Friday, October 1, 2010

The Future of Islam

This week I had a conversation with two other members of the clergy about Islam and it’s place in the world. I think I got them both to understand and recognize that the radicals are actually only a small percentage of all Muslims, but what both of them wanted to say was that in their experience Muslim’s are okay as long as they can be kept in the minority, but are a problem when they are in the majority.

To simplify, their argument was that it was better to be a Muslim in a Christian nation than it was to be a Christian in a Muslim nation. As a church historian I tried to give them a much broader perspective over hundreds of years rather than looking at only say the last ten or even twenty years to help them see something differently.

One of the issues I raised with them was an interesting line that Bernard Lewis has in his book What Went Wrong? The book attempts to looks at the changes that have occurred in Islam (in particular in the Middle East) which led them from being at the height of learning and the protectors of Greek thought to being, or at least perceived to be, in opposition to learning, and science in particular.

In one of the chapters Lewis says that Islam is taking on many of the characteristics of things which have evolved or taken place in Christianity, including a strict hierarchy of leadership and also an inquisition. What he wondered, and he did not explore at all, was whether this will also lead to a reformation, and that has sort of stuck with me. I don’t know if that is possible or what it would look like but it’s interesting.

Something else that occurred to me after the conversation was over was based on something that one of the other clergy said. He recognized that Christianity has made a lot of mistakes over time but that we have evolved and gotten better with time and that we have begun to live into our scriptures and he doesn’t see that happening in Islam and he actually sees them reverting back to something else.

But I thought if we look at Christianity being 600 years younger (Muhammad began receiving his revelations around 610) we are only approaching the end of the middle-ages and the beginning of the Renaissance is still a few years aways. This is not exactly the high point of western civilization, and we are still more than 100 years away from the reformation.

If you were an outside observer to Christianity at this time, especially someone coming into contact with them as being different, you too might not have the best opinion of them or of what is going on, and Christians did not treat non-Christians very well, just ask the Jews. Is that a fair or accurate comparison, I don’t know, but it’s what’s sort of running through my mind at the moment.

Now I guess the question that must be asked is if all Western religions have to follow a particular trajectory. And since Muslims trace their lineage back to Abraham I think they should be considered a Western religion. Since they helped protect most of what we consider Greek and Roman thought for centuries, this also helps with that argument.

Judaism never really had a reformation, but they have certainly broken into widely divergent groups. So the question becomes, as Islam becomes older will they follow a similar path as Christianity and Judaism and become much more divergent in their beliefs and practices (I understand that they are already divergent between Sunnis and Shias, not to mention Sufis or other divisions like Wahabism)? If that happens what does that look like and what does it mean for relations to other relations and within Islamic nations?

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