IN THE HEART of the aged city of Cairo stands an institution as old and as triumphant as the city itself. For more than a millennium, the famed al-Azhar mosque and university has served as the locus of Sunni Islamic scholarship for millions of Muslims around the world. If there were such a thing as a Vatican in Islam, this would be it. Founded in 972 C.E. by the Caliphs of the Fatimid Dynasty, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima—nicknamed al-Zahra, or “the Radiant”—al-Azhar literally means the most radiant, and, indeed, one need only visit in the evening, when the sun sets behind its towering, mud-hued minarets, to see just how much brighter even than the stars in the hazy sky this blooming structure shines.
The campuses of al-Azhar sit beside the city’s central bazaar, known as Khan el Khalili, whose cobblestone paths and labyrinthine walkways teem with local bargain hunters and weary tourists. In the summer months, when the raucous energy of Cairo becomes too much even for Cairenes to handle, men and women, young and old, Christian and Muslim huddle together in the cool, calming silence of al-Azhar’s vast open courtyard. Barefoot old men sit on the marble floor, backs pressed against the crumbling columns, seeking shelter in the shade of the covered porticos. Young students cluster around the intricately carved inlets and corner coves of the main prayer hall, some here to study, most to gossip. On particularly hot days, the only movement in the entire complex belongs to the pigeons, and to the white-capped peasants in dusty, gray galabiyas who sweep the floors with dried-out husks of palm branches.
Everything within these hallowed walls, including the walls themselves, echoes with tradition. On my first visit to al-Azhar I asked an Egyptian friend how long the clerical institution had been in Cairo. “It has always been here,” he replied.
He was not exaggerating. Egypt’s modern capital may sit upon the detritus of half a dozen long-forgotten cities, but the city whose name in Arabic, al-Qahira, means “the Victorious”—the city of a thousand minarets that began as the seat of the Shi‘ite Fatimid Empire and is now universally recognized as the cultural center of the Arab world—that city was constructed with al-Azhar as its backbone. In the twelfth century, when the inimitable Muslim warrior Saladin conquered and cleansed Egypt of Shi‘ite imperial control, he stripped al-Azhar of funding and left it to ruin, only to have the institution rise out of the ashes of his Ayyubid Dynasty stronger than before. In the eighteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte shelled al-Azhar into submission; his troops rode into the great mosque on horseback and sacked it, killing three thousand in the process. Three years later it was al-Azhar that led the uprising against the French, forcing Napoleon back to Europe in defeat. In the twentieth century, at the twilight of British colonial rule, al-Azhar’s Ulama provided the theological basis for the strikes and boycotts that ultimately expelled the foreign invaders from Egypt. During the socialist revolution of Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1950s, al-Azhar first endorsed the ideals of Pan-Arabism, then turned against it when Nasser transformed the school into a secular university controlled by the state. In the post-revolutionary period, al-Azhar became a tool both to legitimize secular dictatorship and to foment the Islamist backlash against it. As the war on terror raged in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Azhar served simultaneously as the bulwark against the West’s “crusade against Islam,” and the model of calm conservatism in the face of the zealous extremism that had gripped the country’s youth.
It is the connection to what is spoken of with hushed reverence inside al-Azhar’s walls as “tradition” that confers upon the institution and its scholars the authority to act as sole arbiters in all matters of faith and morality. Indeed, the entire foundation of the Ulama—whether here at al-Azhar or anywhere else in the world—is tied to their ability to regurgitate what has been said, written, or thought by men just like them who have sat in these very same classrooms studying the very same texts and commentaries for more than a thousand years.
In Shi‘ism, religious authority is derived from the Ulama’s spiritual link to the Prophet and the Imams. In Sunni Islam, religious authority is created solely through the Ulama’s ability to be fully subsumed by tradition. Shi‘ah authority is considered eternal and divinely inspired. Sunni authority is impermanent and anchored to the past. It is self-conferred, not divinely ordained. Like a Jewish rabbi, a Sunni cleric is a scholar, not a priest. His judgment is followed not because it carries the authority of God (it does not), but because the cleric’s scholarship, his intimate knowledge of tradition, and his unbreakable bond with the past grant him special insight into God’s will. Thus, if a rupture occurs that severs the Ulama’s connection to the authority upon which it is built, if some social or political or religious crisis suddenly shakes the very foundations of Muslim society, then the entire institution begins to crumble.
There have been many such ruptures in the fourteen-hundred-year history of Islam: the death of the Prophet, the expansion into empire, the conflict with Europe, the Crusades, colonialism, the destruction of the Caliphate. Yet no previous rupture has had a greater impact on Islam’s evolution, or so thoroughly breached the Ulama’s bond with the past, than the Muslim encounter with modernity and globalization.
For fourteen centuries, the venerable scholars of al-Azhar and their cohorts in similar institutions around the world have claimed a total monopoly over the meaning and message of the Muslim faith. Everything from how to pray to when to fast, from how to dress to whom to marry, has been the sole prerogative of a group of learned old men cloistered inside dozens of clerical institutions and schools of law, whose self-appointed task it has been to divine the future of Islam by controlling its past. No longer.
