The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (37 page)

As Kramer goes on to document, waiting for the Muslim Luther was a bit
like waiting for Godot, because none of the candidates for the title panned out, either because they had no support in the Middle East or because they weren’t in fact the moderate pluralists their boosters in the West hoped they’d be.

But the real problem with all this talk about a Muslim Martin Luther is that the analogy fails on both ends. Not only are there no Muslim Martin Luthers, Martin Luther wasn’t “Martin Luther,” or rather, wasn’t the Martin Luther that progressives imagine him to be.

The idea seems to be that Martin Luther was some sort of moderate, soft-spoken reformer, a champion of tolerance and open inquiry. Indeed, it’s telling that if you search the Internet for “Muslim Martin Luther” a sizable fraction of the results are discussions of the need for a “Muslim Martin Luther King, Jr.,” as if the two figures are interchangeable. To be sure, the arrival on the scene of a Muslim Martin Luther King—an MLK to replace a KSM or OBL—would indeed be a wonderful development. Any popular movement toward nonviolence and pluralism in the Middle East would be a step forward. But the conflation of Martin Luther and Martin Luther King demonstrates some profoundly muddled thinking.

The real Martin Luther, a fiercely pious Catholic monk, did not want to split Christianity or break from the Church. He wanted to reform it. He objected that the Church was too “worldly,” too corrupt, too modern, technological, rational, and intellectual. “Luther despised both intellectualism and good works,” argued Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, though that might be overstating it. What Luther despised was the claim that eggheadery or good deeds could substitute for faith. “Before, man could be saved
sola fide
, by faith alone.”
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Luther was even skeptical of philosophical scholasticism, believing it was tainted by the paganism of the Greeks and Romans. He loathed religious innovation and yearned to return to what he believed to be the “true faith” and the pure life of the early Church. Luther the “reformer” was a brilliant theologian but no religious moderate. He was a truer believer than most Catholics of the time (or so he would contend). One time he spilled a few drops of consecrated wine and immediately fell to the ground to lick them from the floor.

Just because the Reformation was modernizing doesn’t mean the reformers saw themselves as modernizers. In fact, much of the Reformation simply seems modernizing because it was carried aloft by “modern” trends.
For example, Luther’s revolution may not have taken root had he not opted to address his fellow Germans in their native tongue rather than in Latin. And had the printing press not existed, it’s doubtful Protestantism would have spread so rapidly. Perhaps most important, Luther and his fellow theological revolutionaries arrived—and not entirely by coincidence—as the nation-state was emerging as the primary political unit of European society.

The Reformation, and the battles that followed, were not between pluralism, moderation, and tolerance on one side and oppression and orthodoxy on the other. They were about determining how man should live in accordance with God’s will. The reformers saw themselves not as 2 percent milk Christians who need attend church only on Christmas and Easter but as the true believers. Going by the definitions used by the sorts of people today searching for a “Muslim Martin Luther,” they would be considered fanatics and zealots.

In riots of puritanical iconoclasm Lutherans and Calvinists burned paintings, smashed statues, and ransacked allegedly corrupt churches. If you visit museums in Switzerland you’ll find one or two surviving canvasses from whole schools of painting, the rest having been consigned to bonfires by Zwlinglian or Calvinist mobs. The Dutch had their
Beeldenstorm
, or “statue storm”—also known as the “iconoclastic fury” (a fantastic name for a rock band or league of anarchist superheroes) in which religious statues across the country were pulled down in a mass frenzy. But by whatever name, the story was the same. The Protestants sought to cleanse and purge Europe of the worldly excesses and corrupt practices (including graven images) of the Catholic Church.

Theocratic regimes, morals police, executions, terror—these were all tools used by various forces of Protestantism during the early Reformation (and, in fairness, the Catholic Church often gave as good as it got). Obviously the Catholic Church saw early reformers as heretics. But the heretics believed other dissenting reformers were heretics, too. Calvinists attacked Zwinglians, Zwinglians drowned Anabaptists, Anabaptists put saran wrap on the toilet bowls of Calvinists.

This is not to say that Luther’s revolution wasn’t valuable. Over the long run Luther helped shepherd humanity to the uplands of history. Without Luther there is no Protestant work ethic and no Scottish Enlightenment and none
of the needed reforms within the Catholic Church. And while I have no interest in weighing the theological arguments at the heart of all this, Protestants would fairly claim that without Luther millions upon millions of souls would not be nearer to God. But the relevant point for this discussion is that the tolerance and pluralism ushered in by the Reformation wasn’t necessarily part of the Protestant agenda. Rather it was the result of a bloody stalemate between opposing forces in a cataclysmic, century-spanning struggle.

Those yearning for a “Muslim Martin Luther” don’t realize there are Muslim Martin Luthers all over the place, and they’ve been fomenting religious oppression and cruelty in the Middle East and terrorism abroad for generations now. What might be called the Muslim Protestant Reformation began a century ago, as the old Turkish caliphate of the Ottoman Empire crumbled from political, economic, and theological decay. The new Islamic Puritans wanted to restore Islam to its glory days, to a past that probably never existed. The Salafists seek a return to the Islam that existed during the first three generations after Muhammed. Ascetic, intolerant, opposed to intellectualism and innovation, the Salafists, Taliban, and Wahhabis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are roughly—and only roughly—analogous to the Calvinists, Lutherans, and Zwinglians (not necessarily in that order) of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Even this comparison leaves out a hugely important point: Christianity is not analogous to Islam in many fundamental theological respects. Christianity is not a religion of the sword, even if it has been misunderstood as such at times. Christianity began as a faith of peaceful martyrs who died for love. Islam began as a faith of invading soldiers who died for land. This does not mean that Islam has no peaceful traditions, or that Christianity has always lived up to its ideals, but at a theological level these are hugely important distinctions.

