freedom in the Middle East

I wanted to make a comment on something in the Bernard Lewis article on freedom and the Middle East that I linked to in my Catching My Eye feature this morning. Dr. Lewis writes:

“Equality among believers was a basic principle of Islam from its foundation in the seventh century, in marked contrast to both the caste system of India to the east and the privileged aristocracies of the Christian world to the west. Islam really did insist on equality and achieved a high measure of success in enforcing it.”

I know that Lewis is a renowned scholar and I’m a nobody but Christianity has preached equality from its very origins, too, cf. Colossians 3:11:

“Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”

I can produce dozens of other comparable passages. The issue is not what the formal teachings of the religion are or what the basic texts of the religion teach but what the cultural and political accretions of the religion are and what the actual folk practice of the religion is.

It’s an odd irony but whatever the original ideals and principles of the world’s great religions they have absorbed into themselves something of the context under which they arose. For Christianity that context was two-fold: Indo-European culture generally and Rome specifically and the Christian world has been very much influenced by both of these factors.

Both the aristocracy of Christendom and the Indian caste system that Lewis writes about are part of the deep culture of the Indo-Europeans. This is something that has been known and studied for nearly 150 years.

The other component of the social and political accretions of Christianity is Rome. Christianity absorbed Roman law and the Roman bureaucracy. We had a sample of that not long ago in the procedures and ceremonies surrounding the election of Benedict XVI to the papacy. And it was just this Roman-ness that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteen and seventeenth rejected. The rejection included widespread translation of Scripture into vernacular languages.

Islam, too, grew up in a context and that context was Arab tribalism and elitism. Let me repeat something from Ernest Gellner that I cited some time ago:

Traditional Islam possessed a high theology and organization, closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion. A strict unitarianism, a (theoretical) absence of any clergy, hence, in principle, equidistance of all believers from the deity, a strict scripturalism and stress on orderly law-observance, a sober religiosity, avoiding ecstasy and the audio-visual aids of religion—all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois life style and with commercialism. The high theology and the scholarly social elite associated with it were traditionally found in the trading towns, which were prominent in Islam. But the upper strata of commercial cities did not make up all of the Muslim world. There was also a countryside, much of it tribal rather than feudal. There, order was maintained by local groups with a very high military and political participation ratio, to use S. Andresky’s phrase. So military/political activity was not monopolized by a small stratum, but rather widely diffused. Pastoral/nomadic and mountain groups in particular had a strong communal sense and maintained their independence from the central state. Central authority effectively controlled only cities, and some more easily governable peasant areas around them.

The wholly or partly autonomous rural groups needed religious mediators and arbitrators (as did, for quite different purposes, the urban poor). Thus, quite distinct from the lawyer/theologians who defined and maintained high Islam, there was also a host of semi-organized Sufi, “maraboutic” or “dervish” religious orders and local living saints. These constituted an informal, often ecstatic, questionably orthodox unofficial clergy. It really defined popular Islam, which embraced the majority of believers. For many centuries, the two wings of Islam co-existed, often in tension, sometimes peaceably. Periodically, a (self)-reformation, a purifying movement, would temporarily reimpose the “correct”, scholarly version on the whole of society. But though the spirit be willing, the social flesh is weak: and the exigencies of social structure would soon reintroduce the spiritual brokers, mediating between human groups in the name of mediating between men and God. So, even if the formal urban Islam was “modern”, the Islam of the countryside and of the urban poor was not.

The mediators that Gellner refers to are precisely the institutions that have fallen to the assault of the Western colonial powers (and more recently Wahhabist missionaries) leaving a very illiberal and anti-modern traditional core.

The last point I’d like to make is that the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was absolutely critical to the Reformation and I believe that the acceptability of vernacular translations of the Koran for devotional and study purposes will be equally essential if a Reformation of Islam (that I hear about so much) that is liberal and free of tribalism and elitism is to occur. Since, as others have pointed out, in Islam the Koran holds the position that Christ holds in Christianity, the prognosis is probably not very good.

Ignorant and unlearned as I am my own view is rather jaundiced: Islam’s reformation has already taken place, we are seeing its results now, and the direction of the reformation was not towards greater freedom and liberality.