Protestant Muslims

Jonah Goldberg might take some heat for this one...

This quest for a Muslim Luther centered on the understandable hope that such a person could reform Islam toward liberalization and modernization, just as Luther supposedly did in Europe. The problem is he did no such thing. His gripe with Roman Catholicism wasn't that it was too reactionary and rigid, but just the opposite. He thought the church had become too worldly and licentious, selling “indulgences” — or divine do-overs — to the highest bidder and the like.

The early Protestants were hardly “moderates” and, normally, secular liberals are keen to make this point. When was the last time you heard a Western liberal pine for a return of Puritanism? Luther and his immediate successors were true believers. And, while enormous theological and historical differences shouldn't be overlooked, today's Islamic fundamentalists have quite a bit in common with these religious crusaders.

Many Protestant sects were as austere as bin Laden's Wahhabi faith. The doctrines that birthed the Amish were hardly “modernizing.” Other faiths were more violent. Mobs of Protestant iconoclasts rampaged through European capitals smashing “Catholic” sculptures and burning paintings that violated biblical injunctions against graven images.

In the early 20th century, Muslim zealots launched a remarkably similar project. For example, in 1925 Ibn Saud, a patriarch of the Saudi dynasty and a follower of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam, ordered the destruction of the sacred tombs and mosques of Mohammed and his early followers. They razed Mohammed's home and the graves of the prophet's mother and first wife. The prophet's tomb was barely spared thanks to popular opposition. Today, Saudi authorities are in the process of destroying ancient art and architecture of Mecca and Medina out of the same puritanical zeal. A similar fanaticism inspired the Taliban to blow up the Bamiyan Buddhas, to ban music and even kite flying.

The West is surely indebted to Protestantism. But the idea that liberal secularism was born from it steals a few bases. Protestantism lent itself to being a state religion even more than Catholicism did. And while Christianity has long recognized the distinction between secular and religious authority, the reality is that secularism rests on a foundation of blood, not theology. The Reformation inaugurated an era of relentless religious wars. French Catholics slaughtered Protestant French Huguenots. Calvinists and Lutherans beat the stuffing out of each other. The bloodshed continued until, as British historian Herbert Butterfield put it, religious tolerance became “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer.” Secular tolerance, in other words, defined the terms of cease-fire.

What might be called the Muslim Protestant Reformation began with the demise of the closest thing the Muslim world had to a Catholic Church: the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, unlike the church, which was strong enough to fight back, the “Sick Man of Europe” just up and died, ceding the battlefield to zealots. Without the push-and-pull that birthed Western social compromise, Islam simply replaced religious authoritarianism with religious totalitarianism. Tellingly, Lebanon, which endured years of religious civil war, is an exception to this dynamic in the Arab world.

Today, Islam is chockablock with Muslim Luthers claiming to have a monopoly on the Quran's true meaning. Murderers can shop around for a fatwa endorsing the most horrific — and technically un-Islamic — barbarism like junkies searching for a corrupt doctor with a prescription pad for hire.

No, what the Muslim world needs is a pope. Large, old institutions such as the Catholic Church have the “worldliness” to value flexibility and tolerance, and the moral and theological authority to clamp down on those who see compromise as heresy. Pope Clement XIV's famous, or infamous, suppression of Jesuits in 1773 might be an example of both qualities. The Ottoman Empire played a similar, if imperfect, role before its demise. In its absence, Islamic Lilliputians run amok. Ironically, Muslims don't want this divisiveness. The jihadists strive to restore the caliphate as an Islamist thousand-year Reich. But even the moderates long for unity among the Islamic nations. They might one day forge the sort of compromise we in the West reached, but the road map there isn't well illuminated by our past.