I don’t know how many times I have heard Christians—Catholics included, strangely—say, “What Islam needs is a Reformation.” The normally sensible Cardinal Danneels of Brussels even went so far as to say that what Islam needs is to go through its French Revolution—which makes one want to ask when the Catholic Church was ever in favor of the Reformation or the French Revolution? And whether that would be the same French Revolution that gave us Reign of Terror and the adoption of systematic terror as a political instrument?
For good reason the Reformation is often identified with the foundations of modernity, not least for its celebration of the right of the individual believer to approach the scriptural text directly and to interpret it independently of the received tradition. Old hierarchies of traditional interpretation are broken down and a new freedom seems possible when an increasingly literate lay readership has the text in its own hands.
You Say You Want a Modern Revolution?
Yet at the same time, both Catholics and Muslims have good reason to wonder whether that “modern” liberty is the unmixed blessing it is sometimes thought to be. Scriptural texts are not private, but rather communal texts. They address communities of faith—in the case of the Christian scriptures they were created in faith by the community, and were selected because they reflected the community’s faith. All scriptural communities have learned over the centuries how to read and understand their texts together with the other sources of their faith, and in the light of their continued experience of God. The Qur’an itself (Q 3:7) warns of the danger that whose hearts are twisted will use tendentious interpretations of its verses in order to sow conflict (fitna) in the community, and insists (Q 5:48) that the truth about the matters over which were are at odds will only be revealed at the end of time. It counsels a humility that a more modern mind-set, with its confidence in the individual reader, rejects.
There is a certain irony in the way so many are calling on Muslims to “catch up to modernity” when it seems to be the modern individualism of interpretation and an abandonment of the communal wisdom of the tradition that is threatening to tear the Muslim community apart. It is also ironic that Muslims are being called to become modern at the very time when modernity, with all its premises and promises, is increasingly being called into question in the West that gave birth to it. We believe we have seen through the pretensions of modernity’s optimism and its grand narratives. And yet here we are wishing it, even wanting to impose it, on others.
So the Contending Modernities project has some risks inherent in it. We are not simply two religious traditions examining our respective relationships to modernity and to the secularism that often claims to have cornered the market on modernity. For all our protestations—and 19th- and 20th-Century Catholicism has at times protested very loudly—Christians, particularly in the West, have been content to be associated with modernity in its drive to colonial domination and the exploitation and injustice that were an inevitable part of it. Being “modern” ourselves, we could despise the “primitive” and “pre-modern” religions we encountered. From our “enlightened” viewpoint, we could set the terms of the debate and dictate the necessary outcomes.
Muslims were for the most part on the receiving end of our at times savage campaigns of modernist colonialism, and the vast majority, even if they are not living under occupation, still labor under the burden of the world’s neo-colonial economic order. They could be forgiven for wondering why such a modernity should be celebrated and accepted as the norm against which they are to be judged.
