Reformations

Europe went through a religious upheaval in the 16th and 17th centuries. It started with the Protestant rebellion against the Catholic Church’s excesses. Martin Luther and John Calvin led the vanguard of what was to be called the Protestant reformation. It was not, however, a reformation in the sense that we take the word today. Both Luther and Calvin, as well as their followers, were hardline religious fundamentalists by any standards. What was reformative about their doctrine was that they rejected the ecclesiastical abuses by the church, which had become commonplace, especially in Germany. Luther himself was said to suffer from profound religious anxieties and was obsessed with the idea of a righteous God. Historians and psycho-biographers have speculated that he suffered from a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which in fact fuelled his religious zeal for the reform of the church. His writings produced the idea of Christian liberty, of the individual’s own approach to God and a rejection of papacy.
This was an idea that ignited a fire in Northern and Western Europe. The idea that the believers could worship in their own languages unhindered by clerical overlords in the church was liberationist and a refreshing change for a faith that had become overburdened with clerical bureaucracy. But if the humanists of the time believed Luther and his movement would usher in an era of intellectual freedom; they were sorely disappointed for Luther only turned more dogmatic, inviting rebukes from even reform-minded intellectuals like Erasmus who denounced Luther’s increasingly opprobrious writings. Luther denounced everything remotely connected to Catholicism, including the rituals, the crosses, statues and paintings. He believed in straitjacket simplicity in faith, not unlike Wahhabis of the Muslim world today.
The key to Luther’s success and that of Protestantism as a whole also was helped by the fact that various European monarchies, now beginning to resemble nation states in infancy, were not entirely happy with the Roman Catholic Church’s overreach in their domestic matters. So, for example, in the UK, King Henry VIII, who had been a notable opponent of reform and Lutheranism in his early years, broke with Rome over the pope’s refusal to grant an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He wanted to marry the vivacious Anne Boleyn. Throughout the remainder of his reign, King Henry VIII had to maintain a delicate balance between the reformers and the conservatives within his new Church of England. Yet the Church of England, under Bishop Cranmer, was a dogged opponent of papacy and papal traditions. Statues and paintings of the churches were destroyed and monasteries looted. All of this had some political motivation as well. By taking over monasteries and their vast lands, England was able to finance several disastrous wars against France, Scotland and later Spain. At the heart of England’s conversion to Protestantism lay political opportunism, greed and avarice of the king and his courtiers. The religious liberty of Catholics was curtailed; they were denounced as heretics. Under Elizabeth I, through the Act of Supremacy and then Act of Uniformity, England practically outlawed Catholicism from the island. The entire populace of England was required to worship as the Queen ordered and to attend church regularly.
Meanwhile, Catholics, for their part, were equally brutal in their persecution of Protestants wherever they were strong. In France and in Spain, the two states that benefitted directly from association with Rome, Protestantism was seen as a heretical plague. However, what the Protestant reformation did do was make Catholics look inwards and attempt a reform their own Church and doctrine. This was the lesser-known Catholic reformation. Ironically, one of the major early leaders of this reformation was Ximenes de Cineros, the chief architect and grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. This reform movement, partly in reaction to its Protestant equivalent, grew strong in Spain and then spread to other parts of Europe. The Catholic reformation did so by three main agencies i.e. the Council of Trend, the Index and the revived Inquisition and the Society of Jesus. Of these, the third was the most important. Council of Trent was a council convened by the pope himself. Its main purpose was to define the doctrine of the Catholic Church to answer the innovation of the Protestants. Inquisitions had risen up all over Europe and a need was felt to define what heresy was and this was the purpose of the council. There were, however, some attempts to bring Protestants back into the fold but these were firmly rejected as compromise with the Protestants was ruled out. What it did do, however, was initiate a process of reform in the church to undo many of the abuses that had led to the Protestant rebellion in the first place. The two reformations thus proceeded side by side often in reaction to each other. Catholics and Protestants persecuted each other all over Europe. Over time, however, the two simultaneous reformations heralded in the intellectual freedom that allowed for enlightenment to flourish. With that came the idea of religious toleration but it was a painfully slow process; in that process many were burnt at the stake and many lost their heads to the executioner.
The reason for recounting this long drawn out process from European history is that in my opinion we see many of the same signs in the Muslim world, in particular Pakistan. When the reformation was underway, it was never pretty for those at the receiving end of it. It felt something like what we feel today. The modern age has both hastened it and made it more brutal, both for Muslims and the world at large but such is our burden to bear. There is much reason for hope and optimism, for example the recent move by the government to bring in laws against takfir (accusations of apostasy). Coming 41 years too late for one sect, the proposed law nevertheless holds out hope for some forced reconciliation between various schools of thought and a modicum of sanity. The need of the hour is to press home to Muslims whether in Pakistan or rest of the world that the means to settle doctrinal differences can never be violence but dialogue.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com