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Shared Echoes: The Protestant Reformation and Islam
In a time of increasing domestic turmoil and foreign intervention, a group of
fundamentalists seized power in a small city and established their own religious
community, renaming the city in accordance with the sacred texts. A fanatic
authoritarian religious leader backed by numerous followers placed himself at
the head and undertook some eighteen months of harsh theocratic rule as the
community imposed its vision of the requirements of the faith. They shared their
possessions in common with those who were believers and readily accepted the
use of force against those who were not believers. They practiced polygamy, and
some had more than four wives. Even as their rebellion lay exposed to military
siege from the outside by local rulers who feared that their own legitimacy was
threatened, the insurgents promoted their millenarian and apocalyptic vision of
God’s political, social, and religious design in what they hoped was the
beginning of a world crusade. The rebellion was ultimately snuffed out by the
arrayed forces of external authorities, its leaders tortured and executed, and their
bodies hung in cages. Orthodoxy in religion was restored.
This was not an Islamist fundamentalist movement. The place was the
German city of Münster, the date 1534, as the Protestant Reformation was
heading into full swing. The movement and its leader were Anabaptists, the most
radical of the three main trends of the Reformation, which included Lutherans
and Calvinists. The Anabaptists had renamed their city the “New Jerusalem,” but
the radicalism of their message and methods was enough to unite Catholic and
Protestant (Lutheran) forces, which surrounded the city and blotted out its
dangerous doctrines.
This violent, revolutionary event marked an end to Anabaptist political
activism. As in many Islamic movements after 9/11, after 1534 Anabaptist
leaders were at pains to publicly dissociate themselves from the use of violence.
Lutherans and Calvinists totally rejected the revolutionary program of the
Anabaptists, and Europe was horrified at the zealotry behind the Münster saga.

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Consequently, the Reformist Protestants, once reviled as radicals by Catholics,
began to appear more mainstream in comparison. And we find parallels today.
Many Muslim fundamentalists were shocked by the events of 9/11 and their
blowback; as the ultimate political and military implications of radical theology
grew clearer, large numbers hastened to denounce the role of violence in their
midst, even though they understood the grievances that had brought about the
events.
So, in a book designed to look beyond the role of religion to find deeper
causes in the history of events in the Middle East, why are we considering the
Reformation and its progeny in Europe? In fact, the Protestant Reformation
exemplifies, in a number of fascinating ways, many of the same concepts we
raised earlier: the intensely political nature of events usually understood as being
primarily religious in character. But again, religion is the vehicle of political
confrontation and turmoil, not the cause. Political leaders attempt to maintain
tight control over religion as a means to their own ends. Yet, the events of the
Reformation also dramatically reveal to us the converse: what happens when the
state or church loses control over the contents of religion or allows others, even
the masses, to determine theology or to define its meaning and how to act on it.
Christianity had vastly longer success in maintaining centralized, politicized
control of religious doctrine than did Islam, until it slipped during the
Reformation; the Roman Catholic Church still attempts to retain that control.
If there had been no Islam and the Eastern Orthodox Church had held onto its
power in the Middle East, it would still have been only the Latin Church, Rome,
that was challenged by the budding Protestant German princes and others in
contestation for political power, wealth, and control of doctrine. Constantinople
would likely have remained a bulwark of stern Orthodoxy, more convinced than
ever of the misguided, dangerous, even disastrous course of Christianity in the
West.
Islam did not, of course, undergo any Protestant Reformation, nor did most of
the rest of the world. For the West, the Reformation was massively destabilizing
to Europe as a whole; among other things, it led to the Thirty Years’ War, one of
the bloodiest wars in European history—ostensibly all about religion, in reality
all about power struggles among states. The Reformation changed power
relationships within states as well by unleashing many disruptive and sometimes
even violent trends as in Münster. It was socially destabilizing in that it liberated
people from centralized control over their religious ideas, empowered more
individual thinking on political and religious questions, and ultimately unleashed
some truly radical ideas.

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Muslims, too, over the past century have developed much new thinking about
the links between religion and politics; they, too, have generated a number of
destabilizing forces, including sharp critiques of their own ruling regimes,
creation of new organizations to achieve political and social goals, and even
adopting the use of terror against selected domestic and foreign enemies and
invaders. Al-Qa’ida is but one of these forces.
The Reformation was in many ways a period of democratization of religion:
not that there were any functioning democratic political orders, but individuals
were encouraged to examine the texts and think for themselves about the
meaning of religion. This was really the beginning of the development of
popular voices in political and social affairs. But this chapter also notes the
radical consequences that can emerge when democratizing trends—everyone
their own theologian—penetrate religious tradition. There are some striking
echoes of Protestant radicalism in Islamic fundamentalism—and even in some
contemporary radical Protestant interpretations of Christianity. The state,
especially the authoritarian state, is threatened by these new trends toward freer
and more activist thinking in matters involving religion. Indeed, there is close
linkage between freedom in political thought and freedom in religious thought;
each serves to liberate the other.
It’s worth noting that nowhere did the Eastern Orthodox Church undergo a
Reformation. This suggests that a Middle East without Islam—that is, one that
remained Orthodox Christian—probably would not have become any more
secularized and rationalized than the Middle East did under Islam. In fact, it is
fairly evident that Islam in modern times has become in some senses more
democratized, more involved in mass politics, than the Orthodox Church has.
(Whether that is good or bad can be debated.)
Finally, this chapter looks at some of the extreme theological interpretations
within modern Christianity that still exert significant impact upon contemporary
Christian thinking, even if not mainstream. There are often striking parallels here
with elements of radicalism in Islamist thinking. In this context, then, Islam
again looks less and less like an exceptional, uniquely Middle Eastern
phenomenon and more part of a global process of religious change with political
implications; or, conversely, part of a process of political change with religious
implications.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION of the sixteenth century blew apart the
entire institution of the Western Church. It was arguably the most devastating

