COMMENTARY TOLERANCE AND LUMPEN OAFS
By Edward Pearce.
1,109 words
1 July 1992
The Guardian
18
English
(c) 1992
A Jewish friend startled me recently by remarking "God,
wasn't the Reformation a great thing!" My friend wanted
to praise the free enquiry and thought following a religious
split. But he is also a keen Verdian, and the remark emerged
from talk of Don Carlos where much dramatic business is done
by an Inquisitor and chorus got up in a jolly little Ku Klux
Klan number of pointed hoods and white gowns. Yet Verdi was
a Catholic, composer of the Four Sacred Pieces and the Requiem,
albeit also a liberal and anti-clerical. Father Patrick Buckley,
who heroically argues in Ireland against the authoritarian
tradition of the priesthood, does so as a priest. Catholic
clergy in Holland and Germany hold similar views without need
of heroic defiance. But we all know about the present Pope
with his belief that things were better ordered under Innocent
III.
An ecclesiastical version of Peacock's Mr Chainmail who believed
that civilisation had gone relentlessly downhill since the
close of that most perfect of centuries, the twelfth, John
Paul II is a touch reactionary for the more metropolitan parts
of Poland, though he goes down a bomb at the Spectator.[ QQ]
In fact, the modern Catholic church, with its acceptance of
science, critical-minded dissenters, much amended liturgy
and the diminution of central command clericalism, is itself
a product of the Protestant Reformation.
Protestantism is not of course wholly tolerant and liberal
minded - though Quaker, Unitarian, Congregationalist traditions
have been essentially that. The shaming, dismal bigotry of
the Orange lodges, the know-nothing tradition of South Baptism,
mass evangelism (America's provision for the intellectually
challenged), and the assorted First Churches of Jesus Christ
Fraudulent Converter flourishing in the American wilderness,
deny that.
But the Protestant Reformation crucially brought about the
division of Christianity by argument. The contradiction of
central hierarchic authority, the disavowal of central doctrines
like intercession of saints and the real presence, made Christianity
into a religion of debate. Never mind that Calvin could be
in Geneva a Pope all to himself, burning Servetus (unsound
on the Trinity) as the Council of Constance had burned Hus.
Never mind either, that the Roman response to argument was
war and assassination. The Pope of the day effectively took
out a contract on the life of Elizabeth of England; while
the St Bartholomew's Eve massacre - a short spasm of final
solution activity - occasioned Te Deums in Rome.
Post-Reformation Europe emerged from this Iranian phase equipped
for free argument, for Newton, Voltaire and Gibbon, eventually
for Lyle and Darwin and the bad news about geology and biology.
The Inquisition did a solid job on Galileo, but no longer
a Universal Church with a writ running into northern Europe,
it was circumscribed. Brilliant clerical staff work which
could order planetary movement by coercive fallacy, could
not achieve the totalitarian condition of the middle ages.
The Church divided, and authority diluted, evidence and argument
could be published and accepted beyond the police authority
of the Holy Father. There is a comic after-echo to the 16th
century anti-scientific struggle in the response of my favourite
Pope, Gregory XVI, to railways: "Chemins de fer? Chemins
d'Enfer!" He banned them.
All of which, oddly, brings us to modern Islam. Akbar Ahmed
has written in Post-modernism And Islam a characteristically
scrupulous, readable and humane account of the dilemma of
Islam plunged into secular, glitsy unmanageable modern society.
Of the poor Pakistani immigrant (and perhaps of his Imam)
he might have quoted Housman:
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made
He describes moving conversations with a man whose daughter
had written from college renouncing Islam and who had to live
at once with his own intense grief as a believer and with
two sons wishing to kill their sister.
The tragedy for Muslims, in the West and as affected by the
West, is that their religious tradition has no Reformation
equivalent. Historic divisions exist within Islam, but they
have more to do with the identification of sub-prophets -
the Druze for example, glorifying the name and role of the
Caliph Hakim. And talk of Sunni and Shi'a in Protestant/Catholic
terms is plain wrong; which doesn't save half-educated newspapers
from that error. Similarly, differences in relative clerical
ascendancy in various Muslim countries have everything to
do with politics. The Church of England aspect of Islam in
Turkey where Imams are unlikely to shake a stick at the government
or call for Jihads, owes everything to Mustapha Kemal (and
some of the brisker Ottomans) never disposed to take any sort
of uppitiness from preachers.
Mr Ahmed chronicles the bewilderment of Muslims, pointing
out that not every newcomer to this country enjoys the chivalry
(his word) shown him by the fellows of Selwyn Cambridge, whose
church service for the admission of a fellow omitted references
to the Trinity so that this Muslim (like all his brethren,
a unitary believer), could honourably attend the Christian
service for his own acceptance as fellow.
Such sensibility thins elsewhere. Ahmed points out that too
many Muslims have to endure attitudes summed up by the insults
of lumpen oafs like Robert Kilroy-Silk in the new, worse Daily
Express: "They [Muslims] are backward and evil and if
it is racist to say so ... then racist I must be - and happy
and proud, to be so." Kilroy on Monday: "West is
best" (Daily Express, February 25, 1991). In Silk, and
sadly in Conor Cruise O'Brien quoted in shaming, transferred
Likudnik terms, the British Isles, have found their answer
to the desolating Dr Siddiqui. Yet as Ahmed insists, there
is rather more to Islam than rage and reaction. Islam is inherently
tolerant of other religions - the Prophet himself acknowledging
the peoples of the Book - Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians
- something quite unimaginable for the flat earth absolutists
of Pauline Christianity.
But today Islam is caught in its own early 15th century with
the modern world and its depravities accomplished fact, but
has no tradition of Geneva and Wittenberg broadening down
the ages via debate and enquiry into intellectual pluralism.
It is the misfortune of Islam to enjoy the sacred condition,
yearned for by those Pearly Queens of organised religion,
the Anglo-Catholics: church unity.
The growth of divided Christianity, outside County Donegal
and Polish Galicia, into co-existence with the secular material
world, has been telescoped for the mainstream of united Islam
in a generation and a half, causing every kind of cultural
shock and occasioning every reason for our tender understanding
of, and indeed chivalry towards Islam.
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