Over at Foreign Policy Passport, Preeti Aroon repeats–not once, but twice–the invidious comparison between contemporary Islam and pre-Reformation Latin Christiandom. Now, I’ve written on the general silliness of this line of comparison before, but Aroon asks an important question:
Yesterday’s program mentioned that the Protestant Reformation was accompanied by its share of violence, which took place over centuries. (Bloody Mary and Catholic violence against Huguenots in France come to my mind.) Does that mean that a reformation of Islam would be accompanied by violence? If so, would it be worth it?
No.
The Protestants, in general, were the back-to-basics religious extremists of the sixteenth century. More of that sort is decidely not what Islam needs.
I’m not arguing that the Catholic Church couldn’t get downright nasty and repressive. It could and it did. But Catholic humanism represented a far more tolerant strand of Latin Christianity than early modern Zwinglianism, Lutheranism, or the Reformed Church. We shouldn’t confuse pre-Reformation Catholicism with Counter-Reformation Catholicism, nor Protestant movements with later, often Protestant, champions of liberal enlightenment.
I’m currently finishing a book manuscript that points to some interesting parallels between early modern Europe and the contemporary period, yet I cannot stress two points enough:
First, the “does Islam need a Protestant Reformation” question depends on a grossly distorted view of the nature of the Protestant Reformations.
Second, even if the question didn’t precede from bad history, the circumstances of the Reformations simply don’t travel well to those of contemporary Islam.
Again, the answer is “no.” The “Protestant Reformation” is not a synonym for “The Enlightenment.”
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
0 Comments