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schism in church history, even more important than the Great Schism between
the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Latin Church several centuries earlier. It
all happened within Europe. It resulted in deep, lasting divisions. A world of
centrally controlled theological doctrine in the West was fragmented, creating
new relations among church, state, and the individual. Neither the church nor the
West would ever be the same again.
Yet the Reformation did not come as a complete surprise. In fact, its timing
suggests a lot about its political character. When the monk Martin Luther nailed
his ninety-five theses of accusations against the church onto the church door in
Wittenberg in 1517, he crystallized in one sharp moment centuries-long
dissatisfactions with the church. The newly emerging secular power of the
German princely states and the north European states had long been raising
objections to excessive church exercise of political and financial power. Europe
had already witnessed many centuries of demeaning struggles among various
states to capture the papacy for their own ends. The Reformation would never
have happened if Luther had simply been one of a handful of dissident monks
arguing theology; the success of his movement was due to the direct support of
German princes who shared his desire to cut the power of the church down to
size. The theological objections to the church, while quite real, provided
intellectual and theological cover for a deeper political and economic assault
against the church’s power and corruption. Luther’s theses, in other words,
would clearly bring to a head a church-state crisis that the European political
order had not yet been ready or willing to face in an earlier era; but by 1517, it
was.
In its more moderate forms, the Reformation called for sharp reform of the
church—doctrinal, organizational, hierarchical—and an end to Rome’s
centralized power. But as the process of change, decentralization, and
independent-mindedness evolved, more radical formulations in thinking began
to emerge; ultimately, some of these began to challenge the entire validity of the
church, its body of theology, hierarchy, history, and operation as representing an
apostasy from True Christianity from its earliest days.
Islam actually had no parallel to the intimate links between church and state
in the West, where the church itself wielded great political and economic power.
While Islamists today—those speaking for forms of political Islam—constantly
emphasize the indissoluble unity of religion and state in Islam (din wa dawla), in
fact, this perception is largely a modern ideological construct: state power in
Islam was virtually always distinct from the clerics. Religious officials in Islamic
states never appointed leadership or controlled the state. (Clerical domination of
the state in today’s Iran is a glaring exception, a modern Shi’ite innovation.)

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Even in Saudi Arabia the monarchy in most contexts is far more powerful than
are clerical institutions.
To be sure, the legitimacy of Muslim rulers historically depended upon their
implementation of Shari’a law, at least in theory, but a great deal of the time
rulers did not seriously implement its spirit, and they rarely could be overthrown
for such religious lapses. In fact, some medieval Muslim clerics inadvertently
dispensed virtual carte blanche authority to misrule by secular powers by
declaring that anarchy (fitna) was worse even than oppressive rule (dhulm).
Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask
forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do
before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key
secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply
to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between
religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had
no parallel in Islam.
EARLIER CHAPTERS HAVE EXAMINED the way in which expanding
religions routinely absorb local religious traditions, shrines, holy figures, and
practices of the earlier religion to smooth the transition to the new. Both
Christianity and Islam experienced these pagan accretions as they grew; their
reformers have sought to expunge such accretions and to get back to the pure,
original faith. That was part of what the Protestant Reformation was about—a
return to the pure message. Muslim “fundamentalists,” too, attempt to get back
to fundamentals, to basics, to purify the faith. Wahhabism in eighteenth-century
Saudi Arabia was one of many such movements; they are often also referred to
as “renewal” movements (tajdid). Renewal can actually cut two ways: it can
refer to a movement back in time perceived as once purer, or it can look forward
in time to interpret the traditional texts in the new light of contemporary
understanding.
So how would the Middle East region differ today if it had remained
Orthodox? Of the three religions—Islam, Western (Catholic) Christianity, and
Eastern Orthodox Christianity—it is Orthodoxy that has perhaps changed the
least. Some of the most divisive reforms over ritual were introduced in
seventeenth-century Russia to bring Russian Orthodox practice into conformity
with Greek Orthodox practice, essentially a politically driven agenda that caused
much widespread popular opposition. Other Orthodox “reforms” strengthened
Russian state control over the church. The Orthodox Church has maintained its

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remove from involvement in political affairs ever since the fall of
Constantinople, and of the three faiths is probably the most “otherworldly” and
the most subservient to the state. It has avoided becoming heavily involved in
political and social agendas. A Middle East still under Orthodoxy today would
perhaps have been more conservative on political and social issues than Latin
Christianity or Islam.

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