By William Kremer BBC World Service
Once upon a time, animal sacrifice
was an important part of Hindu life, Catholic priests weren't celibate and
visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad were part of Islamic art. And soon
some churches in the UK may be marrying gay couples. How do religions manage to
change their mind?
In 1889, Wilford Woodruff became the fourth president of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints - more commonly known as the Mormon Church.
As president, he was seen as a living prophet, someone who could receive
wisdom and advice from Jesus Christ. And he was certainly in need of advice -
his church was in crisis.
For 40 years, Mormons had been at loggerheads with the US Congress over the
issue of polygamy, which was encouraged among male believers. The government
said it was illegal, and held that religious conviction was no defence.
Woodruff in 1889 - he had seven wives across his
life, and 33 children
Woodruff and others lived a precarious life, moving around in an attempt to
dodge marshals with arrest warrants for bigamy. In 1890, the government brought
things to a head by moving to confiscate all of the church's assets.
It was then, Woodruff said, that Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision and
showed him the future of the Mormon Church if the practice wasn't stopped - and
it wasn't pretty. Although he did not renounce plural marriage, he issued a
manifesto banning it.
If that sounds like a problem easily solved, it wasn't - according to
Kathleen Flake, a professor in American religious history at Vanderbilt
University, and a Mormon herself.
"It was a very difficult thing socially, personally and theologically," she
says. The change destabilised the entire church, and led to deep reflection
about what Mormonism's core principles were.
History shows that any religion that refuses to change dies out, Flake adds.
But what about those religions that don't have living prophets - how do they
change?
For Muslims, the last prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, died almost 1,400 years
ago. So it's the
ulama, a class of legal scholars, who rule on
contentious points of Islamic or sharia law based upon a careful scrutiny of
fundamental sacred texts, including the Koran and the Sunnah, a collection of
stories relating the beliefs and practices of Muhammad.
Continue reading the main story
Selected U-turns
- Radios, loudspeakers and telephones were forbidden for Muslims 100 years ago
- one story relates how a Saudi king instructed a cleric to recite the Koran
down the phone to another scholar to prove the invention was not corrupting
- There were figurative miniatures of the Prophet Muhammad in both Ottoman and
Persian art - the 14th Century Turkish epic Siyer-i Nebi features many such
illustrations, although the Prophet's face is veiled
- In ancient times animal sacrifice was a core part of Hinduism, as described
in texts such as the Vedas and the Mahabharata - it's widely abhorred now, but
still practised in some areas
- In the 10th Century most rural Christian priests were married - the Catholic
Church cracked down on this in the 12th Century
An obvious challenge here is how specific laws governing
life in 7th Century Arabia can be applied across the world in the 21st Century.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the ulama in different countries make different
judgements, and sometimes change their mind.
A century ago, using a radio or loudspeaker was
haraam - forbidden.
Today, many observant Muslims have their own radio, TV and even YouTube
channels.
Similarly, at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the ulama there
said that birth control was haraam, but now the use of condoms is encouraged,
with state-supported condom factories and pre-marital family planning lessons.
"The assumption was that anything from the West was going to undermine
Islam," says Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware.
And quite often, he says, there
is a tension between aspects of
Western daily life and Muslim teachings. One challenge for Muslim men, for
example, is the urinal.
"One of the traditions for Muslim men is to sit and pee," Khan says,
explaining that this was thought to be the best way of preventing spillage that
would defile devotees' clothes before prayers. This is not always possible in
the urinal-loving West.
Another challenge is the architecture of Western homes.
"These houses that are designed in the West have no gender segregation. If
you're having a Muslim-only party and then you have women who want segregation,
then it is very complicated," he says, adding that he missed three or four of
his son's birthday parties as a result.
Continue reading the main story
Rational 'bias'
Medieval thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides would be astonished
at the way we read, preach and pray today, says author Karen Armstrong.
"We've tended to lose older, sometimes more intuitive patterns of thought,"
she says.
"They would see some of the ways we talk about God as remarkably
simplistic.
"We are reading our scriptures with a literalness which is without parallel
in the history of religion, largely because of this rational bias of ours."
Sometimes Muslims in multicultural societies long for
scriptures to be reinterpreted, Khan says.
Clerics faced with these decisions have a choice between a literal
interpretation of the Koran, or attempting to look beneath the surface for a
deeper message.
