As Christianity has taken many twists and turns in its history, so has Islam, and so might it again, only this time moving toward the more open posture of most contemporary Western Christians. The Christian experience should caution us against assuming there is something intrinsic to Islam that mandates that Islamic societies be anti-modern. In fact, in the 16th through 20th centuries, liberal ideas were imported into Muslim societies with remarkable success, and harmonized with Islam, especially in the Ottoman Empire. Less happily, at critical moments in Islamic history, reactionary interpretations””or misinterpretations””of the Quran and Shariah triumphed over others.
Fortunately, some Muslims have begun to reinterpret ancient traditions in light of modernity and begun their own, albeit often-quiet reformations, distressed by the authoritarian elements smuggled into their tradition. They are intent on synthesizing””as have so many branches of Judaism and Christianity””features of their religious traditions with democratic ideas. Such reformations have been institutionalized successfully in several countries with significant Muslim populations, such as Turkey and Tunisia.
We can only hope that, with the quickening pace of historical change in modernity, Islam can adjust more rapidly than Christendom, so that a broad-minded form of the religion will prevail. Muslims will have to recognize what the West, through many centuries of hard experience and reflection, has learned: that religious texts arose in a particular context and must be reinterpreted in the new context of modernity; that pluralism within one’s own tradition and the tolerance of other faiths must be appreciated anew; and, finally, that the coercive imposition of faith will generate only nominal or hypocritical, not authentic, conversions.
[blockquote]In fact, in the 16th through 20th centuries, liberal ideas were imported into Muslim societies with remarkable success, and harmonized with Islam, especially in the Ottoman Empire.[/blockquote]
This is why Islam remains fundamentally misunderstood in the West. Christianity gave birth to Western liberal ideals in one form or another. Those ideals were either true fruits that have led to positives or they have been negatives that have led to the secular post Christian West, but they are Christian in origin.
The idea that they could be grafted onto Islam ignores how the changes took root in the West in the first place and ignores the fact that the initial attempts that failed were attempts at colonialism and cultural imperialism that were bound to be seen for what they were and viewed with hostility.
I am sorry to see that the author of this piece is a professor of history at Harvard Divinity. Such a person should be knowledgable about the foundational texts and traditions of religions. In the case of the repressions and violence of medieval and reformation-era Christianity, the warrant for the violence is not found in the basic teachings of the religion. They violate it, in fact. It is a sad truth that texts and traditions in support of Islamic violence, whether state-sponsored or, more recently, individual jihad, are clearly found in the basic teachings of the religion. Not all Muslims, happily, interpret them this way, but hundreds of millions do.