In his most recent column Fareed Zakaria draws an incorrect or at least incomplete conclusion from a correct observation. Here’s the observation:
There is a cancer of extremism within Islam today. A small minority of Muslims celebrates violence and intolerance and harbors deeply reactionary attitudes toward women and minorities. While some confront these extremists, not enough do so, and the protests are not loud enough. How many mass rallies have been held against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in the Arab world today?
His false conclusion is here:
That is not how Christianity moved from its centuries-long embrace of violence, crusades, inquisitions, witch-burning and intolerance to its modern state. On the contrary, intellectuals and theologians celebrated the elements of the religion that were tolerant, liberal and modern, and emphasized them, while giving devout Christians reasons to take pride in their faith. A similar approach — reform coupled with respect — will work with Islam over time.
It is false for two reasons. The first is that we simply don’t have time for Islam to work through its own internal contradictions. I could list a half dozen reasons why we don’t have the time but I’ll restrict my explanation to one reason: individual empowerment. Today’s technology acts as a force multiplier and potentially gives a single individual or even a small group of individuals the killing power of an army of the 6th, 13th, or 19th centuries AD. As a matter of simple self-defense we can’t allow people with as murderous intent as some Muslims possess to gain control of that sort of technology. Yes, innocents will be caught up in the struggle.
The second reason he’s wrong is that he’s swallowed a fiction made up by 19th century mostly Protestant historians hook, line, and sinker. The Enlightenment, what he’s referring to when he writes of “how Christianity moved from its centuries-long embrace of violence, etc.”, did not grow from the so-called Reformation. Protestantism began as a fundamentalist movement. The Enlightenment on the other hand grew from Italian Humanism which in turn was fostered by the most structured and hierarchical wing of Christianity.
In Islam that structuring principle is completely absent. There is no hierarchy. Anyone who can attract a following is an imam. Anyone who accepts the five pillars of Islam is as good a Muslim as any other.
Is there any reason to believe that something analogous to the Enlightenment can take hold in Islam as it did in Christianity? I don’t see the institutions, structures, and principles that would make that possible. Quite to the contrary I think that remaining decentralized and diverse is inherent in Islam. And as long as that decentralization and diversity exists there will continue to be “Islamic States”.
Islam might benefit from a Pope, a Curia, and a Vatican of its own.
Having read Zakaris’s boon on the Future of Freedom, I think his case for Christian exceptionalism is premised on the paradox of Catholicism, stemming from the movement of the Roman capital to Constantinople, and illustrated by the Archbishop of Milan forcing the Emperor Theodosius to dress as a beggar and stand outside the Cathedral and beg forgiveness for eight months for massacring a Greek tribe. For him, freedom originates from this separation of church and state, in which power is contested and ultimately fragmented.
In any event, I don’t think he is referring to the Reformation — note that he is referring to witch-burning in the past tense. I think he is talking about the Peace of Westphalia.
Zakaria is the new Friedman – pretty writing, but the content usually cannot stand much scrutiny.
I don’t really see why ISlam could not have an Enlightenment. The American experience probably best represents the Enlightenment put into action and I think you would be hard pressed to show that was fostered by a structured, hierarchy. The ideas formed and embraced since the Enlightenment are available for Islam to grasp if they want. It strikes me that what Zakaria is placing as problem located solely among Islam’s religious beliefs and leaders is really also a political one. They aren’t just killing each other, and sometimes us, over matters of faith. There is a lot of old fashioned nationalism, ethnic strife and good old squabbles over oil, land and money mixed in.
Steve
Your argument sounds a lot like the one Pope Benedict raised in 2006 at Regensburg:
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
I don’t really know if Islam can moderate as Christianity did – I’d say it’s definitely possible but very unlikely in my lifetime.