You quoted Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam, here is a much more nuanced discussion of his position:
"Thus, although Tocqueville gave possible grounds for an apology for Islam, i. e. that it is the sort of able compromise between the material and spiritual which is needed in a religion in a democratic society, he himself did not take this view of Islam, and he preferred Christianity as an antidote to materialism. A similar argument could be made in regard to Islam as “submission” (the meaning of the word “Islam”) to the will of God. Given that Tocqueville argued that religion is a kind of association in which human beings must surrender, as long as they are part of the association, their liberty, and that such associations are necessary, especially in democracies, then the fideist aspect of Islam (as of other religions) would seem to meet with Tocqueville’s approval. However, in practice Tocqueville thought that Islam’s affinity was with despotism rather than freedom, even if both in its compromise between spiritualism and materialism, and its requirement for dogmatic faith in religious matters, it would seem possible to make the opposite case.
In this context it is as well to dismiss two possible objections to Islam which Tocqueville might plausibly be supposed to have held, but which he did not. The first of these is the problem of predestination. Like Calvinists, Muslims believe that the question of individual salvation is predetermined. Tocqueville, as is well known, rejected all theories, whether secular or religious, that claimed that the future of humanity or of individual human beings was predetermined. Indeed he wrote in Democracy that the “doctrine of fatality” is particularly attractive to people in democratic times and that if it took hold, “it would soon paralyze the movement of new societies and reduce Christians to Turks” (Gambetta later attacked Catholicism for encouraging fatalism. Was Tocqueville projecting a potential critique of Christianity onto Islam?). [15] However, Tocqueville was well aware that the Puritans, whose contribution to American freedom he thought crucial, were Calvinists who believed in predestination. There is a distinction to be made between the theological doctrine of predestination and the human practice of fatalism. It is only the latter that Tocqueville condemned. Tocqueville ascribed the stagnation of Islamic societies to other reasons than the doctrine of predestination.
Secondly, in The Old Regime Tocqueville compared the revolutionaries with Islam, because like Islam the Revolution “flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs”. [16] This would be a rejection of Islam only if it was a rejection of the Revolution. Certainly Tocqueville criticized both the French Revolution and Islam for tendencies to excessive violence. Nevertheless, Tocqueville was by no means an opponent of the Revolution (at least of what he considered its “good parts”), and the same could be said, in this respect at least, of Islam. Proselytism, whether religious or political, is in Tocqueville’s view a necessary consequence of the idea of equality.
Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s overall judgment of Islam was negative (and it became more so over time) despite the positive elements he saw in it. But the main reason for his disapproval of Islam had less to do with any particular disposition of the Koran than with its larger context. What led Tocqueville in the final analysis to strongly reject Islam was its relationship to political freedom. Islam has a natural affinity with despotism, according to Tocqueville, not because of predestination or even fatalism, not because of violence, but rather because of the absence of any separation between Church and State. The reason Tocqueville gives for the lack of separation of Church and State in Islam is at first glance paradoxical: it is the absence of a priesthood, an absence which Tocqueville thinks is in principle good.
In preparation for his first voyage to Algeria,in May-June 1841, Tocqueville read and annotated a variety of material about Algeria and its population. At some point in this period he wrote a piece titled “Why there is no Priesthood (sacerdoce) among the Muslims”. Unlike most of his Algerian notes, according to the editor, these pages “are written without crossing-out and in an exceptionally legible manner, which allows one to suppose that Tocqueville, intending to preserve this note, carefully recopied it”. [17]
Tocqueville thought the absence of a priesthood in Islam a striking fact, a fact “which in itself seems at first glance very unusual, because all religions, and above all all those which have strongly influenced the human imagination, have acquired or preserved their influence with the aid of a priestly corps very separate from the rest of the nation and very strongly constituted”. This absence was “a good amidst all the evils to which the Muslim religion has given birth. For a priestly body is in itself the source of much social malaise, and when a religion can be powerful without the aid of such a means, one must praise it for that”. In this passage Tocqueville, freed from the constraints of a Catholic audience, allowed a Protestant side of his thought to be glimpsed. The democratic “priesthood of all believers”, as Luther put it, was to be preferred to the aristocratic if not hereditary position of the Catholic clergy.
Tocqueville gave two reasons why Islam had no priests. Early Islam was organized for war and as a result there was little ritual, and what there was was simple, without any need of a priest to perform it. But much more important, according to Tocqueville was that “Islam is the religion which has the most completely combined and intermixed the two powers [civil and religious]”. Since there was no separation of Church and State, there was no need, and for that matter no means, of distinguishing the clergy from other educated people. Tocqueville’s chief complaint about Islam is that the separation between Church and State, so laboriously acquired in Europe, never happened in Islam. Tocqueville recognized that this separation did not come about in Europe with the Church’s consent, but what mattered was that it never came about at all in Islam. “Religion and justice have always been combined in Muslim countries, like the ecclesiastical courts tried to do in Christian Europe”. [18]
The fundamental problem was that the Koran simultaneously regulated the general moral and religious duties of humanity, and provided detailed rules of civil and political law. This combination led to two serious problems from Tocqueville’s perspective, one of political organization, and one of social organization, which together had disastrous results for Muslim countries. The political problem was that Islam had combined civil and religious authority “in such a way that the high priest is necessarily the ruler, and the ruler the high priest, and that all the acts of civil and political life are more or less regulated according to religious law”. Thus the politico-religious institution of the Caliphate, which combined supreme civil and religious authority in one individual, was anathema in Tocqueville’s eyes. Socially, “since the Koran is the common source from which issue religious law, civil law and even in part secular science, the same education is given those who want to become religious ministers, doctors of law, judges and even scholars. The sovereign takes indiscriminately among this educated class the ministers of religion or imams [Tocqueville does not consider imams a priestly body], the doctors of law or muftis and the judges or Cadis”. Thus the secular and the sacred were constantly intermixed. While Tocqueville did not say if this was detrimental from a religious point of view, it was catastrophic from a secular perspective: “This concentration and confusion established by Mohammed between the two powers has on the one hand produced this particular good [the absence of a priesthood], and on the other hand it has been the first cause of the despotism and above all of the social immobility which has, almost always, been characteristic of Muslim nations and which finally made them all fall before the nations which have embraced the opposite system”. [19]
This is the reasoning behind Tocqueville’s negative judgment of Islam found in volume two of Democracy (1840), a judgment both more knowledgeable and more hostile than that found in volume one:
Mohammed made not only religious doctrines, but also political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories descend from heaven and placed them in the Koran. The Gospel, in contrast, speaks only of the general relations of men with God and each other.... That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot long dominate during times of enlightenment and democracy, whereas the second is destined to reign during these centuries as in all others. [20]
Two things worth noting about this passage are, firstly, the tone of false confidence which Tocqueville adopts with regard to the domination of Christianity. He was by no means confident that the democratic religious future would be Christian, rather than pantheist or frankly materialist. This passage was probably written to help convince devout French Catholic readers of his bona fides. Was he wholly sincere in his praise of Christianity? Doubtless he was, at least of his ideal of Christianity. Historical reality, as Tocqueville knew, was another matter. But to convince French readers of the need to reconcile religion and freedom, it made more sense to appeal to the ideal than to the real.
