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Saturday, February 10, 2007

Putting the Col Back in Colloquy

For most of its life, Benzene 4 ran with comments disabled, on the theory that any discussion would take place through the "letter column". Long after it became clear that the blog letter column would be no more current than Benzene 3's snail equivalent, I finally enabled them.

The comments box is fine for short replies, or for strangers passing through who don't know any better, but it's not practical for any real discussion. If you're a regular reader, you know where to find me.

Responding to last week's sprawling wrap-up of our colloquy on Islam, Steve Hutton writes:

Separation of church and state, as the concept is commonly understood in the U.S., is a recent and local phenomenon. It doesn't even exist today in much of western Europe, where the state collects "church tax" from all members of an established church, or in Ontario where Catholic schools up to grade 12 are fully funded by taxes.

Early American Protestants had many denominations, each of which was a minority and many of which had recent experience of being a persecuted minority. They decided that the state shouldn't take sides between Protestant denominations, and this neutrality (which Jefferson idealized as a "wall of separation between church and state") was useful as the U.S. dealt with waves of Catholic, Jewish, and other non-Protestant immigration and as fringe groups took protestantism so far from the mainstream that they came to be considered new religions (Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.). Religious neutrality also serves as the basis for America's integration of its relatively new Muslim minority, although that's going through a bit of a rough patch right now.

Separation of church and state is primarily a political question, a practical means of dealing with religious diversity. In countries (or, indeed, parts of the U.S.) where one Christian group forms an overwhelming majority, I haven't noticed church leaders arguing that they have a religious obligation to keep their noses out of political questions.

All of what Steve says is true, but it's not what I was talking about. The misunderstanding is entirely my fault. I should know better than to use the common phrase "separation of church and state", since of course everyone is going to read it in the modern sense that Steve describes here.

My emailed attempt to explain to Steve what I was talking about isn't very clear, so instead I'll quote Bernard Lewis again. I have enormous admiration for Lewis as a historian -- his work in the Ottoman archives was truly groundbreaking -- but I'd hardly call myself a disciple: I disagree with most of his political views; I do agree with him on the Armenian genocide, for which I think he gets a lot of unfair criticism from those who simply don't understand what he's saying; and on the grand debate over orientalism I'm probably closer to Lewis than to Edward Said, but I have some sympathies for each. But on this particular topic, which Lewis discusses frequently, I think he is excellent:

In classical Islam there was no distinction between Church and state. In Christendom the existence of two authorities goes back to the founder, who enjoined his followers to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and to God the things which are God's. Throughout the history of Christendom there have been two powers: God and Caesar, represented in this world by sacerdotium and regnum, or, in modern terms, church and state. They may be associated, they may [be] separated; they may be in harmony, they may be in conflict; one may dominate, the other may dominate; one may interfere, the other may protest, as we are now learning again. But always there are two, the spiritual and the temporal powers, each with its own laws and jurisdictions, its own structure and hierarchy. In pre-westernized Islam, there were not two powers but one, and the question of separation, therefore, could not arise. The distinction between church and state, so deeply rooted in Christendom, did not exist in Islam, and in classical Arabic, as well as in other languages which derive their intellectual and political vocabulary from classical Arabic, there were no pairs of words corresponding to spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical, religious and secular. It was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then under the influence of Western ideas and institutions, that new words were found, first in Turkish and then in Arabic, to express the idea of secular. Even in modern usage, there is no Muslim equivalent to "the Church," meaning "ecclesiastical organization." All the different words for mosque denote only a building which is a place of worship, not an abstraction, an authority, or an institution. One might perhaps discern, in the postclassical evolution of the professional men of religion, some approximation to a clergy, and such terms as "ulema" and "mollahs" almost acquire this sense. But there is no equivalent to the term "laity," a meaningless expression in the context of Islam. At the present time, the very notion of a secular jurisdiction and authority -- of a so-to-speak unsanctified part of life that lies outside the scope of religious law and those who uphold it -- is seen as an impiety, indeed as the ultimate betrayal of Islam. The righting of this wrong is the principal aim of Islamic revolutionaries and, in general, of those described as Islamic fundamentalists.

