An argument that has not met its strongest opponents has not been tested. State the objections at their full weight, in the words their ablest defenders would choose. If the case cannot survive them, it deserved to fall. If it can, it will be stronger for the encounter.
The Lecture and the Reply
On the twenty-ninth of March 1883, Ernest Renan mounted the platform of the Sorbonne to deliver a lecture on Islam and science. He was the most celebrated scholar in France, a master of Semitic languages, and the author of a life of Jesus that had scandalized Catholic Europe.
His argument was blunt. Islam, he said, was the heaviest chain that humanity had ever borne. It had crushed the free inquiry that the Arabs inherited from the Greeks. Such science and philosophy as had flourished in Baghdad and Córdoba had done so in spite of the religion, and was mostly the work of Persians and Spaniards who were Muslim only in name. Once orthodoxy had tightened its grip, in the twelfth century, the lights went out, and they would never come on again. The Muslim, Renan told his audience, has a kind of iron band around his head that closes it to knowledge.
Sitting in Paris that spring was a man uniquely placed to answer him. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was the most famous Muslim agitator of the century, a restless Persian who had preached resistance to European empire from Cairo to Calcutta and had been expelled from half the countries between. Seven weeks later a Paris newspaper carried his reply.
Everyone expected a defense of the faith, and what they read astonished them. Al-Afghani conceded nearly the whole indictment. It was true, he wrote, that the Muslim religion had tried to stifle science and had succeeded only too well. It was true that the believer had been yoked like an ox to dogma. Renan was wrong on one point only: he had treated as permanent a condition that was temporary. All religions are intolerant in their youth. Christianity had persecuted science for centuries before it was forced to make room. Islam was six hundred years younger. I cannot keep from hoping, he wrote, that Muhammadan society will succeed someday in breaking its bonds and marching resolutely in the path of civilization after the manner of Western society.
Renan replied courteously that he hoped the sheikh was right.
That exchange, almost a century and a half old, contains in miniature every argument that has since been made for and against the reform of Islam. The objections deserve to be set out one at a time and answered in full.
7 more minutes: First Objection: The Word of God Cannot Be Set Aside, Second Objection: The Extremists Are Simply Right, Third Objection: It Is Politics, Not Doctrine, Fourth Objection: There Is No One to Decide, Fifth Objection: Outsiders Will Poison the Well, Sixth Objection: The Killers Will Not Listen, Seventh Objection: You Are Feeding the Bigots, Eighth Objection: Every Religion Has Blood in Its Books, The Lesson
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.