by Tamim Ansary
On Halloween night, 1517, Luther nailed an inflammatory document to the door of a church in Wittenberg in which he set forth ninety-five “theses,” ninety-five objections to the Church and its doings. Luther’s paper was an overnight sensation, and it sparked the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation was no single thing. Once Luther opened the gates, the passion spread in numerous directions with numerous reformers launching separate movements and many new sects springing up, each 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 came 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 itself.
By empowering the individual, the Protestant Reformation had consequences 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. Probably none of the reformers thought they were encouraging people to think outside the box on matters of faith. And yet, calling the quest for salvation the province of the individual legitimized the authority of each individual to think what he or she wanted about God, no matter what the reformers intended. And legitimizing the authority of individuals to think what they wanted about God implicitly legitimized their authority to think what they wanted about anything.
It was this aspect of the Reformation that cross-fertilized with the European rediscovery of ancient Greek thought, the renewal of interest in pagan Latin writers, and the trickling influence of Arab thinkers. Individuals who felt they could seek salvation on their own terms were naturally going to speculate freely on the nature of God and the world and with all these interesting ideas floating around, some people inevitably were going to start playing with new ways to put together the pieces of the puzzle they saw around them.
If the Church had still been ubiquitous and all-powerful, every idea would have required that an addendum be accounted for: how does it relate to the faith? If one were thinking, “I wonder why everything falls down instead of up,” the voice of the church inside one’s conscience would immediately ask, “and how will the explanation help me to be a better Christian?” There’s only so far and so fast a mind can roam if it’s dragging around this baggage all the time.
Liberated from this baggage, Copernicus could posit that the Earth went around the sun. This simple and daring hypothesis explained everything about the motion of the stars and planets except for why God would make the universe revolve around something other than His most precious creation. If you didn’t have to deal with that second part, you could much more easily work out an answer to the first part. A lot of nature’s puzzles were like that: they became much easier to explain if you didn’t have to square your explanation with the dictates of the faith.
For most thinkers, this didn’t mean contradicting the faith; it just meant that faith was one thing and explaining nature was another: they were two separate fields of inquiry and never did the twain have to meet. Separating inquiries about nature from the framework of faith enabled Europeans to come up with a dazzling array of scientific concepts and discoveries in the two centuries following the Reformation.
Francis Bacon and René Descartes, for example, overturned the Aristotelian method of inquiry and elaborated the scientific method in its stead. They and others also helped establish the mechanistic model of the universe, which held that every physical event had a purely physical cause. Galileo, Descartes, and others went on to dismantle the Aristotelian idea that everything is made earth, air, water, and fire, replacing it with the atomic theory of matter, which laid the basis for modern chemistry.
Andreas Vesalius mapped the anatomy of the human body for the first time, and William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood. Together, they and others laid the basis for modern medicine. Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek discovered the world of microorganisms, which eventually led to Pasteur’s powerful germ theory of disease.
Robert Boyle began the process that led to formulating the four laws of thermodynamics, just four laws that govern the transformation of energy into work in any system from a rabbit’s digestive tract to the birth of the universe.
And let us not forget to mention the greatest scientist of them all, Isaac Newton, who invented differential calculus, explained the motion of all objects in the universe from pebbles to planets with three simple formulas, and discovered the laws of gravitation, thereby definitively explaining the motion of all heavenly bodies, the work begun by Copernicus and Galileo. Just for a capper, he described the wave nature of light and discovered the spectrum. No scientist had ever done so much and none has equaled his achievements since. It’s ironic, therefore, that he himself felt his proudest accomplishment was remaining celibate all his life.
But here’s the really interesting mystery to think about. Muslim scientists had come right to the threshold of virtually all these discoveries long before the West arrived there. In the tenth century, for example, al-Razi refuted Galen’s theory of four humors as a basis for medical treatment. In the eleventh century, Ibn Sina analyzed motion mathematically, as Newton was to do so fruitfully six centuries later. In the thirteenth century, about three hundred years before Vesalius, Ibn al-Nafis described how blood circulated in the body. Ibn al-Haytham, who died in 1039, discovered the spectrum, described the scientific method, and established quantification and experiment as the basis for scientific exploration: he pretty much pre-Newtoned Newton and pre-Descarted Descartes. Muslims had already elaborated the atomic view of matter, which they took from Indian scientists, and some had elaborated the mechanistic model of the universe, which they had gotten from the Chinese.
