You may need to sit down with a stiff drink before reading this but I very nearly felt a twinge of sympathy for President Obama yesterday. He is receiving a steady stream of abuse because he dared to remind the American people that the history of Christianity is soaked in blood. Of course, that is a truth but, in typical Obama style, it is a trivial truth and also a sly truth because it serves only to provide him with an excuse not to condemn Islamic bestiality. It also conveniently skips over the gradual but inexorable changes wrought in Christianity following the Reformation. Suffice to say that today's passive and pacifist Christianity bears little resemblance to the Christianity of the crusades over which Obama obsesses. He might also care to brush up on his American history in which Christianity played an important role in aiding and comforting and invigorating the equal rights movement led by Martin Luther King - and please note his middle name!
In the current context the question arises as to if and when Islam will experience its own reformation? Where is their Luther, asks Theo Hobson in this week's Spectator, "presumably sulking in the corner of some madrassa" he suggests! However, he is quick to set Luther's words and actions in a proper historic context:
Instead, Luther said something along the lines of: ‘Let’s purify our religion, be more faithful to its essential logic, contained in its founding documents.’ And this reforming movement gradually produced new political realities and ideas. Creating a more liberal political order was not on Luther’s agenda, nor on anyone’s at that time, but it did become a central concern of some Protestants in the next century. The Protestant Reformation was not a matter of Christianity accepting the truth of something else, something beyond itself. And that is what people really want when they say that Islam needs a reformation: they want it to accept the truth of western values, adapt to them.
So the ‘Islam needs its reformation’ line makes this mistake. It supposes that Christianity and Islam are two comparable forms of religion: if Religion A adapted to modernity, Religion B can too. But Religion A didn’t adapt to modernity: it inadvertently made modernity, by trying to be more purely itself.
The entire article is worth reading in full. It seems to me that the very real threat to Islam will not come from some internal equivalent of a Luther but from the inexorable pressure of modern western life-styles. This pressure is felt by every Islamic male with a wife or daughter whose envy, mostly carefully hidden for the moment, of the freedom enjoyed by western women, strikes at the very heart of the male domination that is central to the Islamic religion and central to the Muslim man's view of himself as all-powerful over his own domestic domain - even if he is a virtual slave to the political domain. In the end they will lose but they will murder as they lose and it will be a long-drawn out affair.
Alas, God has very little to do with any of this, it is people who are to blame!
