Exsecrari Ab Religio Omni! Ego Somnias de Mundi Profanum...

Islam, Christianity and Religious Culture

Cultural Relativism is now so accepted by our society that even a NASCAR fan wearing a wife-beater, swilling beer while sitting in the back of his pickup with like-minded friends will cite its principles to defend his choice of pastimes. As much as advancing Cultural Relativism has been a priority of the Left for decades (and rightly so) in an effort to combat the American tendency towards baseless triumphalism and a certain self-congratulatory myopia, one cannot escape the basic truth that insofar as nothing in nature is exactly equal, neither are cultures and religions (regardless of the analytical framework and value system one uses to examine them). To the extent that they are meaningful, and thus have any real impact on their members and adherents, such membership is itself unequally positive.

The utility of these sorts of comparisons derive primarily from their use as a reality check. We all think we are smart, enlightened and closer to the truth than our neighbors. By extension we believe that our religion is best, the others (and their members) are worth of pity, and perhaps some outreach to bring them back to the One True Path. If one holds that ecumenical tolerance is the sine qua non of a mature, confident religion that deals with religious pluralism in an adult fashion, then comparing one's levels of such to one's peers is the only way to ascertain if this is a baseless conceit or a quality one possesses.

Christianity and Islam are unarguably the most aggressively proselytizing religions. All of the others believe they follow a path laid out by divine mandate, but either believe that their path is still flawed by the flaws inherent to a human understanding of anything, or that there are equally valid paths laid out for others. (Hinduism/Buddhism and Judaism respectively) While the tenets of Islam include the belief that Islam is the way God wants everyone to live and a message that is the obligation of every Muslim to spread, (Christianity implies an identical belief) they also include explicit ecumenism. For a millennium the Islamic world would be more tolerant of other faiths, more progressive in social and economic policy, more open to scientific inquiry and simply wealthier than Christian Europe. (625 AD, the founding of Islam, until close of the Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment period, circa 1650.)

This disparity is too easily underestimated. The tension between science and religion that so obsessed Europe early on (with the rejection and suppression of the Greek/Roman intellectual tradition) and continued later to Galileo and Copernicus was never evidenced in the Islamic world. The fields of medicine, physics and biology were all pursued without the threat of excommunication and death, and thus progressed far more rapidly. Via cultural contacts with India and China mathematics and astronomy also progressed at a time when Europe paid these subjects no attention at all, leaving the Islamic world to develop far faster.

The differences were not in science alone. The Muslims were economic progressives, levying a tax upon the rich to pay for feeding, clothing and educating the poor. Public institutions were built to bring the rewards of prosperity to the masses, and coupled with medical insight, public health infrastructure received investment. Little things like closed sewers, public baths and the like improved the average health of a resident of the Ummah to heights that would not be seen in Europe for some time to come.

What happened? Certainly societies can stagnate in terms of technological development without any core flaw in their value system, but in many ways the Islamic world has regressed socially and even economically. What event or movement could so dramatically change the very identity of a culture, from a progressive, tolerant community priding itself on its education and intellectual inquiry to the reactionary, millenial and somewhat xenophobic present completely unable to perform even the most cursory self-introspection. At one time Islam was urbane and cosmopolitan, now it indulges in bizarre conspiracy theories that assert that literally every non-Muslim man woman and child is working to oppress them.

The Christian religious community had a century of violent religious conflict, (1/3 of Germany's population was slain or died of starvation in a thirty-year portion of that period) and came out of it with a firm understanding of the perils of allowing religion into the public sphere. We Americans may pretend that we invented "the separation of church and state", but after 1650 one really can't find a single state action (at least in terms of foreign policy) by any nation in Europe whose primary purpose wasn't secular.

Islam also had a violent division between its adherents; Sunni and Shi'a fought over who should succeed Mohammed and be the first Caliph of the Islamic Ummah (community). The Shi'a believe Ali, his son in law ought have been that successor. Instead three people reigned in turn before Ali was installed, and his throne was usurped not long after. This conflict was fought in 632, perhaps too soon after the founding of Islam for the conflict to be seen as a reason for disassociating the state from the mosque. No real governmental infrastructure existed outside of the religious establishment, and so perhaps there was no indication of an alternative.

All of these seems very circumstantial. Any ideas on the reason for the disparate tracks Islam and Christianity took, and specifically the change in Islam's identity? I welcome your comments.