A Mirror for Muslim Reformers
Por Stephen Schwartz para Tech
Central Station
Fecha: 14/12/2004 Idioma: Inglés
 The
Muslim sacred month of Ramadan has begun, celebrating the
revelation of Qur'an to the Prophet Muhammad. At such a time,
I am especially grateful to TCS for allowing me space to develop
my thoughts on the trope of the "Islamic Reformation."
This concept is typically put forward as a brusque demand
by ignorant Islamophobes, who claim a moral flaw exists within
the faith itself, rather than an intellectual weakness afflicting
the minds of some of its adherents. I also fear it has lately
been adopted as a palliative by Muslim intellectuals too willing
to answer non-Muslim criticisms in a non-Muslim idiom.
I have therefore, in prior TCS columns, offered a critical
examination of Luther, the exemplar of the Protestant Reformation
most typically held out as a model for emulation by modern
Muslims, as well as the Reformation paradigm in general .
In the most recent of these commentaries, I noted that I was
confronted by an American incensed that I would compare Luther
to Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi cult, the state
religion in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism, the most
rigid, exclusionary, violent and repressive Islamic sect known
in modern times, inspires the atrocities of Osama bin Laden
as well as the beheadings ordered by the "shaykh of slaughter"
in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The same American who reproached me over Luther was also
irritated to find John Calvin compared with Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab
in my work, which was no surprise considering how frequently
we Americans are taught and retold that Calvin, the 16th century
theocrat of Geneva, was somehow the father of our liberties.
(It was perhaps appropriate, in a way, that my interlocutor
was an attorney, and that this unpleasant experience came
about during a legal proceeding having to do with Wahhabi
depredations in America.) But a list of Calvin's prohibitions
and punishments immediately calls to mind life under the religious
authority of the Wahhabis in the Saudi kingdom. Calvin forbade
music, oversaw the beheading of children for trivial abuse
of their parents, and, in multiple instances, decreed death
by stoning for adultery. Those who refer to Saudi Islam as
medieval are wrong; they would better refer to Saudis as living
under Reformation conditions.
The biography of Calvin also reminds us of another personality
of the Protestant Reformation, who, although he died as a
heretic, offers a stirring example for Muslims today. That
individual was a theologian and medical researcher named Miquel
Servet (1509/11-1553).
I first encountered the name of Miquel Servet 25 years ago.
I was young, and was then still a man of the radical left.
I spent a great deal of time in those years in Barcelona,
the sentimental capital of the European revolutionary labor
movement. From my first visit, I noticed a plenitude of "squares,
streets, and delightful parks" (in the phrase of the
Valencian neo-troubador Ausias March), named for Miquel Servet.
Soon I learned that Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the official
capital, considers him among its great civic heroes. I found
Servet depicted as "a martyr for freedom" on an
Art Nouveau poster produced by Catalan libertarians -- that
is, members of the anarchist labor movement for which the
city and region are justifiably famous.
Miquel Servet is a Reformation figure that should appeal
to Muslims who want their religion freed from obscurantism,
dogmatism, and oppression. His views reflect both intellectual
independence and a curious commonality with some essential
elements of Islam, and especially of Sufism, or Islamic spirituality.
Born in a small village near Zaragoza, in Aragon, Servet was
impelled as a youth to doubt the Christian doctrine of the
trinity, which he saw as an impediment to the intellectual
conversion of Jews and Muslims to the faith of Jesus (see
biography at www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/michaelservetus.html).
He seems to have excluded from his consideration the Spanish
practice of effectively compelling the children of Isaac and
Ismail to accept Christianity by force, and to have perceived
that the complicated trinitarian system, which both Jews and
Muslims reject, erected a mental barrier between the Christians
and the others that could not easily be overcome. Above all,
however, he was disturbed to find the idea of a three-in-one
godhead absent from the Bible. But it is also of interest
that both Servet and his great Catalan predecessor, Raimon
Llull, on whom I previously wrote in TCS, were influenced
by Islamic thought even as they sought to convert Muslims.
Servet went on to study law, to rebel against the wealth
of the Roman church, to join in the tumult of theological
controversy then common in Europe, and to publish a work titled
On the Errors of the Trinity. He journeyed from Spain to Provence;
then from Spain to Bologna, where he broke away and traveled
to Basel, a Protestant redoubt. However, it soon became clear
that the antitrinitarian views of Miquel Servet were as discomfiting
to the new orthodoxy of Protestant reform as to the Catholic
order. Simultaneously, he was made unwelcome in communities
ruled by the former, and was actively sought for "questioning,"
i.e. torture, by the Spanish Inquisition. The latter institution
sent Servet's own brother, a priest, to try to convince him
to return to Spain, to certain death. The now-hunted dissenter
adopted a false name, that of "Michel de Villeneuve,"
and studied mathematics and medicine in Paris, where he met
the young Calvin in the early 1530s. Calvin came secretly
to Paris to argue religion with Servet, but the latter, fearing
exposure, failed to appear. Servet wrote that, like Jonah,
he dreamed of escape as a sailor, or by coming to the New
World.
He was nothing if not versatile in his capacity for personal
reinvention, at least when it came to supporting himself.
He labored as an editor in a French printing house, and in
the work of publishing Ptolemy, the classic of geography,
he became an expert and lecturer on that subject. Employment
as an editor of the Bible helped him refine his theological
views. After assisting in the production of medical volumes,
he returned to surgical study. It was thus that he was credited
with the first publication describing the role of the lungs
in delivering oxygen to the bloodstream.
