Where is our Martin Luther?

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, he set a train in motion that traversed time dilations and initiated a chain of events that undeniably had its roots in that All-Saints-Eve in Saxony on October 31, 1517. By giving the Pope a good old wallop in the shape of the Theses, Luther proclaimed the arrival of ‘reason’ and the previously unfathomable act of questioning the church.

Western Europe was marred with discontent with regards to the activities of the papacy in the early 1500s. The church was the hierarchy, the Pope had the final word, and with a handful of Latin connoisseurs, the words of Bible were moulded by the Pope into any sculpt that he desired. This manipulation kept his hegemony intact. Bohemian scholar Jan Hus – burned at the stake for heresy – and English Scholastic Philosopher John Wycliffe – declared a heretic; body exhumed and destroyed – had preceded Luther in their quest for purging society of tinkered religious doctrines, but it was the German priest who ensured that their sacrifices did not go in vain.

The current Islamic world bears an uncanny resemblance to the European conditions of Luther’s epoch. Heinous acts in the name of religion are being extolled on a daily basis. Recently, the hue and cry regarding Qadri’s conviction was a petrifying sight. By backing Qadri’s actions, we have spelled out where we stand on the blasphemy debate, and more painfully on our religious understanding. A lot has been written and said about the utter havoc that supporting such a blatant act of killing will cause and has caused for a considerable span of time, and the finger inevitably points at the barefaced misinterpretation of Islamic teachings.

The gist of Luther’s 95 Theses was twofold:

a) The Pope is a false authority. Bible is the one supreme authority.

b) All Christians were equal and did not need priests and bishops to interpret the Bible for them.

And, one of the pivotal changes that Luther brought about was the translation and expansion of Bible into the language of the people. The masses in Germany couldn’t comprehend Latin, but had learnt by rote their prayers and passages from the Bible – sounds familiar doesn’t it?

In Pakistan, where nearly all of the Muslim population undergoes Arabic education as far as “reading” and “pronunciation” is concerned, it is appalling to note that Arabic understanding is criminally neglected. Spreading the teachings in a commonly understood vernacular is surely the logical thing to do. Logic and clergy, however, rarely go hand-in-hand.

Like the papacy labelled Latin in the middle ages, the pseudo-Islamic scholars would have you believe that Arabic is somehow a sphinx-like language whose myriad layers make it impossible for a non-native to fully comprehend, and that translations into other dialects transform the meaning. Masses succumb to the daunting claim and without going through the Holy Scriptures themselves, blindly follow the scholars. Not deriding the importance of scholars, but surely without going through the Quran in a parlance that is understandable, how can one synchronise one’s ideas with a school of thought – and hence religious thoughts have become a matter of family inheritance.

Martin Luther’s feat might’ve created the volatile Catholic-Protestant divide initially, but after the Treaty of Westphalia’s ink dried in 1648, a string of epoch-making episodes followed eventually culminating in Europe’s revival. The Renaissance, that was limited and its effect sporadic till the early 16th century, received a boost in the realms of culture, thought, art, religion, science and humanism as minds began to open up.

Reformation merged into Renaissance and freshened up the antediluvian Europeans. Leading into the Industrial Revolution, and encompassing new ideas like secularism, nationalism, liberalism and democracy – in the 18th and 19th century – this transformation brought about progression in all facets of life.

Leading writers have drawn parallels between the Arab Spring and the 18th/19th century revolutions in Europe – Fareed Zakaria called it the reincarnation of the 1848 Revolutions. However, since these revolutions weren’t preceded by a rethinking of orthodoxy, their effect has not been as expansive..

A Christian eighth-grader was recently accused of blasphemy for a misplacement of a dot and another student was suspended by a Peshawar school for trimming his beard. While such incidents have unfortunately become a norm, it is Saudi Arabia that takes this particular cake. King Abdullah proudly decreed on September 25 that Saudi women would be able to vote and run in local elections due in 2015 – only 122 years after women first got suffrage in New Zealand. The poor souls still can’t drive though.

Funny how when France bans the niqaab the rage knows no bounds, but when there’s a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia – that’s okay. US drone attacks are hauled over coals on a daily basis, but if the Taliban raze our core in the name of Islam – that’s okay. Machiavelli had counselled the West to separate religion from politics around the time Martin Luther was busy synthesizing his list of Theses, but we still continue to make a mélange at our own expense.

A throwback to historical Muslim governments shows a progressive social setup – be it the Caliphate of Baghdad, the Moors in Spain, the Mughals in India, the Central Asian Sultans or the last to fall, the Ottoman Empire – the involvement of the mullah was marginal.

Another baffling double-standard we embody is our impassioned demand for justice all over the globe when we aren’t allowed to practice “our” beliefs in “their” homelands the way we want to, while ignoring the fact that non-Muslims are rarely allowed to practice their religion freely in most Muslim states. This is coming from the flag-bearers of a religion that gave birth to religious tolerance.

A metamorphosis of status quo is thus the need of the hour if we want the Arab Spring or the scores of other springs to bear fruit. So, now to the million dollar question: Where is our Martin Luther?