The beautiful, Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman I greatly admire, has written a book entitled, ‘Heretic: Why Islam needs a reformation now.’ While not contesting Hirsi Ali’s basic premise of change, reformation within religion is invariably flawed and pointless.
It’s not as if Islam has been without reform. When the renowned theologian and historian Shah Waliullah of Delhi, born in 1703, sought reform, his call was for a return to the pristine Islam of the prophet Muhammed. The threat Hindu India and subsequently colonial Britain posed to Islam could only be averted by a jihad against these forces. The same can be said of Abd al-Wahhab, a contemporary of Waliullah, who roamed the Arabian desert sands, proclaiming a new faith so puritanical and literalist in nature that to be called a ‘Wahhabi’, a follower of Wahhab, was considered an insult and a colloquial term for religious intolerance.
It was Wahhab’s partnership with the powerful Muhammad ibn Saud (fortified later through Wahhab’s daughter marrying Saud’s son), that legitimised Wahhab’s edicts and gave birth to the house of Saud, creating an unholy alliance between preacher and military ruler which survives to this day. This reformed Islam quickly declared war on tobacco, dancing, music, luxurious dress, idolatry and anything not particularly proscribed by Wahhab himself. When in 1929, Hafiz Wahba, an envoy, presented at the Central Asian Society in London, he likened Wahhabism to Martin Luther’s reformation, which in Europe led to Protestantism.
Religious reformation - be it Christianity, Islam or any other faith - inevitably leads to deplorable acts of cruelty; to inquisitions, jihads, persecutions, exiles, executions and sectarian wars. Religions when reforming are consumed by one overwhelming desire - to return to a ‘pristine’ time, to Eden, to the Promised Land, to an Utopia of the holy books. No religious reformer, it seems, can escape this call for a return to the genesis. The Puritans left in boats and sought it in America; Gandhi sought it in his Ram Raj; the ISIS of today seek it in an Islamic Caliphate. Even New Age gurus such as James Redfield of The Celestine Prophecy fame, talk of an ‘ancient wisdom’, the return to which will somehow lead to a more fulfilling life. Except of course, this flies in the face of everything we know about human evolution. If we believe, as any rational human being must, in Darwinian evolution, then the only thing ‘ancient wisdom’ can teach us is how to make tools with which to catch ants.
Just as Christian reformations and revivalist movements - Lutheranism, Calvinism - were in fact movements against the changes they saw happening within Christianity, Islamic reformations have been protests against the challenges presented by the inclusivity of the Moguls, the unsettling poetry of the Sufis who advocate a spiritual jihad instead of bloodshed, the licentiousness of the western world, the heretical Shias and the lapsed Sunnis. Because the vagaries of circumstance make life unpredictable, chaotic and untameable, it is easy to convince people that strict religious compliance can bring about order. Each reformed sect of religion tends to be more absurd and literalists than its predecessor, finding obscure interpretations of their holy books to justify their irrationality. If we need proof, the bizarre preachings of the Believer’s movement in Goa is a prime example.
Religions don’t reform. Civil society reforms; visionary individuals reform. At best, religion tweaks its dogma when civil society forces its hand. The Catholic Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is a good example. The popular vote in Ireland which voted yes to gay marriage was a result of civil society activism and despite opposition from the Catholic Church. Last month, the US legalised gay marriage through its Supreme Court. Can one imagine such reformation coming from within the Church? It took the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and industrialisation to truly impact the moral zeitgeist of Western European societies.
What we need in Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Buddhism is not a religious reformation but an act of goodwill. We need people to recognise that to live modern lives we have to arrive at our morality through negotiation, empathy and consensus. Reformation and religion are basically incompatible. To be religious is to give up one’s right to question; it is to be a follower, a disciple, it is to suppress natural curiosity, to quell scientific enquiry, to continue to believe in an untruth even when all evidence points to the contrary. To reform is to constantly want to change the status quo, to evolve, to mutate, to understand with some amount of compassion the fragility of the human condition. It is a feat of wonder that societies, since time immemorial, have survived religion and continued to evolve despite the strictures it imposes on them.
ï® Selma Carvalho is the author of A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865 - 1980. Between 2011 - 2014, she headed the Oral Histories of British Goans project in London.
