Religious reform is no solution to ISIS or Hindutva

Many years ago I was explaining the poetry of Harivansh Rai Bachchan to an American friend, and why I liked it so much. I mentioned particularly both Bachchan's open-mindedness and playfulness, which made his Madhushala such a worthy successor to the Rubbaiyat of Omar Khayyam. When my friend asked who Khayyam was, I mentioned that he had been a poet, mathematician and astronomer living in the town of Nishapur, in Persia.

"Oh, a Renaissance Man!" she exclaimed, using the term for a person with many skills, both in the social and physical sciences.

"Yeah, kind of," I replied. Except, of course, Omar Khayyam died three centuries before the Renaissance started in Europe. So what do we call him?

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Khayyam is a good example of why European terms have little meaning beyond Europe. He would have been a man of the Dark Ages, if we accept European terminology, except a man who built his own observatory, introduced concepts of geometric algebra and practiced both philosophy and poetry does not seem to be living in the Dark Ages. In fact, the Dark Ages were generally dark only for Europeans. For the rest of the world, they were fairly bright. Until the 18th century, for example, India accounted for more than 20 per cent of world trade, China accounted for close to 30 per cent. Both more than Europe. Now India accounts for less than five percent, and China is just getting to 20 per cent.

For most of the world the Dark Ages were those that were brought by Europeans when they landed upon the shore of the Americas, or China, or India, bringing with them war, pestilence and opium.

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Nevertheless, it is European terms that we speak in, whether it is of Dark Ages, or of Enlightenment or of religious reform.

The last term is especially rich. Having captured lands through bribery or war, European colonial movements often blamed the societies and religions of those they had captured as weak, corrupt or unscientific - forgetting that the gunpowder in their guns was invented in China, the mathematics they used was learned from Arabs, and the numbers (that they wrongly called Arabic) were of Indian origin. Many social movements rose in response among the defeated people. 19th century Bengal - the first province captured by the British after the Battle (or Bribery) of Plassey in 1757 - positively bristled with Hindu reform movements - from those of Ram Mohun Roy to Debendranath Tagore (the father of Rabindranath). After the failure of the 1857 Uprising, other "reform" movements arose, like Dayanand Saraswati's Arya Samaj and the Deobandi movement, which are now castigated as needing more "reform".

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While religious revival of one sort or the other has been prevalent in all religious societies - these reform movements came up specifically in response to European colonialism. Many of them explicitly referenced the European Reformation which, according to both them and the Europeans, had allowed Europeans to progress beyond that of other societies.

Even today, many well-meaning (I presume) people talk of how one religion or the other needs to go through the process of reformation. Most of these people are ignorant of what the European Reformation was. Primarily, it was revolt of young religious scholars - newly exposed to ideas coming in after interactions with the Arabs, who themselves had inculcated those ideas from the Greeks, Persians, Chinese and Indians. The revolt was against the traditions of a church that was also a secular power - the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing like it has existed in any other culture. There is no Hindu equivalent. And while Muslims have the idea of the Caliphate, the vast majority of the Muslim world - spread across Central Asia, South Asia and South East Asia - was never under the control of the Caliphate at any point of time. The Caliphate itself was not a religious institution like the Roman Catholic Church.

The only real equivalent one can find is the Vilayat-e-Faqih (Rule of the Religious Jurists) idea proposed, and implemented, by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran - an innovation that is unprecedented in Islamic history. Despite not having an equivalent of a Roman Catholic Church, the rest of the world is told by Europeans, or those from European colonies (some of them prison colonies) such as the US, Canada and Australia, that we should "reform" anyway. Let me, by way of clarification, tell you a story of a religious leader, an important town, and reform.

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Having captured political power in a small but politically important town, the religious leader - who had broken with traditional religious authority and aspired to set his own ideas into place - slowly started to impose moral codes. Swearing was banned, as was card playing. Dancing invited punishment, even if it was at weddings. Sex, of course, was to be loathed, and adultery led to executions. Torture was used to get confessions.  Women were restricted from public lectures, Jews abhorred, and a prominent doctor who challenged the religious views of the leader was burned at the stake. Older women were particularly vulnerable, and over a four year period, when the town was hit by disease, 58 women were executed for being "witches".

By the time of his death, the religious leader had managed to train up a body of recruits who carried forth his dour preachings to the continent - words that denied that a man or woman could achieve salvation; that, in fact, we were all condemned unless we were given the grace of an unknowable God. There was no idea of justice being achieved by humans at all. All that was, was to be found in the Holy Book.

This might remind you of the Taliban, or the Saudis, or even the Islamic State, and you may be wondering when we get to the reform part. But this is actually the story of the European Reformation, and one of its most important leaders, John Calvin. This is the story of his rule in Geneva, Switzerland from 1536 until his death in 1564.

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Is this really the direction we want to go? Don't we already have enough of exactly this type of mess, whether from Hindutva thugs or Islamic leaders, to keep railing more and more about "religious reform"? In the end the civilisation that came to Europe came from the slow strengthening of civil authority and the establishment of Rule of Law - the same law applied to all people regardless of class, colour and creed.

It took a long time, and as is evidenced by the lingering racism in the United States or the persecution of the Roma in many parts of Europe, this process is far from complete. Like the gathering of science from across the world in the process which is now called the Enlightenment, the growth of democracy, of civil institutions, of human rights and legal claims, is a universal process. There is no template of perfection, or a cookie-cutter solution that we can cut from one place and stick on another.

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Unfortunately, we continue to find charlatan upon charlatan who wishes to reform one religion or the other, and cannot see the world for what it is: a community of equals who are strengthened when they are all treated fairly, and none unjustly. That is the goal that those of every religion - or who believe in none - can wholeheartedly support, and that can only be achieved by political reform, not religious reform.