MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 209each with its own idiosyncratic creed; but generally they had four tenets in
common:
- Salvation could be a palpable, right-here/right-now experience.
- Salvation could be achieved through faith alone.
- No person needed an intermediary to connect with God.
- People could get everything they needed to know about religion
from the Bible; they didn't need to know Latin or the conclusions
of church councils or the pronouncements of priests and scholars.
In some ways, the Protestant Reformation carne out of the same sorts
of dissatisfactions and hungers that had given birth to Sufism. In the West,
however, no Ghazali appeared to synthesize orthodox dogmas with the
quest for personal religious breakthrough.
In other regards, the Protestant Reformation resembled the movements
of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyah-the exact opposite of Sufism. Like
those Muslim theologians, Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize all
later accretions of doctrine and go back to the original source: the Bible.
The Book.
But ultimately, the Protestant Reformation was nothing like anything
that had happened in Islam. Protestant Reformers rebelled against the
Church and the pope, but in Islam, there was no church or pope to rebel
against. In the West, the religious reformers who broke the hegemony of
the Catholic Church didn't do so to raise up some monolithic new church
but to empower the individual. Such a quest in no way pitted them against
Christianity itself, because Christianity was inherently about the individual:
a plan for the salvation of each person. Islam, however, was a plan for how
a community should work; any reform movement that sought to secure for
each individual the right to practice the religion as he or she thought best
would inherently go up against the core doctrines of Islam itsel£
By empowering the individual, the Protestant Reformation had conse-
quences that went far beyond religion. At some level, breaking the hold of
"the Church" amounted to breaking the hold of any church. It's true that
the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were
talking only about religious strivings, and it's true that each sect had a
pretty definite and limited idea of a person's proper relationship to God.