Is modern Islamic fundimentalism equivalent to the Reformation?

[Odin2005]

It sure seems like that to me. The first protestants were originally more dogmatic then the RCC (for example, Martin luther bashed Copernicus quite a while before Rome did), obsessed with the strict biblical literalism, and were quite anti-mystical. This seems similar to what I've heard about Wahabbism, which wanted to purge out Sufi-based elements the same way Protestants purged the cult of the saints.

[msongs]

1. who has murdered more people? nt

[Warpy]

2. More like Rome's reaction to the Reformation

meaning the Inquisition, the attempt to crush heresy through torture and murder.

Islam has felt itself under attack from cultural exports from the west, meaning music, television, and films. Fundamentalism is the reaction against cultural pollution by their conservatives.

It won't last, but it's likely to butcher as many people as the Inquisition did and possibly more.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Uh no.

There is no central islamic authority to reform, break away from, or rebel against. The reformation was all of the above with respect to the roman catholic church.

[TankLV]

4. They're similar to all our hateful so-called christian sects here.

THAT is the problem with ALL religions.

Period.

[manic expression]

13. Yeah, because Shinto

is so much like Christianity. :sarcasm:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Writer Karen Armstrong has an interesting take on fundamentalism

She says that it appeals to people who have been hurt by or feel threatened by the modern world and want to believe that there was a mythical golden past when "their kind of people" were on top.

The Reformation was a revolt against several aspects of the central authority of the papal establishment. It was stricter than the Catholic church in some ways and looser in others.

[kwassa]

7. "The Battle for God "..... I'm reading that now

all about the history of fundamentalism in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

[ulysses]

10. I think she's quite correct in that assessment.

Every person I've known who was given to a fundie mindset was a fundamentally insecure person as well. Of course that feeds the racism and homophobia, too.

[Finder]

6. That happened a century ago--Ottoman Empire...

was like the RCC. The schisms are what we have today.

[onager]

8. OK, let me overcomplicate this...

:hi:

The simple answer is "No." Because as Warren pointed out, Islam has no "pope" or central ruling religious authority. Western politicians have created a lot of problems for us...and the Muslims...by trying to find such a mythical authority and exploit it to their benefit.

You can Google umpteen pages for a lot more info. But the whole problem started when Mohammed died without naming a successor. That led to the split still making life interesting for us today, between the Sunni and Shi'ite branches of Islam.

Eventually the Caliph Of Baghdad was recognized, sort of, as a more or less ruling religious authority. But that ended in the 13th century when the Mongols razed Baghdad. One story says the Mongols recognized the Caliph as a religious leader and thought it would be unlucky to spill his blood. They solved that problem by tying him inside a sack and having him trampled to death by their horses. Some scholars date the rise of Muslim fundamentalism from that incident.

Someone mentioned the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, but nobody paid much attention to him as a religious leader. He seems to have been viewed in the Muslim world exactly as what he was--a secular political leader who had usurped the religious title.

When the British were trying to grab the Middle East during WWI, they went and had a chat with King Abdul-Aziz bin Saud of Arabia. Apparently they offered him the Caliphate in exchange for loyalty to the British. The British thought this would make him the "pope" (or Archbishop Of Canterbury) for the entire Muslim world.

Probably looking at them very strangely, Abdul-Aziz pointed out that he was a Wahhabi Muslim, so he didn't give a hoot who called himself "Caliph." The Wahhabis only recognize the first 4 Caliphs after Mohammed, and the last one of them had been dead for about a thousand years by then.

For a lot more about this, see David Fromkin's great book: A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

The Muslims do TRY to have a religious authority. I've spent about 10 months so far in Egypt, home to one of the most famous Islamic authorities: Al-Azhar University, founded in the Seventh Century almost simultaneously with Islam itself. The assorted muftis, sheikhs and scholars of Al-Azhar routinely issue fatwas--supposedly binding opinions under Sharia law.

Well, they're not "binding" at all. As soon as a fatwa is issued it routinely gets denounced by OTHER muftis, sheikhs and scholars.

One of the funniest recent fatwas came about because of a popular religious TV talk show. A sort of "Ask The Sheikh," I guess. A woman called in and asked if it was haram (forbidden) for married couples to have sex completely naked. The Sheikh on TV said that yes, based on his readings of the Quran and hadith, married couples should NOT be completely naked when making love.

A couple of female Al-Azhar scholars immediately called in to denounce that fatwa and say...in secular-speak...that the Sheikh was an addled old poophead who didn't know what he was talking about.

