Bill Warner Moment: The Problem of Islamic Reform

Can Islam Be Reformed?

Tony Abbott Has Called for a Religious Reformation of Islam

NEWS.COM.AU: TONY Abbott has controversially called for a religious “reformation” of Islam, labelling it as a “culture” that “thinks you can kill in the name of God”.

The former Prime Minister made the comments in a wide-ranging interview on the Paul Murray Live program on Sky News.

Mr Abbott said not only did there need to be a military offensive, but also a “hearts and mind” offensive to tackle the rise of radical Islam while also calling for Australians to have greater confidence in Western civilisation. » | Emily Moulton | News.com.au | Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Opinion: Manifesto for a Modern Islam

DEUTSCHE WELLE: Muslim intellectuals have called for their fellow believers to indentify societal failures and develop an Islam for the 21st century. Loay Mudhoon believes that Europe should unreservedly support this effort.

In a clearly formulated manifesto last week, four well-known Muslim intellectuals appealed to all Muslim political and religious leaders to stand up and support a democratic Islam. In their letter, they also laid out some concrete steps, among them a conference in France early next year that would "define the contours of a progressive interpretation of Islam firmly grounded in the 21st century."

The four men behind this letter are Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford; Anwar Ibrahim, the head of Malaysia's national opposition and chairman of the World Forum for Muslim Democrats; Ghaleb Bencheikh, the president of the World Conference for Religions for Peace; and Felix Marquardt, founder of the Abd al-Raḥman al-Kawakibi Foundation. They're hard on their fellow Muslims and ask tough questions. In their letter, they call for a clear-eyed diagnosis of Islam's current plight and want to develop a fundamental critique of Islamic culture and religion. » | Loay Mudhoon / cmk | Tuesday, February 22, 2015

My comment:

Muslims consider the words in the Koran to be Allah’s actual words. So anyone who tries to change any of them would be considered a heretic. (How can a mortal being know better than Allah what is meant by Allah’s words?) Further, Islam is totally and utterly immiscible with democracy for many reasons, chief among them being that Islam understands no separation of mosque and state. In Islam politics and religion are considered to be one integrated whole. Democracy requires a separation. Without this separation, there can be no democracy. So how exactly can Islam change to fit the modern world? How can Islam become democratic? It seems to me that this is an exercise in futility. Aren’t these people who are trying to bring this change about doing so in bad faith, to detract from the central issues? They must surely know that this reformation/modernization is simply not possible. Pie in the sky! - © Mark

"Der Islam braucht einen Martin Luther"

PRO: Der Islam benötige "Vorbilder, die unbequeme Fragen stellen", ist die Integrationsexpertin der SPD Lale Akgün überzeugt. Ein Martin Luther im Islam wäre nicht schlecht, sagt die ehemalige Bundestagsabgeordnete, die sich einen "Aufstand der Kopftuchmädchen" wünscht.

"Ich möchte, dass sich die Frauen ihr Recht nehmen und nicht abwarten, dass sich irgendwann etwas ändert", sagte die Muslimin, die Referatsleiterin in der Staatskanzlei von Nordrhein-Westfalen ist, im Interview mit dem evangelischen Magazin "Chrismon". Entsprechend heißt ihr aktuelles Buch "Aufstand der Kopftuchmädchen" (Piper, 2011).

An Universitäten sei ein Kampf um Gleichberechtigung muslimischer Frauen bereits zu sehen, gibt sie zu verstehen. Doch wenn muslimische Frauen in die Öffentlichkeit gingen, hätten sie Angst. "Der Gesetzgeber und die Gesellschaft können eine Menge gegen die Angst tun. Sie können Rahmenbedingungen schaffen, die Unterdrückung nicht zulässt." Überlasse man das Zivilrecht den Imamen, würde ihr allein der Gedanke ein "kaltes Grausen" verursachen.

So verurteilt Akgün etwa den Vorschlag, islamische Schiedsgerichte in Deutschland einzurichten, als falsch. Dies hatte etwa der rheinland-pfälzische Justizminister Jochen Hartloff (SPD) vorgeschlagen. Die Politikerin erinnert daran, dass Mohammed Entscheidungen in und für seine Zeit getroffen habe. "Und wir müssen entscheiden, wie wir es heute machen." Das starre Festhalten an Traditionen habe zum einen etwas Beruhigendes, gibt sie zu, aber sie nennt es eine "Pseudosicherheit". Der Islam brauche einen Reformatoren wie Martin Luther, ist Akgün überzeugt. » | Von js | Dienstag, 03. April 2012

God Help Europe! Even the Financial Times Buys Into the Idea of the Reformation of Islam and the Rôle of Turkey in that ‘Reformation’
FINANCIAL TIMES: Aficionados of the clash of civilisations are fond of the thesis that the Muslim world’s problem is that it has not undergone a reformation. This imperiously ignores that Islam, by retrieving the classics of Greek science and philosophy, dragged Europe out of the dark ages and made possible the Renaissance.

It is nonetheless true that the articulation of modern Islamic thinking is hampered by a number of self-inflicted handicaps. News that Turkey’s religious establishment is close to completing a modern reinterpretation of Islam is therefore a potentially huge – and highly controversial – development.

Theologians at Ankara University, backed by the Diyanet, Turkey’s state authority for religious affairs, are re-examining the Hadith, the sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet Mohammed. The Hadith were not codified until two centuries after the Prophet’s death in 632. While the Koran is held by Muslims to be the revealed word of God to the Prophet, the Hadith – initially an orally transmitted tradition of the Prophet’s time – are the origin of the majority of Sharia law.

Modern scholars believe many Hadith betray cultural traditions and mechanisms of social control – particularly of women – alien to the original message of Islam. Practices such as female genital mutilation, common in Egypt, are African customs alien to the Arabian peninsula. Even the veiling of women is thought to be a borrowing from the Byzantine aristocracy.

The “Ankara School” plans to strip away the accretions and apocrypha of the Hadith, looking at the texts through the contextual techniques of hermeneutics. The idea, encouraged by Turkey’s government of neo-Islamist reformists, is of a truly modernised Islam. Rethinking the message of Islam >>>

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Wafa Sultan dit la verité sur l’islam


TIME:
Wafa Sultan By Asra Q Nomani

NYT:
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats

WAFA SULTAN.ORG:
Wafa Sultan

MEMRI.ORG:
Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan: There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century

Mark Alexander

Wafa Sultan on the Glenn Beck Show
Glenn Beck seems to think that Islam can be reformed. It is my belief that Islam cannot be reformed. Islam is what it is, and it will remain as it has always been. It would appear that Wafa Sultan is of the same opinion as I.

Islam hasn’t been reformed in over fourteen hundred years. In any case, how can a religion be reformed when not a single vowel in the Qur’an has been changed in all those 1400 years? The message of Islam has been written in stone, so to speak. Further, the Qur'an are thought, by Muslims, to be the actual words of Allah. Who would dare try and change those words? Devout Muslims would consider any such attempt to change the Qur'an to be sacrilege. This is hardly a good starting point for a reformation. Add to this the propensity of Muslim Arabs to accept things literally - Arabs are not given to abstract thought and metaphor – and we have a poor basis for change. ©Mark Alexander


Mark Alexander