The key, according to Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University is to distinguish
"principles" that are immutable and "models" that are a product of the time and
place the stories were told. From this perspective, changing our inferences from
the Koran is not just an option but an obligation.
"There is no faithfulness to the message of Islam without evolution in our
understanding," he says.
So, while there is a verse of the Koran which appears to permit beating a
woman, "the best example was the Messenger himself never beating a woman,"
Ramadan says.
Arvind Sharma, a professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University,
relates an incident which seems to show how it's possible to update models at
the same time as underscoring the principles that form a religion's continuity.
His anecdote centres on the moment Mahatma Gandhi discussed the principle of
karma - the Hindu doctrine that you will pay for your actions, or be
rewarded for them, perhaps in a future life.
"Karma was used to justify untouchability in classical Hinduism," says
Sharma. "A person is born an untouchable because in a previous life he performed
certain foul deeds, so he should accept the status quo as it is."
Sharma says Gandhi pointed out that all castes of Hindus had been treated as
untouchable by the British in India, who would post signs outside their clubs
saying "Dogs and Indians not allowed".
"Gandhi's argument was: 'You see how karma works? You treated people as
untouchable on the basis of their birth, and you have also been treated as
untouchables on the basis of your birth.'" In criticising Indians' traditional
interpretation of karma - and showing how they were paying for their poor
treatment of untouchables - Gandhi was at the same time invoking and restating
the principle of karma.
A famous story from the Talmud, one of the Jewish holy books, seems to
foresee that future generations will interpret holy law in their own way.
A mid-19th C engraving of Moses receiving the 10
commandments on Mt Sinai
In the story, Moses goes to Mt Sinai to receive the Torah - another Jewish
holy book - from God. Moses spots God embellishing the letters with little
crowns.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
The whole area of genetics, molecular biology and evolution
in general are quite a challenge to the church”
End Quote George Coyne
Former Vatican astronomer
"Moses, who was a humble man, says 'Well, really you
know, I'll take it plain,'" relates Rabbi Burt Visotzky from the Jewish
Theological Seminary in New York.
"And God says: 'No - many generations from now there will be a rabbi by the
name of Akiva, and he will actually derive Jewish law from the very crownlets on
the letters.'"
When God shows Moses a vision of Rabbi Akiva teaching, Moses is dismayed
because he can't understand anything.
"Built within the Talmud itself - that repository of great law and wisdom of
the rabbis - is a notion that things change but it's still all part of
revelation," says Visotzky.
One of the forces exerting pressure on religion to change is science. The
Copernican Revolution - when scholars grasped that the earth revolves around the
sun, rather than vice-versa - is an obvious example.
This clashed with the church's own teaching on the subject. The Inquisition
found Copernicus's successor Galileo "vehemently suspect of heresy" and he spent
the last decade of his life under house arrest.
As well as his works on physics and astronomy Galileo wrote two tracts on the
interpretation of scripture.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
Absolving the Past is a two-part documentary from the BBC World Service,
presented by Imam Khalid Latif (above).
"He essentially said the scriptures were written to tell
us how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go," says George Coyne, a Jesuit
priest who ran the Vatican's own observatory for 28 years.
The Catholic church now admits that Galileo was right and in 1992 Pope John
Paul II formally exonerated him. But science continues to raise difficult
questions for the church.
"The whole area of genetics, molecular biology and evolution in general are
quite a challenge to the church," says Coyne. "Does the ghost of Galileo come
back to speak? Yes it does. My loving church! What you did in the Galileo period
was not listen to science."
For Coyne, it is the role of scientifically trained believers to throw
themselves into the muddy, difficult process of squaring the church's teachings
with the discoveries of science and the opportunities they offer for
humanity.
The question of what to believe - or who to believe - falls, in the end, to
believers rather than teachers.
"We ultimately have to make that creative effort to think for ourselves and
puzzle things out for ourselves," says Karen Armstrong, the author of a History
of God, and more than 20 other works in religious studies.
While the answer to the question of how to live might be found using
scripture, it won't be in scripture, she says, just as the ability to drive is
not found in a car manual.
But she admits that this is hard for those people who, in a world of rapid
change, look to their religion for something steady and fixed - an
easy-to-access pot of answers.
"People often think religion is easy," says Armstrong. "In fact it requires a
great deal of intellectual, spiritual and imaginative effort. It's a struggle
that never ceases."
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