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 Muhammed and his early followers. They razed Muhammed’s home and the graves of the prophet’s mother and first wife. The prophet’s tomb was barely spared, thanks only to popular opposition. In recent years Saudi authorities have rededicated themselves to destroying
the 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 and to ban music and even kite flying. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a Shia version of the Protestant Reformation of the shah’s worldly, open, and modern Iran.

In short, Islam doesn’t need any more Muslim Martin Luthers; it needs a pope. The Catholic Church didn’t disappear after the Reformation (as you might have noticed). Instead, it launched the counterreformation under the guidance of Pope Pius III, who called the Council of Trent to address the accusations of Luther (among others) and initiate a worldwide movement of administrative reform within the Church. That process became institutionalized.

The Church adapted and had the authority and discipline to impose those adaptations. Where is there a similar institution in the world of Islam? Even when you look at some of the Muslim world’s oldest institutions you still often find Holocaust deniers, apologists for terrorism, and enemies of modernity. Because these institutions don’t have the power to change the attitudes of the so-called Arab street they become tools of the Arab street.

Unfortunately for Islam, the Ottoman caliphate vanished entirely in 1924, leaving nothing and no one to play the role of caliph. Islam needs a central authority that speaks for the interests of the larger Islamic world. It need not have religious authority over all Muslims, but it should have moral authority among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. There are those who say Islam itself is the problem, and expecting a caliphate to modernize and temper Islam is gravely naïve. They may be right, though I remain unconvinced. If they are right, then that is yet another reason why the quest for a Muslim Martin Luther is folly. Regardless, Islam right now has no large, authoritative institution with a “tradition of existence” that can temper the forces of zealotry and puritanism sweeping through the Muslim world.

Instead, would-be Muslim Martin Luthers and mini Mahdis issue more fatwahs than Luther had theses, telling why vast numbers of nonbelievers must be slaughtered or converted, why Islam will conquer the world, and how theological backsliding or compromise is a crime punishable by death.

The Crusades

The great irony is that the zealot-reformers who want to return to a “pure” Islam have been irredeemably corrupted by
Western
ideas. Osama bin Laden had the idea that he was fighting the “new crusaders.” When George W. Bush once, inadvertently, used the word “crusade,” jihadists and liberal intellectuals alike erupted with rage. It was either a damning slip of the tongue whereby Bush accidentally admitted his real crusader agenda, or it was a sign of his stunning ignorance about the Crusades. Doesn’t he know what a sensitive issue the Crusades are? Doesn’t he know that the Crusades belong alongside the slaughter of the Indians, slavery, and disco in the long line of Western sins?

After all, it’s been in the papers for a while. In 1999, Muslim leaders demanded that Pope John Paul II apologize for the Crusades. “He has asked forgiveness from the Jews [for the Church’s passivity in the face of the Holocaust], so he should ask forgiveness from the Muslims,” Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, told the
New York Times
.
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Across the country sports teams have been dropping their crusader mascots because they’re offensive to… someone. Wheaton College changed their seventy-year-old team name from the Crusaders to the Thunder (no word from Thor worshippers yet as to whether they are offended). Even Campus Crusade for Christ opted to change its name to Cru partly because the word crusade has become too radioactive. “It’s become a flash word for a lot of people. It harkens back to other periods of time and has a negative connotation for lots of people across the world, especially in the Middle East,” Steve Sellers, the organization’s vice president told
Christianity Today
. “In the ’50s, crusade was the evangelistic term in the United States. Over time, different words take on different meanings to different groups.”
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I’ll say. Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).
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Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a
defensive war
. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”
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At first the larger Muslim world didn’t much care about the Christian reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The jihad to repel the crusaders didn’t start in earnest until the European forces pressed on into the Muslim Holy Lands approaching Mecca and Medina. Even then the Muslim world considered the fight to reclaim Jerusalem a sideshow. The real fight was in the East, where caliphs were rolling up victory after victory in the old Byzantine Empire. In 1291, the Muslims expelled the last of the crusaders, and all remaining Christians and Jews in the Islamic world lived as second-class citizens (though often better than Muslims or Jews might have in many parts of Christendom). By the sixteenth century, Islam’s empire covered all of North Africa, Asia Minor, Arabia, and much of southern Europe. Had Islamic forces not been turned back outside the Gates of Vienna, Christianity itself may not have survived. (The battle ended in victory for the Christians on September 12, but it was the day before, marking the apex of Muslim rule, that would stick in the minds of many Muslims for the next 318 years.)

By that point the Crusades period was several centuries in the rearview mirror, and most Muslims considered them one of their many, if minor, victories.

“In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period,” writes Lewis, “there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called ‘Franks’ or ‘infidels.’ The words ‘Crusade’ and ‘crusader’ simply do not occur.” Lewis notes that the word only starts to gain wide currency in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, when Western notions of imperialism seep into the Muslim mind. And that’s the irony. In the nineteenth century Europeans (and Americans) invoked the Crusades to justify their imperialist agenda. When imperialism fell into disrepute in the twentieth century, the Crusades fell with it. But the idea that twelfth-century Muslims—or even eighteenth-century Muslims—saw the Crusades as European imperial aggression is nonsense.
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“In other
words,” Madden explains (writing back when bin Laden wasn’t fish food), “Muslims in the Middle East—including bin Laden and his creatures—know as little about the real crusades as Americans do. Both view them in the context of the modern, rather than the medieval world. The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.”
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