Today, if a Muslim in Egypt wants legal or spiritual advice on how to live a righteous life, he or she is more likely to pass over the antiquated scholarship provided by the stately Egyptian institution of al-Azhar for the television broadcasts of the wildly popular Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled. Amr Khaled’s weekly shows, through which he dispenses advice on religious and legal matters, are watched by tens of millions of young Muslims across the globe, from Jakarta to Detroit. His Facebook page has over two million fans. His YouTube channel boasts more than twenty-six million visits. His DVDs sell better than many Hollywood hits. In 2007, Time magazine named him the thirteenth most influential person in the world. He is without doubt one of the most prominent, most sought-after, most authoritative scholars of Islam on the planet.
Except that Amr Khaled is not a scholar. He is not a cleric. He has never studied at al-Azhar or, for that matter, at any recognized clerical institution. In fact, he has never studied Islam or Islamic law in any official capacity; he is an accountant. According to the strictures of Islamic law, he has no right to expound his theories on the meaning and interpretation of Islam. Nevertheless, through his ubiquitous television and Internet presence, Amr Khaled has utterly usurped the role traditionally reserved for the Ulama as the sole interpreters of Islam. And he is not alone. All over the world, a slew of self-styled preachers, spiritual gurus, academics, activists, and amateur intellectuals have begun actively redefining Islam by taking its interpretation out of the iron grip of the Ulama and seizing for themselves the power to dictate the future of this rapidly expanding and deeply fractured faith.
Welcome to the Islamic Reformation.
There is, admittedly, a great deal of religious and cultural baggage attached to the term reformation, which is why historians and scholars of religions so often shy away from using it. Beyond its obvious and unavoidable Christian and European connotations, for many the notion of a reformation necessarily implies something lacking or deficient, something requiring improvement or correction. But the term reformation contains no value judgment whatsoever. Stripped of its historical context, it signifies a universal religious phenomenon, one found in nearly all institutionalized religions. For however else one defines the Christian Reformation, it was, above all, an argument over who holds the authority to define faith: the individual or the institution. That argument ultimately led to the fracturing of Christianity into competing sects and schisms. But the underlying conflict of the Christian Reformation was by no means unique to either European or Christian history. On the contrary, the entire history of religions, and particularly of the so-called Western religions, can be viewed as a constant and sustained battle between institutions and individuals over religious authority. In times of social stress or political upheaval this ever-present conflict can explode onto the surface, often with catastrophic results.
That is what happened in the first century C.E., when a group of militant Jewish factions in Roman-occupied Palestine* began to vigorously challenge the authority of the Temple and its priestly hierarchy to define Judaism. What has been rightly called the “Jewish Reformation” ultimately led to the founding not only of Rabbinic Judaism, but also to a wholly new sect of Judaism called Christianity, sparked by a Jewish reformer whose principal message was that the authority to define the Jewish faith rests not with “the chief priests and the teachers of the law,” but with every individual believer. (It should be noted that the Jewish Reformation also led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from the city.)
The reformation that gave birth to Christianity fractured it fifteen centuries later when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Of course, the Christian Reformation did not arise with Luther, nor was it simply due to widespread disaffection with the corruption of the Catholic Church. The Christian Reformation was the result of a long and gradual process that began as early as the fourteenth century, when a number of influential Church leaders, most notably John Wycliffe in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia, and Jean Gerson in France, began aggressively trying to reform the Church from within. Long before Luther entered the austere monastic order of the Augustinians, the Christian Humanists had launched a renaissance in medieval theology by insisting on bypassing the Latin Vulgate for the original languages of the Bible. Desiderius Erasmus, perhaps the most influential intellectual of the sixteenth century, had already foretold much of Protestant ideology with his 1516 edition of the New Testament, in which the Virgin became “gracious” rather than “full of grace,” and John’s apocalyptic cry in the Gospel of Matthew to “do penance” was deliberately transformed to “repent.”
What separated Luther from Erasmus and the Humanists, and marked him in history as the instigator of the Christian Reformation, was that Luther had no interest in reforming the Catholic Church, which he viewed as the throne of the Antichrist. On the contrary, Luther wanted to tear down the Church, to take away its privilege as the sole agent of salvation and the sole authority on scripture. Hence his conception of sola scriptura, which emphatically stated that scriptural interpretation should rest, not in the hands of the Pope, but in the hands of individual believers.
