My dad and I aren’t so very different. Sure, he has a beard and a questionable taste in music (to be fair, we all make mistakes; I have a soft spot for Tegan and Sara, but it’s by far the lesser of two evils considering that he owns most of the Jefferson Starship back catalogue), but when it comes to personal development, it seems like we both went through the same stages at the same ages.
At sixteen, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do, and this lack of identity and purpose was terrifying. One of my friends had wanted to become a doctor for as long as I’d known him, and in comparison, I felt like something was wrong with me.
“Yeah,” my dad said, “I went through the identity vacuum stage, and it’ll be fine. Just give it some time, and in a few years, it won’t be an issue any more.”
He was right. Three years later, I was nineteen (call me?) and knew exactly what I wanted to do; I was going to change the world. It seemed pretty simple at the time. I was going to go into politics and spearhead some groundbreaking centre-leftist reforms based on the radical notions of common sense and pragmatism; why wasn’t anybody doing this already?! I’d conveniently forgotten that, bizarrely enough, different people have different opinions, and that an election is essentially a glorified popularity contest, which has never been my strong suit. This realisation was disheartening.
“Yeah,” my dad said, “I went through the political disillusionment stage, and it’ll be fine. Just give it some time, and in a few years, it won’t be an issue any more.”
He was right again. Another three years on, and I’m twenty-two. I’ve realised that I’m not going to change the world; fuck, it’s hard enough to change myself. I’ve done various things and been various places, but I still have no idea who I am or what I want to do. However, I have at least worked out that this is not it, and that some metaphorical gardening needs to be done.
“Yeah,” my dad said, “I went through the Candide stage, and it’ll be fine. Just give it some time, and in a few years, it won’t be an issue any more.”
He’s probably right. I’m not sure which trials and tribulations of life I’ll be lamenting three years from now - possibly something about still not being able to grow a beard - but whatever it is, it will be a different stage again.
Now, this got me thinking. If everybody goes through similar stages, does everything go through similar stages as well? Is everything relative?
Armed with a GCSE in RE and some knowledge of current affairs, I’m going to make a gross generalisation (one of my favourite kinds of generalisation!) and anthropomorphise a couple of religions. It turns out that, like my dad and I, Christianity and Islam went through roughly the same growing pains at roughly the same time.
Much is made of the “crisis” in modern Islam. Nobody can quite put their finger on what this crisis (or set of crises) actually is, or whether the Arab Spring is a cause or a result, but it seems fairly clear that there are growing rifts and cracks in the Muslim world; between Shias and Sunnis, between reformists and traditionalists, between the devout and the occasional. Different Muslims want different things, as Lady Gaga has discovered this week.
Western observers (or any other lazy journalistic term for “people who aren’t actually affected”) claim that Islam has lost its cohesiveness and common identity. With exponential growth over the last century or so, this is only to be expected; if anything, the first mistake was to brand Islam as one homogeneous unit, what with all the different sects, cultures, and nations that fall under Islam’s vast umbrella. The second mistake was not to see this coming; 1400 years old is just about the right time for a religion’s angsty teen phase to kick in.
Islam is about six hundred years younger than Christianity, putting it at about the same stage of personal development as Christianity in the 15th century and the Reformation. Liberal Christians were starting to distance themselves from Traditional Christians and from the dictators who used religion to justify their own personal power, while the hardliners dealt with upheaval and change by clinging more steadfastly to religious values, becoming more radical within their own countries or spreading their views to others as colonialist missionaries. When Martin Luther nailed his list of grievances to a church door in Wittenberg, he precipitated a vast schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, which fundamentally fragmented Christianity and ultimately led to a series of conflicts such as the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War and the French Wars of Religion. Sound familiar?
Of course, it isn’t just an issue for Islam. Christianity had the relative luxury of going through its growing pains before a global economy was established, and so its effects were mostly contained within Europe. Now, though, the repercussions of such changes are far more influential and far more extensive. Islam’s problems are global problems.
I don’t know how to solve the world’s problems; I’ll leave that to my nineteen-year-old self. But, if everybody and everything does work in stages, then it’ll be fine, just give it some time and in a few centuries, it won’t be an issue any more.
I hope my dad’s right. If he is, then the world will eventually sort itself out, when I’m in my 30s I won’t be unhappy any more, and I might even have a respectable beard one day … although I think I’ll forever remain dubious of Jefferson Starship.
