Late in 1545, a general council of the Western Church was convened by Pope Paul III in the Tyrolean city of Trent. The ambition of the various bishops and theologians in attendance was to affirm Catholic doctrine in the face of the Protestant Reformation. Accordingly, when the council issued its first significant decree on 8 April 1546, it was targeted very precisely at what the delegates saw as most noxious about Luther and his followers. Whereas Protestants, following Luther’s lead, aspired to strip away the cladding of tradition and learn the will of God from scripture alone, the Council of Trent condemned this ambition as a pernicious heresy. Divine revelation, it declared firmly, was not confined to the Bible. Tradition, too, “preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession”, expressed the essence of Christ’s teachings. To doubt this was no longer to rank as Christian.
It is in a kindred spirit that Mehdi Hasan, in his article in last week’s issue of the New Statesman, would deny the title of Islamic to Islamic State, also known as Isis. That Isis militants, in justifying their actions, can quote the Quran, or the example or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, does not necessarily make them orthodox Muslims. Islam, like Christianity, is more than the sum of its scriptures. Over the course of its near 1,500 years of existence, an immense corpus of commentary and interpretation has accrued. “. . . the religion’s teachings in every age are determined by scholarly consensus on the meaning of the complex scriptural texts.” So declares Timothy Winter, the director of the Cambridge Muslim College, as quoted by Hasan. It is an assertion that would not have looked out of place in the decrees of the Council of Trent.
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