With regard to Islam, however, Tocqueville had no need to develop an ideal different from what he perceived to be the reality, and he did not. His reasoning of 1840 is repeated in an 1844 letter to Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes had made a trip to the Middle East and returned, in Tocqueville’s view “a little more Muslim than is suitable”. As far as Tocqueville was concerned:
As I got to know this religion better, I better understood that from it above all comes the decadence that before our eyes more and more affects the Muslim world. Had Mohammed committed only the mistake of intimately joining a body of civil and political institutions to a religious belief in a way to impose on the first the immobility that is in the nature of the second, that would have been enough to doom his followers in a given time first to inferiority and then to inevitable ruin. The grandeur and holiness of Christianity is in contrast to have tried to reign only in the natural sphere of religions, abandoning all the rest to the free movement of the human mind. [21]
Regardless of the accuracy of Tocqueville’s statement about Christianity (when he attempted to make a similar remark in Democracy, his brother and father criticized it and he left it out), [22] the fundamental source of his rejection of Islam seems clear. Islam presented many advantages from a Tocquevillian perspective: a stance midway between materialism and spiritualism, a proper dogmatism in matters of faith, a strong emphasis on charity (very important to Tocqueville), and the absence of a priesthood. Nevertheless, none of this could compensate for its historical failure, by comparison with Christianity, to establish and maintain a strong separation, political, civil, and educational, between Church and State, the religious and the secular realms. Tocqueville’s views on Islam and his reading of the Koran underlined the importance he placed on this separation. The reason for the decline of the Muslim world is not fatalism, it is the absence of separation of religion and state.
Is the solution for the Islamic world then conversion to Christianity? Absolutely not, in Tocqueville’s view. This is in accord with the statement made in Democracy that it is wrong to try to persuade a democratic nation to changes its religion. Thus in his 1847 report on Algeria, written well after his negative view of Islam had crystallized (and after a second voyage to Algeria in November-December 1846), Tocqueville wrote that it was wrong to try to discourage Islamic education in Algeria, and that on the contrary Islamic religious education ought to be encouraged, for fear that otherwise ignorant and fanatical leaders would take the place of a more educated and presumably moderate class. This is not to say that Tocqueville was sanguine about Islam’s fate. How could he be, when he was not confident in the fate of Christianity? Thus he wrote that Islam too was faced with the danger of materialism, and indeed that Islamic faith, while still very lively, was daily losing ground in Algeria to “the interests of this world”, as shown by the fact that many Muslim Algerians were willing to take service in the French army. [23]
Islam might thus, in Tocqueville’s view, be inferior to Christianity in certain respects, but it neither could nor should be replaced by Christianity. Rather it should be preserved. Were Tocqueville a Muslim, we might imagine him encouraging elements in Islam that could lead to a separation of Mosque and State. Islam does, from a Tocquevillian perspective, potentially meet many of the needs of democratic society.
Understanding Tocqueville’s views of Islam does not result in a great upheaval in our understanding of Tocqueville’s thought. His concerns about the social and political functions of religion remain the same, as do his analytical methods. Nevertheless this examination permits us to understand his attitude to religion in new ways. Because neither Christianity nor the Christian/Catholic prejudices of a broad readership were engaged (there was no readership for his notes, and only one reader at a time for his letters), Tocqueville could more freely express some of his attitudes. Thus, for example, we see him develop a Protestant view of the priesthood, and present an unapologetically instrumental view of religion. If some aspects of his analysis of religion in Democracy are repeated, e.g. the role of religion in combating materialism, other sides to this story are now given greater emphasis, as in the crucial importance Tocqueville placed on the separation of Church/Mosque and State, or else given new expression, e.g. the need for religions to balance materialism and spiritualism.
Above all, however, we learn from his discussion of Islam that for Tocqueville the relationship between religion and democratic society, religion and freedom, is not simply a concern of the West. For Tocqueville democracy was a global phenomenon, and the relationship between democracy and religion was not just a story about Christianity or Western religions. Whether he was examining Christianity or Islam, what concerned Tocqueville was the relationship that religion might have with democracy and with freedom. However aristocratic his thought may have been in certain respects, the fundamental moral equality of all human beings and all human souls was central to his way of thinking. When it came to religion, Tocqueville was without reservation a democrat."
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