Usual Disclaimer: I'm an atheist. Do not ask me for any fatwas.

[charlie]

9. Here's a Guardian article

about those Ask the Cleric shows that mentions the incident you described:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1688285,00.html?gusrc=rss

Some of it is pretty funny stuff. For such publically chaste societies, it's remarkable how frank their discussions about sex are. One guy was doing his wife through the backdoor because he felt it was the best method of "family planning" instead of using condoms, but he wasn't sure. The Mufti's reply was essentially: for pete's sake, if you're doing that as a contraceptive, just use the damn condoms!

[onager]

11. Yes, they can be VERY frank.

And right on topic here!

In the incident I mentioned, one of the female scholars said Muslim married couples could do just about anything they wanted in the bedroom, except for 2 "unclean" practices: anal sex and sex during menstruation.

Now this was a Muslim woman and religious scholar, saying these things live on national television. Her remarks were also printed, in full, in the Egyptian Gazette (which is where I read them).

I'm not even sure she could get away with that in the U.S., without some "bleeping."

The "temporary marriage" thing is pretty funny too. There's one kind where the woman is not required to leave her family's home. That one is seen as thinly legalized prostitution, apparently for good reason. One rural Egyptian village is famous for quasi-marrying its teen-age daughters to visiting Saudis and other rich Arabs from the Gulf States.

Apparently the town has split into a sort of "haves versus have-nots" feud on the issue, between families who are willing to loan out their daughters and those who aren't. The guy "marrying" the daughter is expected to provide such amenities as a refrigerator, TV, maybe a new cement-block house for the family, maybe a car, etc. So it's pretty easy to see who is on which side just by driving thru the village and checking for signs of prosperity.

[rug]

12. They're closer to the Crusaders than the Reformers.

[CatholicEdHead]

14. Francis Fukuyama talked about this in a recent speech in Philly

he is a former (according to the podcast but probably still) a neocon who disagrees with much of the current policy. When the questions came to this he talked the same way.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbg_20060611.mp3
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2006/1657712.htm#transcript

Just as an aside, Olivier Roy has this actually quite interesting suggestion. Many people looking at the world of Islam say, 'Well, the problem with Islam is it's never had its Reformation. It's never evolved into a more moderate kind of religion that is then able to separate religion from the State. There's never been a Muslim Luther'. Roy suggests that actually the Muslim Luther may be among us today and his name is actually Osama bin Laden. For the following reason: First of all the real world Luther who pinned the 95 Theses to the cathedral door, back in the early 16th century was not a liberal. He was not in favour of religious tolerance, but he was very clear on a doctrinal matter, which is that the mediaeval Catholic church defined religiosity in terms of adherence to social practices, going to confession, the rosary, all of these Catholic practices, the indulgences that made up the body of what it meant to be Catholic in the late Middle Ages in Europe. And what Luther said was 'No, that's not right. Faith is a purely internal act of belief, it does not matter what your acts are, your external acts, or whether you're conforming to externally imposed ideas, what matters is your direct relationship to God. A believer with a Bible can have as much access as a priest.' And the argument in a way is that that is what's happening in the world of Islam in Europe right now, because they're living in lands of unbelief, where those social practices, the Muslim social practices are really not supported by the surrounding society, and so it's driving belief inwards, and making it a matter of inward faith.

And if you think about it in Western Europe, that was really the basis for the growth of secular societies, where you could separate easily a religion and a State. Because if you say that religion is purely a private matter, then the State does not actually have to support religion in any visible way. I think that in the history of the growth of the Enlightenment and modern democracy, that transformation of religion from a State supported social practice to a matter of private inward belief was absolutely critical. And the Muslim world may be moving in that direction.

Now there's good news and bad news here. In Europe this transition from mediaeval Catholicism to the modern democratic world that we know took about 400 years and certainly the first 150 of them were unremitting bloody, as Protestants and Catholics all over Europe slaughtered each other over these doctrinal kinds of issues. And in a sense, if the Muslim world is going through some version of this, we can only hope that that process doesn't take 400 years, and somehow gets compressed.

There's good news in the sense that if my interpretation is true, the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism that we're witnessing is not completely unfamiliar; that in a sense we've seen that modernity spins off these violent millenarian ideologies. In the late 19th century they would have been anarchists, in the early 20th century, they would have been Bolsheviks or Fascists; later on members of the Bader Meinhof gang. It all appeals to that same kind of alienated situation with regard to complex multiple identity, pluralist societies on the part of people who demand more tightly-bonded communities.