Freelance

Germany is celebrating 500 years of Reformation of Christianity these days. On 31 October 1517 it is said that monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to Wittenberg’s church calling for some change. It was the beginning of the Protestant Church and caused a remarkable amount of schism, strife, and decades of war. Luther’s violent anti-semitism (now euphemized as anti-Judaism) had even repercussions in the 20th century, culminating in the Nazi’s Endlösung der Judenfrage when the majority of Germans, being  Protestants (but Catholics were callous as well), kept silent amidst the most horrendous genocide in history, the holocaust.

Some question whether Islam does need sort of “Reformation” as well. Those who ask are generally unaware that an age of science and enlightenment happened in Muslim-reigned countries 600 years before Renaissance in Europe. Without Islam’s Golden Age, European enlightenment would simply not have been possible.

Now, Martin Luther’s merits include not only Reformation of  rotten Christianity. When translating the Hebrew text of the Tanakh and the Greek Gospels, he would ultimately enable the illiterate crowds to follow the myths and mysteries of church messes and better reflect on what they actually had to believe. Superstition was at work anyway. The Holy Scripture could now be read in the German language, and the creation of that particular language resulted in the perception of a nation. And, Johannes Gutenberg had re-invented movable type printing around 1450 in Europe (after the Chinese had invented it in the 11th century), so dispersion of the Word of God was granted.

Apart from his obnoxious anti-Semitism, what did Luther think about Islam? In 1529, Vienna was besieged by the Turks for the first time. It was the maximum expansion of the Ottoman Empire in Central Europe. Turks ruled over much of the Balkans for more than 150 years thereafter.

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