Onward Muslim soldiers

Matt Yglesias takes up the question of whether Islam is in the middle of, or possibly about to have, its own Reformation. I usually think sweeping historical analogies of this sort are pretty useless, but this one is kind of an exception, since I think it's relevant to ask if Islam is finally going to undergo a separation of church and state. Yglesias thinks the analogy holds some water, but isn't enthused about the prospect:

[W]hat happened during the Protestant Reformation...[was] massive religious wars in which huge numbers of people died. This happened on the European continent and also in the British Isles. It's true that in the long-run the Reformation led to the development of doctrines about religious tolerance and liberalism, but it took a good long time...In between came an awful lot of wars, witch-burning, fanaticism, etc....[T]he Islamism-related violence we're seeing is in some ways reminiscent of the violence associated with the Reformation and Counterreformation[.]

Very astute (if a little heavy on the italics). But I think that if we really want to make an analogy between Christianity then and Islam now, we have to step back and take a broad look at the story of how Christianity became what it is.

In the Dark Ages, circa 1000 A.D., Christendom had no separation between church and state. Clergy and noblemen vied for power constantly, and nobody knew who was really in charge, although there was officially a Pope (or two), a Patriarch of Constantinople, and a Holy Roman Emperor (who was, most likely, none of the three). Christian Europe was an impoverished backwater, far inferior in technology and organization to the neighboring Muslim lands. Christians had huge fertility rates, though, and those extra boys were always fighting each other over little scraps of honor.

Then Something Big happened: The Crusades. A radical Christian leader (Pope Urban II) stood up and said "Let's all go attack the Muslims and reclaim Jerusalem!" And the Christian world heeded its call, sending wave after wave of surplus boys screaming down on the relatively peaceful Muslim world. The Muslims, however, had things like horse archers and gunpowder and big castles and siege engines, and they thumped the poor unwashed Christians without breaking much of a sweat. In fact, the Crusaders ended up doing much more damage to their fellow Christians along the way, pretty much destroying the Byzantine Empire.

The Crusades were probably a big wake-up call to Europe. The whole high-fertility, religious-fanatic, scream-and-charge thing wasn't working. What's more, the Muslims had those pretty minarets and that amazing exploding black stuff. "We've gotta get us some of that!" said the Christians, and the Renaissance began. Europe's transformation in a few short centuries from indigent backwater to the center of world power and culture is one of history's most amazing chapters.

But in order for Christendom to transform itself, the role of religion in public life had to change. Kings took power from clergymen as nations centralized and strengthened. As the Church lost central control, schisms occurred, and people started coming up with versions of the Christian faith that were more individualized (Lutherans, Huguenots) or more nationalistic (Church of England). That of course resulted in the massive and bloody wars that Yglesias spoke of - the best example being the 30 Years' War, which pretty much depopulated most of Germany. As Yglesias notes, it was only after those wars - which the forces of theocracy decisively lost - that the idea of separation of Church and State became Christendom's new norm, and Christianity became the peaceful happy faith we now know and love, with only the occasional abortion-doctor shooting to remind us of its bloody past.

Which brings us to the Muslim world today. Things look pretty different than they did back in 1000 A.D. Now it's the West that built the fancy skyscrapers (the Burj Dubai being a big case of minaret envy) and the big bombs, and it's the Middle East that's an impoverished backwater ruled by shifting coalitions of princes and muftis and imams and presidents-for-life. And here comes Osama bin Laden, our modern-day Urban II, saying "Let's all go attack the Christians and reclaim Jerusalem!" And here come the swarms of young extra sons to answer the call, swarming over the hills to blow up buses in London, shoot helicopters in Afghanistan, and sprinkle IEDs over the roads of Iraq. And like their Crusader predecessors, today's Jihadis mostly end up killing people of their own faith (the Sunni/Shia bloodshed is even a bit reminiscent of the Catholic destruction of Orthodox Constantinople).

But we live in an era of al-Jazeera and the internet, and word gets around a lot more quickly than it used to. The Crusaders broke themselves on Muslim swords for four hundred years before they finally realized that it just wasn't working; today's Jihadis will probably not take so long to come to their senses. Jihad/Crusade just doesn't work. It's unsustainable militarily, it can't hang on to any gains, and it just ends up highlighting the technological and organizational weaknesses of a society that sends its sons to die so ineffectually.

That means the next thing we'll hopefully see is lots of Muslims questioning why their social system has failed them, and realizing that it has something to do with religion and the state. From what I hear, this is already starting to happen - reformist scholars like Tariq Ramadan and even post-Muslim secularists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are all over the news. Though many are quick to point out that Tariq Ramadan is a far cry from a modern European liberal, I'd counter that he's a heck of a lot more liberal than Martin Luther or John Calvin. Basically, Muslims are no dummies - they realize that something big has to change, and a lot of the change has to do with religion. And that is a Reformation.

Of course, Yglesias is right - when we see Muslim reformists and conservatives slaughtering each other, then we'll know the Muslim Reformation is clearly in full swing. And I'm sure that will happen, probably sooner than we expect. But the slaughter won't be as bad as Europe's Reformation, just as the modern Jihads have been nowhere near as bloody as the Crusades. The world is (hopefully) way too wealthy and settled to tolerate those casualty figures. And because everything is sped up now, thanks to the wonders of information technology, I expect the Muslim Reformation to be concluded much more quickly than the Christian one.

No one can deny that big changes are afoot in Islam. Will these changes lead to separation of church and state, like they did for Christianity four centuries ago? I hope so. But just in case that kind of reform isn't inevitable, we should keep pushing the idea of church-state separation, and emphasize how much it's done to make Western society richer, stronger, and more dynamic over the years.

I actually have high hopes for the Muslim Reformation. Someday al-Qaeda will be as forgotten as the Knights Templar.