That same reformation phenomenon, which forever altered the religions of Judaism and Christianity, has been taking place in Islam for nearly a century, ever since the era of European colonialism, under which some 90 percent of the world’s Muslims lived throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, however, Islam has never had a single religious authority. There has never been a “Muslim Temple” or a “Muslim Pope”—that is, a centralized religious authority that claims the right to speak for the entire Muslim community. The Caliphate, it will be recalled, was a political not a religious position. Particularly in the Sunni tradition, which represents some 85 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, religious authority is not localized within a single individual or institution (not even in the preeminent al-Azhar). It is, instead, scattered among a host of competing clerical institutions and schools of law that, as demonstrated throughout this book, have maintained total control over the interpretation of Islam since the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Yet over the last century—and especially since the destruction of the Caliphate, which, powerless as the institution may have become, nevertheless served as the embodiment of Muslim unity—a great many Muslims have been compelled to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community of faith, than as citizens of individual nation-states. The result of this geopolitical fragmentation has been the almost total breakdown of the communal ideals upon which Islam was founded. For a while, the ideologies of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism attempted to reunite the Muslim community across national boundaries. But as those ideologies collapsed, a new generation of Muslims came of age without any awareness of, or for that matter desire for, a unified Ummah. Meanwhile, the focus on modern schooling in many Muslim-majority states led to dramatic increases in literacy and education, shattering the Ulama’s privilege as the “learned men” of Islam, even as widespread access to new ideas and sources of knowledge resulted in the gradual devaluation of the kind of institutional learning claimed by the Ulama as uniquely theirs. Add to this the rise of alternative forms of Muslim identity such as political Islam (Islamism), Islamic socialism, or even Jihadism—all predicated on the notion that the Ulama are to blame both for the decline of Islamic civilization and for the moral corruption of Muslim society—and the result is a kind of “democratization” of religious authority, as anyone with a significant platform and a loud enough voice can now claim for himself the rights and privileges once reserved solely for Islam’s clerical class.
Part of the reason the Ulama have been able to maintain a monopoly on the interpretation of Islam is because, for the most part, they have been the only ones able to read Islam’s scriptures and texts. Ever since the end of the seventh century C.E., when its verses were collected and canonized, the Quran has remained fixed in its original Arabic because the Ulama insisted that a translation of the Holy Scripture into any other language would violate the divine nature of the text. To this day, non-Arabic versions of the Quran are considered interpretations of the Quran, not the Quran itself. This means that for most of the last fourteen centuries, some 80 percent of the world’s Muslims, for whom Arabic is not a primary language, had to depend on the Ulama to define the meaning and message of their faith for them. (As one can imagine, such incontestable control over scripture has had a particularly negative effect on Muslim women, who have historically been even further removed from a text whose sole interpreters were, with two or three notable exceptions, strictly men.)
All of that is changing as the last century has witnessed the translation of the Quran into more languages than in the previous fourteen centuries combined. More and more Muslim laity, and especially women, are brushing aside centuries of clerical interpretation in favor of an individualized and unmediated reading of the Quran. Two Arabic terms have come to define this process: tajdid, which means “renewal,” and islah, or “reform.” Together these two terms signify a stripping away of centuries of accumulated clerical interpretation in favor of a return to the original founding texts of Islam. Indeed, one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic movements within Islam today is being led by an international community of Muslims, called Quranists, who reject all sources of authority in Islam—the hadith, the Sunna, the Shariah—save for the Quran.
If this idea sounds familiar, it is because scripture has always been the primary battleground in religious reformations. No reformation can succeed unless individuals are able to access the same texts that endow the institution with its power. Luther’s concept of sola scriptura—the notion that all people should be able to interpret the Bible for themselves without the need for a papal mediator—would have been meaningless were it not for his translation of the New Testament from Latin (which only the clergy and the upper class intellectuals could read) to German, the language of the masses. Likewise, by taking upon themselves the authority to define the Quran and actively reinterpreting it according to their own evolving needs, these Muslim men and women are following in the footsteps of the great reformers of the past.
As a result of this remarkable, centuries-long process, Muslims all over the world have been galvanized by a familiar yet revolutionary idea that there need be no mediator between the believer and God, that all people have the ability to discern God’s will for themselves, and that being bonded to the past does not necessarily qualify one to decide the future. Some have used this radical creed to develop wholly new interpretations of Islam that foster pluralism, individualism, modernism, and democracy; others have used it to propound an equally new ideal of Islam that calls for intolerance, bigotry, militancy, and perpetual war. Which of these interpretations is “true Islam” is an unanswerable question, since the rejection of institutional authority means that all interpretations of Islam must be considered equally authoritative. As Martin Luther quickly discovered, once individual believers are empowered to interpret religion for themselves, there can no longer be any constraints (institutional or otherwise) on how faith is construed. Just as the Christian Reformation opened the door to multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes baffling interpretations of Christianity, so has the Islamic Reformation created a number of wildly divergent and competing ideologies of Islam. What must be recognized, however, is that the peaceful, tolerant, and forward-leaning Islam of an Amr Khaled and the violent, intolerant, and backward-looking Islam of an Osama bin Laden are two competing and contradictory sides of the same reformation phenomenon, because both are founded upon the argument that the power to speak for Islam no longer belongs solely to the Ulama. For better or worse, that power now belongs to every single Muslim in the world.
A FEW KILOMETERS from the campuses of al-Azhar University, inside an unassuming office building in the rumbling business district of Dokki, about one hundred fifty full-time employees—most of them in their twenties and thirties—run an Internet site that has quickly become one of the most visited destinations on the Web. IslamOnline.net has, by some estimates, nearly one million daily visitors, the majority of them aged eighteen to twenty-four (it is also one of the most frequently visited sites on the Internet for Muslim women). