248 DESTINY DISRUPTED
ljtihad, remember, means "free and independent thinking based on rea-
son." It can't depart from scripture, but it consists of thinking through the
implications of scripture creatively. Muslim scholars had once allowed that
ijtihad might be exercised on issues not explicitly settled by Qur'an; then
by Qur'an and hadith; then by Qur'an, hadith, and the work of previous
authoritative scholars .... And so by the eighteenth century, important
scholars generally agreed that no unsettled issues existed. Everything had
been covered, everything worked out; ordinary people no longer needed to
exercise free and independent thought. There was nothing left for them to
do but follow the rules.
Following the rules, however, does not provide the spiritual fulfillment
people seek from religion. The bureaucratization of Islam created much
the same stultifications and discontents that in Christendom had provoked
the Protestant Reformation. And indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth
century, reform movements were beginning to sprout throughout the
Muslim world.
But there never was a Muslim version of Europe's Protestant Reforma-
tion, and thus none of the consequences that followed from the Reforma-
tion: no doctrine of individualism emerged here, no coupling of religion to
nationalism (except in a sense in Iran), no separation of church and state,
no conceptual division of the world into secular and religious realms, no
sudden development of enlightenment-sryle liberalism, and so no democ-
ratic, scientific, or industrial revolutions.
Why not?
Well, for one thing, some of the issues that fueled the Reformation
could not arise in Islam. Protestant reformers rebelled against the Church;
Islam had no church. Protestant reformers attacked the authoriry of the
pope; Islam had no pope. Protestants said priests could not mediate be-
tween man and God; Islam never had a priesthood (the ulama were more
like lawyers than priests.) The Protestant reformers insisted on a direct,
personal interaction between the individual worshipper and God. The
Muslim prayer ritual had always been just that.
But the Europeans were certainly a factor too. Without them in the
picture, the Muslim reform movements might well have taken a different
course. European religious reform took shape in a purely European con-
text. That is, when Protestant reformers challenged Catholic practices and