A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

ideas that affect power.
Let’s not just blame religion; “orthodoxies” reign in all fields of human
endeavor, including history, philosophy, and even science. You find orthodoxy
wherever dogmatic certitude replaces skepticism, inquiry, and debate, and where
that certitude is then buttressed by power. Recall how in the Marxist, atheist
Soviet Union, communist orthodoxy was vigorously enforced by Stalin across a
broad range of intellectual fields including history, the arts, and the sciences;
ideological heretics in many different fields often met their fate with a bullet in
the back of the skull in the dungeons of the KGB. Orthodoxy and ideology were
all there to serve and preserve the welfare of Communist Party rule. Political
parties, too, especially ideological ones, rise and fall on their ability to articulate
beliefs that attract and organize followers, and the parties seek to impose
ideological consensus on its members. In the absence of consensus, the party
falls apart. The struggle of political parties to maintain ideological purity differs
little from the state’s handling of religious doctrine—except that religious

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organizations hold the trump of appealing to a Higher Power.
Heresy lies at the junction of belief and power. When religions become
institutionalized, they face the problem of “ownership” and control of doctrine.
Belief counts for nothing if anybody is free to believe whatever he or she wants,
or to craft a do-it-yourself kind of personal faith. Finding God for oneself in the
texts was indeed the ultimate rationale of the Protestant Reformation—an event
that split Christianity wide open into fissiparating shards of small religious
communities. Fundamentalist salafi or Wahhabi doctrine is also revolutionary in
calling for the individual to interpret scripture directly, not through some
intermediary to God.
Power, then, is the final trap, the ultimate corrupter: the closer religion
becomes linked with state power, the further it drifts away from the realm of
intellect and spirit and into the realm of the political—with direct implications
for state power and authority. The state cannot then be indifferent to theology.
When the state’s official beliefs and doctrines are challenged, the state’s
authority itself is challenged—and the state does not look kindly upon it.
It’s a self-serving cycle. Theological doctrine comes to serve the state’s
interests. The state then recruits clerics who bestow their theological imprimatur
upon the state’s self-serving interpretations. Both Islam and Christianity, with
their long linkage to various state powers over history, continue to face this
challenge to this day. In fact, church and state in Christianity have been far more
closely tied over most of Christian history than was ever the case in Islam, where
clerical power almost never exercised political rule—until the Islamic Republic
of Iran today. Meanwhile, Judaism, lacking the instruments of state power for
most of its history, was a bit more able to avoid this path, although now that
Judaism has become linked with the power and politics of the modern Israeli
state, it, too, is no longer exempt.
Conversely, when religion becomes independent of the state, something
important happens: the state actually loses much stake in the preservation of
religious orthodoxy. But even then, we are still not home free. Even personal
religious beliefs can still affect the state very much if certain doctrines and views
affect the public’s perception of the state. Thus, some evangelical movements in
the United States directly impact the public’s view of the government; how
fundamentalist movements in Islam view the state can directly threaten the
legitimacy of the most secular authoritarian regimes.
None of this is at all meant to suggest that religion is nothing more than a
cynical façade for power struggle. It can be that. But human ability to bend
religion to political or commercial ends should not diminish the profound

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spiritual power that personal belief can have in shaping one’s personal life,
philosophy, and conduct, and hence the behavior of society at large.
Even tolerance can be elusive. Hinduism seems to have remarkably avoided
most of the compromising problems of power and orthodoxy. Indeed the concept
of orthodoxy and heresy is almost entirely absent in Hinduism, since it embraces
all religious ideas within its bosom, each one representing partial insights and
glimpses of elements of truth as parts of a vast, fundamental, ineffable,
ultimately never fully knowable Truth of the Divine. But none of this tolerant
polytheistic character of Hinduism suggests that a Hindu-dominated state, or
followers of Hinduism, is not equally capable of discrimination, persecution, and
brutal violence toward people of other religions; the world has sadly witnessed
in recent times the use of violence under militant Hindu leaders of Hindutva
(Hindu nationalism) against Muslim, Sikh, and Christian communities.
All of this has everything to do with politics and nationalism and little to do
with religious doctrine per se. Note here that against outsiders Hinduism, too,
can readily be translated into an intolerant and narrow religious nationalism; this
parallels what happens with Islamic fundamentalism when it operates as an
“Islamic nationalist” movement against Western incursion. While
philosophically highly pacifist, even Buddhism, when combined with ethnicity
in ethnic struggles such as with the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka against the Hindu
Tamils, quickly loses its ethical considerations of pacifism, even on the part of
Buddhist monks, when it comes to fighting in the name of the Buddhist
Sinhalese community. Theology seems to count for little.
And can we forget that God in Islam has ninety-nine revered names: the
Merciful, the Compassionate, the Loyal, the Avenger, the Comforter, the Victor,
the Savior, and so forth—all different facets, faces, of the same God? Nobody
would claim that Islam is polytheistic, but it clearly recognizes multiple faces of
the Divine.

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