Three centuries on, an English philosopher of freedom gives Muslims and Christians food for thought
By B.C.
FOR anyone who believes in freedom of thought, worship and speech, John Locke must rank as a towering genius. In an era when Europe had been torn asunder by warfare between Catholic and Protestant kings, he set out the revolutionary idea that the state should hold back from adjudicating or enforcing religious doctrine. A century later, his ideas had a decisive influence on America's founding fathers. And to this day, he is provoking some rich intellectual debate, among Muslims as well as Christians.
There is one passage from Locke that is often quoted to challenge the idea that Christianity is simply ahead of Islam in learning to accept religious diversity. As a sort of mind-game, the philosopher urged readers to imagine two doctrinally different Christian churches standing side by side, with neither having any hope of supplanting the other. That would be impossible in the Christian world, he suggested, but very possible among the Muslim Ottomans.
Let us suppose two churches, the one of Arminians, the other of Calvinists, residing in the city of Constantinople. Will anyone suggest that either of these churches has right to deprive the others of their estates and liberty (as we see practised elsewhere) because of...differing from it in some doctrines and ceremonies, while the Turks, in the meanwhile, silently stand by and laugh to see with what inhuman cruelty Christians thus rage against Christians?
As Reza Shah-Kazemi writes in a monograph published by the Institute of Ismaili Studies, a London-based centre of Islamic scholarship: "It is evident Locke was deeply struck by the contrast between the paradoxically tolerant 'barbarians'—the Muslim Ottomans—and violently intolerant yet ostensibly 'civilised' Christians."
Actually, the great thinker was a bit too deeply struck, if the whole truth be told. The Ottomans did pick and choose between Christian groups; they preferred the Orthodox to the Catholics, and they deprived even the Orthodox of quite a lot of "estates and liberty" while incorporating the Orthodox bishops into the imperial power structure. Most monastic property was turned over to Islamic foundations, while some stayed in Christian hands, albeit subject to the sultan's pleasure. But perhaps Locke's point wasn't strictly about the Ottomans; he was trying to show the absurdity of any government adjudicating between Christian doctrines, especially but not only in cases where the government happened not to be Christian at all.
In any case, the debate about Locke goes on; and some Turks are doing more than laugh. Mustafa Akyol, a writer on Islam, has proposed that a Lockean spirit of freedom is exactly the corrective influence that today's Muslim world, mired in dreams of a caliphate, badly needs. As he notes approvingly, "Locke...argued that the Bible does not propose a system of government (like the divine right of kings)...he emphasised that the religious faith of the individual is meaningful only when based on the 'inward persuasion of the mind' which cannot be compelled by outside force." In Mr Akyol's reading of Locke, it is not only governance that would be healthier if it were separated from religion; religion would be healthier too. Muslims as well as Christians should take note, in the Turkish writer's view.
By the way, those Calvinists and the Arminians are still arguing, especially in the world of American evangelical Christianity, over their conflicting ideas on human salvation and predestination. They fight over theology teaching posts, but not physically. And neither side is expecting the Feds to ride in and settle the argument by force; for this relief, we owe thanks to John Locke.