The momentous thing was not so much the discoveries themselves as the fact that in the West they persisted, they accumulated, and they reinforced one another until they brought about a complete and coherent new way to view and approach the world, the scientific view, which enabled the West’s later explosive advances in technology. Why did all this happen in the West but not in the East?
Possibly because Muslims made their great scientific discoveries just as their social order started crumbling, whereas the West made its great scientific discoveries just as its long-crumbled social order was starting to recover and in the wake of a religious reformation that broke the grip
of church dogma on human thought, empowering individuals to speculate freely.
The Protestant Reformation was thus a key to the resurgence of Europe. But the Reformation also intertwined with another European development of tremendous consequence, the emergence of the nation-state as a form of political organization. The two were intertwined because when Luther and the others defied the Church, they took refuge with one or another of the monarchs of Europe, monarchs who had variously been struggling with the pope for some time now over who had final power in any given locale, the religious establishment or the secular one. The Reformation triggered an outburst of violence throughout Europe that ended with the Peace of Augsburg (1555). There the contending forces agreed on a landmark principle: that each monarch would have the authority to say whether his state, big or little, would stay with the Church of Rome or adopt one of the new Christian sects. Augsburg was only a ceasefire, it turned out. The pressure burst out again as the Thirty Years’ War, a kind of civil war that raged all over Europe, basically over the issue of which religion was to prevail. When the conflict wound down finally, and a treaty was signed at Westphalia, in 1648, the principle established at Augsburg was confirmed. So along with empowering individualism, the Reformation ended up dismantling a Europe-wide ideology in favor of a system in which church and state reinforced each other to promote nationalism.
Some of the first germs of nation-states formed in England and France, whose monarchs had fought the sporadic Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453. It wasn’t actually one continuous war, of course, but a series of campaigns interrupted by periods of peace. Before the war, there really was no such thing as “England” and “France.” There was just territory, controlled by various nobles, who had various affiliations with other nobles. Empires, such as that of the medieval Carolingians, had been collections of territories. Being the emperor of these territories meant possessing the right and power to collect taxes there and draft soldiers from among its people. Emperors could mix and match and shuffle their collections of territory, trading or fighting over patches with other monarchs the way children fight over toys or exchange baseball cards. The people of two territories owned by the same emperor did not feel any sense of common peoplehood on that account. They weren’t united in a feeling of kinship just because they both belonged to Charles the Bald.
A sense of shared peoplehood did, however, begin to develop over the course of the Hundred Years’ War. For one thing, it became more distinctly the case that people in France spoke French and people in England spoke English. The French began to feel ever more united with others who spoke their language and lived in the same invaded territory and ever more distinct from the English-speaking armies who kept coming amongst them. Meanwhile, English soldiers, thrown together with one another over long campaigns that might recapitulate a campaign their fathers had been on, and which their sons might go on, felt ever more united with each other in a team-spirit kind of way. Over this period the “king” developed into something more than just the biggest nobleman: the idea of “king” as embodiment of “nation” began to form.
The Hundred Years’ War began as a war between big-shot nobles and their knights, with yeomen who came along to carry the baggage and sometimes shoot their silly bows at other yeoman, those arrows being completely ineffectual against the real warriors, the men in metal suits. Partway through the Hundred Years’ War, however, the English longbow was invented, a bow that could shoot harder and further than previous bows and whose arrows could pierce armor. Suddenly, a team of archers standing far behind the lines, could bring down a row of knights before they even got off their lists.
From that moment on, knights no longer determined the outcomes of battles, which meant that knights were obsolete. Feudal political organizations consisted of networks of personal connections. As feudalism faded, people who controlled money could organize large impersonal forces for war and eventually for work too. On the one hand, this transformed the king as a power figure in his country: he was the one person best situated to organize funding for large-scale military campaigns. But on the other hand, kings had to organize their fundraising through their nobles. In England, the organization of nobles whom the king had to call together to ratify a new military campaign was called “parliament.” The English monarch’s dependence on parliament to legitimize taxation eventually led to the development of democratic institutions in England—but that was still far down the line. In 1400, the transcendent grandeur of a king was big news all by itself.
