An Islamic Reformation is the world’s best chance for peace

By admin-s On Apr 6, 2015

John Lloyd, FMT

If a young woman, before her marriage or after it, is found to have had sexual relations with another man not her betrothed, she is sentenced to be stoned to death. By contrast, a man who rapes or seduces a young girl usually must pay a fine to her father, and offer to marry her himself.

This punishment, ordained by God, is not confined to the ideologues of Islamic State. It is to be found in the holiest books of Jews and Christians: in a part of the Jewish Torah, known to Christians as Old Testament’s book of Deuteronomy.

The Jewish literary critic Adam Kirsch writes that “in Deuteronomy, we find the same kind of panic about female sexuality, the same need to control women’s feelings and behavior…(while) under Talmudic law, (a woman) is not a legally competent individual, but the responsibility of a man.”

The Talmud is a compendium of centuries of Jewish thought and commentary on the Torah.

Why, then, should those born within the cultures of the two older monotheistic faiths — Judaism, the oldest, and Christianity — recoil in horror from the obedience of some Muslims to these commands of God, since our cultures contain the same observances and our cultures’ holy figures approved them?

Because both Christianity and Judaism were profoundly changed by the Reformation and the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment’s apostles included large figures from the Christian tradition — David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes; and from the Jewish, in Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelsohn. They, and a legion of others, thought “freedom and toleration were … essential to the pursuit of enquiry, both religious and secular.” Their belief became, especially in France, a cause, a militant proclamation of freedom of thought and of publication, a definition of the rights of man.

“Man” to a degree meant also “woman” — but far from completely. The idea of male supremacy continues worldwide. Only under the influence of liberal and socialist reformers, emancipatory movements and feminism did (some) cultures recognize real, substantial equality of the sexes — rarely completely.

Islam did not join the renaissance, the rebirth, of Judaic and Christian cultures that began at the end of the 1500s and then evolved over centuries. Islam has within it millions of devotees who are liberal in their thoughts and actions, and who believe that nations should be secular, tolerating all religions and those with none. But the religion and the commentators on it do not lend them support: the religion still, in theory and in much of its practice, aspires to be the spine to a nation’s politics, the guide for its judiciary.

Last month, two powerful voices — one Jewish, one a Muslim breakaway — have been raised to give voice to the same belief: that until Islam undergoes its own rebirth, in which its divine commands are generally allowed to give way to secular, enlightenment practices, the majority of Muslim moderates will be held hostage by the minority of Muslim extremists.