Some 15 years passed after Servet's acquaintance with Calvin,
and, from Geneva, the latter became the foremost representative
of the Protestant Reformation. Servet, living in France, initiated
a clandestine correspondence with Calvin. Their relationship
soon turned to aggravation and insult, and Servet printed
some letters to Calvin in his key work, The Restoration of
Christianity. Calvin denounced Servet to the Inquisition,
and Servet apparently fled toward northern Italy, where he
counted on finding friends and supporters. But he stopped
in Geneva, and was recognized at a church service, and arrested.
He was tried for heresy, based on his criticism of trinitarianism
and his opposition to the baptism of children, which he considered
a pagan ritual reminiscent of infant sacrifice in ancient
society.
He was ordered burned at the stake by the Genevan authorities.
Calvin recommended his beheading, as an act of mercy, but
was rebuffed. All copies of The Restoration of Christianity
were ordered destroyed; only three survived. Perishing in
the flames, Servet was heard to cry out, "O Jesus, Son
of the Eternal God, have pity on me!" That is, he did
not call upon Jesus as "the Eternal Son;" to him
Jesus was a son of God as all humans are children of the creator.
Some Muslims will read this story and be tempted to imagine
that Servet had secretly adopted Islam: the echoes of the
faith of Muhammad are strong in Servet's arguments. Muslims
respect, and Sufis love Jesus as a prophet, yet Muslims reject
the claim that he had a divine nature. Repudiation of the
trinity became the foundation of Unitarian Christianity, but
denial of Jesus's status as God's son is also the most important
distinction between Christianity and Islam. Servet's theology
encompassed another viewpoint shared with Muslims -- refusal
of belief in original sin.
The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography points
out that Servet's view on original sin influenced the founders
of Unitarianism in Poland and Transylvania. Accusations in
Poland that these Christians, known there as Socinians, had
"fallen back into Judaism," led to burning at the
stake. Transylvania, an independent principality, was accused
of having entirely abandoned Christianity. The local predecessors
of Unitarianism declared "God is One," as Jews affirm
in the Shema Yisrael ('Hear O Israel, Our God is One God')
and Muslims in the Shehadeh ('I affirm there is One God, I
affirm Muhammad is his Prophet').
But both territories stood on the frontier of the Ottoman
empire for 150 years, beginning at the time of Servet's martyrdom.
Islamic conceptions of religion had a way of penetrating these
borderlands, and in fulfillment of Servet's yearning for a
Christianity that could encompass Jews and Muslims by abandoning
trinitarianism, some inhabitants of Transylvania advocated
a universal religion uniting all faiths (see www.theuufellowship.org/_sermons/001203.htm).
Even later Unitarians, including Deists (the creed embraced
by Thomas Jefferson), were accused of having converted to
Islam.
Ibn ul-Arabi, the greatest shaykh of Sufism, also envisioned
a single religion reconciling all believers in one God. Could
Servet have been a secret Sufi? There is a moment during his
trial in Geneva that, for a Sufi like me, produces the classic
"shock of recognition" -- but as if in a mirror.
Servet believed that all of Creation is of the Creator; as
the Catalan dissident put it, "[it] is my fundamental
principle that all things are a part or portion of God and
the nature of things is the substantial spirit of God."
This doctrine is similar, but not identical, to that known
in Islam as "unity of being," or wahdat ul-wujud,
which is especially dear to the followers of Ibn ul-Arabi.
In classical Islam, all things are one as divine creation,
although they do not share divine essence.
But Calvin despised any expression of this concept, and at
the trial of Servet he shouted, "What, wretch! If one
stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God?"
I was further affected in reading these words, by the recollection
of a Sufi parable. It is said that a narrow-minded Muslim
cleric confronted a Sufi, and demanded to know if the mystic
truly believed in God. The Sufi replied, "the God you
worship is beneath my feet."
There are differing versions and interpretations of this
parable; some say it teaches that God is the same as his creation.
And some say the Sufi stood on a golden coin, and meant that
religion was no more than a means for the cleric to gain power.
It is said the Sufi was seized and executed for blasphemy.
Miquel Servet may be relevant to Muslims as a Christian who
was also a model of true religious reform, of unfettered inquiry,
of achievement in science, and of the harmony of the monotheistic
faiths, as well as of belief in the unity of all things. He
died a martyr and is remembered, if at all, only by Unitarians;
meanwhile, the cruel, bloodthirsty Wahhabis who call themselves
Reformers of Islam also like to claim the title of Unitarians,
which to Western ears sounds especially absurd.
As I reread the life of Servet, I was also reminded of Sufis
who have touched me personally. In the recent confrontation
I have mentioned, with an enraged defender of Luther and Calvin,
I had to listen to repeated denunciations of Muhammad Hisham
Kabbani, shaykh of the Naqshbandi Sufis in America, and one
of the great Islamic teachers of our time, as a cultist; of
Sufis as believers in the summoning of demons, and similar
inanities. But that colloquy took place here in America, where
neither Kabbani, nor I, nor any other Sufi or Muslim reformer
should face the punishments meted out in Saudi Arabia, or
in Geneva a half millennium ago. Yet believers in God's love
and its transmission through religion must still face the
inquisitions and libels of "official" reformers
and bigots, and will doubtless have to face them forever.
In such moments, inspiration may be found in the lives of
many men and women of faith, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian.
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