My answer to Steve was less clear, but he understood:

I get your point, but I wonder if the difference is really as stark as you make it out to be. Certainly, Islam doesn't have a formal hierarchy of pope, archbishops, bishops, and the like (except, to some extent, in Iran) and without that sort of bureaucracy it couldn't administer a state. But there's a rough pecking order of religious schools and leaders, and I imagine that religious leaders could make themselves very useful or obstructive to political leaders even before the "modern" era.

Your article was excellent, by the way, but I wonder if you are seeing this very foreign culture as even more foreign than it actually is. A lot of individual human motivations and circumstances are universal, and people will find ways to be kind, cruel, generous, greedy, pious, profane, etc. etc. using whatever tools their culture offers them.

You're persisting in drawing a distinction between religious leaders and political leaders. Yes, of course, one can be more one than the other, but I think it is your home culture that encourages you to fall into these categories.

What is Muqtada al-Sadr? Is he a political leader or a religious leader? Or Ali al-Sistani? Or Ali Khamenei? Obviously each is a bit of both. I don't think any of them fits your suggested pattern of a religious leader aiding or obstructing political leaders.

It's more than a semantic question. It is very important to understand from where a man like al-Sadr draws his authority over others. Classifying him as religious or political will tend to interfere with that understanding, I think.

Is this really so different from American Protestantism? Was Martin Luther King a religious leader or a political leader? Jesse Jackson? Jerry Falwell?

Until recently, both eastern and western countries have been religious monocultures, in which the people with political power all adhered to the dominant religion. In most western countries, there has been a hierarchical national or trans-national church set aside from the national government (as in Iran), and that has sometimes led to power struggles. In most Muslim countries (as in the U.S.), the dominant religion is much less hierarchical but a common religious view pervades political and social discussion.

I'd be interested to know how things worked out in the Ottoman empire before it was obviously in decline. I don't think the Sultan was an authority on Islam, or that religious leaders had any prospect of being made Governor of a province. To me, this says that there was a (non-hierarchical) church, separate from the state.

Yes, the concepts of law, science, etc. are tied up with religion under Islam but that was also true under Christianity. Universities were founded for the education of clergy. Scientists tried to understand the mechanics of God's creation, and took it for granted that their discoveries would be consistent with the literal truth of the Bible. Laws were based on interpretations of the Bible, kings were put on their thrones by God, people were endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, and even religious freedom was justified "whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free". (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom)

I think the real contrast is between post-Darwin western society and everything else, not between Muslim and Christian societies.

Regarding Ottoman administration, at the local level all government was administered by the qadis, who were by definition part of the ulema, so in that sense I suppose you could say that the entire class of local magistrates were "religious leaders" -- though again I think the very idea of "religious" is bound to mislead if seen in Western context.

As for a qadi getting promoted to governorship over a vilayet, I really don't know, but it sounds improbable. Many of the governorships were originally hereditary, in preservation of the previously independent monarchy which the empire had absorbed into vassalship (a habit inherited from Roman practice). For those where the original line of succession had lapsed, I think the governors were generally appointed directly by the sultan and were chosen from among his inner circle.

To whatever extent that a qadi could not aspire to be appointed governor, I'd be more inclined to characterize that as a lack of upward mobility, or tension between centralized and decentralized authority, rather than an exclusion by the state of religious leaders.

Other than that, I'm not sure which religious leaders you mean. The justice minister? The grand muftis? Muftis were academic types -- more like scholars than leaders -- but yes, the grand muftis were state officials, sort of like the surgeon general, and as far as I know their opinions were never binding on the qadis.

These are my recollections, anyway, from incomplete study once upon a time. I'm happy to be corrected if anyone out there knows better.

9:11:15 PM [permalink] comment []

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