Before nation-states emerged, the strongest forms of political organization were loose collections of territory with quasi-independent authority vested in many figures, at many levels. The overall leader had to operate through many intermediaries. Any order he gave was likely to be modified by every authority figure through whom it passed, not to mention distorted as it was translated into various languages, not to mention altered as it was made to fit local customs, not to mention lost entirely as people at the final, most local levels forgot (or refused) to pass it on. The greatest roar of the greatest emperor was likely to dissipate into a faint noise by the time it reached the smallest villages in the most outlying provinces. But in a nation-state, where everyone spoke more or less the same language, where a single network of officials administered the rules from top to bottom, where everyone was more or less on the same page, the king’s policies traveled without much distortion to every cranny and corner of his realm.
That’s not to say that England or France was that kind of nation-state in 1350 or 1400, but both were heading that way, and so were some of the principalities in northern Europe. The emergence of the nation-state enabled a single coherent government to set policies that affected all aspects of the lives of all the people living in its realm of control, people who still thought of themselves as subjects but were on their way to becoming citizens. So later, when the West went east, it was a case of nation-states, hard and sharp as knives, cutting into empires, loose and soft as bread.
The European quest for a sea route to the Indies, a direct aftermath of the Crusades, came to a head just as nation-states were emerging in Europe, just as the Protestant Reformation was turning the individual into a major actor on the historical stage, and just as the synergy between individualism and resurgent classical learning was giving rise to modern science.
In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, proving at last that a ship could sail from the Atlantic Coast to the Indian Ocean. A stream of traffic followed his route. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic and discovered two big continents hitherto unknown to Europeans. A stream of traffic was soon going back and forth to the Americas.
Because Spain financed Columbus, Spain got first crack at the wealth of the Americas. This good fortune made Spain the richest nation in Europe for a while. Spain sucked so much gold out of the Americas, and spent it so freely at home, that the European gold market crashed. Ironically, that crash destroyed the Spanish economy, and Spain ended up as one of the poorest European nations.
The gold of the Americas, however, also washed through the whole economy of Europe. This happened just around the time that western Europe was firming up into nation-states, and nation-states have such coherence that they tend to operate as if they were individual persons. Before the nation-state emerged, it wasn’t possible for some guy in England to hope that “England” would get richer, and to take personal satisfaction and pride in this happening. He might want wealth to flow to his area; he might want his town to get richer, or his family, or even his king, but England? What was England? Now, however, in areas where the people thought of themselves collectively as “a nation” it was easy and inevitable for people to think in terms of policies that would benefit the nation. One such policy was mercantilism.
Mercantilism was quite a simple concept, really. It was based on the notion that the economy of nations was like that of individual people. An individual person who earns
a lot of money and spends very little becomes rich: guaranteed. For any individual person, the most desirable form that (incoming) money can take is gold. Accumulate lots of gold and you’re set. So people in western Europe easily fell into thinking that the wealth of their nations depended on bringing in as much gold as they could and letting out as little as possible. And they saw how this could be done: by selling lots of products to their friends and neighbors for gold and buying—ideally—nothing.
To sell a lot you have to make a lot. To buy nothing, you have to be self-sufficient. But how could a nation sell and sell and never buy? Where would the raw materials come from? This is where mercantilism, which was intertwined with nationalism, which was intertwined with the Protestant Reformation, which was intertwined with the ethos of individualism, which was intertwined with Renaissance humanism—intersected with European sea prowess and the urge to explore the world—which came right out of the Crusades.
All these synergistic, cross-fertilizing developments were beginning to peak in Europe just around 1600. At that moment, Europeans were master mariners. They were rapidly getting organized as compact nation-states. They were rethinking the world in scientific terms. They had the gold of the Americas burning holes in their pockets. And they were economically energized by protocapitalist entrepreneurs armed with a new ethos of individualism.
Incredibly enough, all of this development went virtually unnoticed by the Muslim world where, at that very moment, Moghul civilization was peaking in India, Safavid culture was peaking in Persia, and the Ottoman empire was only just past its peak period of efflorescence in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the Hijaz, Egypt, and North Africa.
And then the two worlds began to intermingle.
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