Re: The Amish

Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I'm about 100 pages into Blickle's book.

Now I'm about 150 pages into it, nearly done.

I'm done with it. It was very informative. I'm sure I'll need to return to it.

The views of Thomas Muentzer caught my eye. Here are some highlights:[snip]
In my earlier posting, I asked about what similarities there might be to
the modern American religious right.[snip]
It makes sense to at least try first to put it into some kind of more general
context. For example, what other conflicts have given rise to the formulation
of new (for the time), religiously based political ideologies, no matter what
religion might have been involved?

Motivated by this question, I pulled another long neglected book off my
shelf: "The political language of Islam", by Bernard Lewis, published by
U. of Chicago Press, 1991. I'm now about 50 pages into it. It's quite
interesting. One reason I selected it is that it brings Islam into the
discussion, a religion whose tenets and history are not well known, I think,
to most readers of this group.

Here are a few highlights of what I have read so far:
(1) Lewis claims that Islamic governments are not theocratic. His argument
is roughly as follows: If by theocracy we mean a state governed by priests,
then Islam is not a theocracy because Islam has no church or priesthood,
or rather that it had none in classical Islamic times.
(2) He then explains that to the extent that the argument in (1) is false,
the reasons are due to more recent innovations. These include:
(a) The Ottomans instituted a system of territorial muftis, each with
his own diocese, and part of a hierarchy presided over by the chief
mufti of Istanbul.
(b) In Iran, in the 16th century, Shi'ite Islam was adopted as the state
religion. Eventually the mujtahids began to function as a clergy.
The first Iranian equivalent of an episcopate emerged in the 19th
century, with the invention of the ayotollah. Lewis considers this
to be radical innovation: "the regime of the mollahs in present day
Islam is a radical departure from all Islamic precedent".
(3) In spite of the innovations broadly subsumed under (2), there is still
no priesthood in the strictly theological sense in Islam. And therefore
Lewis maintains that, according to the meaning of theocracy given in (1),
Islamic governments are not theocratic.
(4) He then views the matter from the standpoint of a different meaning of the
word "theocratic", namely the more literal (and ancient) meaning, "the
rule of God". From this point of view, there is no doubt about the
theocratic nature of Islamic governments: only God makes law and only
God confers or legitimizes authority.

It is (4) in particular that strikes me as reminiscent of the political
ideology of the rebels in the German Peasants' War of 1525. They had a role
for religious scholars to serve as referees as to what God intended the law
to be, but the scholars didn't rule. Unfortunately for the rebels, the
scholars they selected (including Luther) either refused to accept the role
or else were unequivocally opposed to the rebel cause (as was Luther).

As I mentioned, my copy of Lewis' book was printed in 1991, but it was written
in 1986. That is recent enough for it to be informed about the Iranian
Revolution, but perhaps not recent to be informed about the more recent
Islamic regimes such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the political
aspirations of Osama Bin Laden.

So, here is one naive question: are the political ideas of the Taliban
(resp. Bin Laden) more like:
(i) the classical Islamic political ideas?
(ii) the Iranian political ideas?
(iii) Western political ideas?
(iv) Other (specify) __________________?

And what book addresses their political ideas in a scholarly manner?
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.

.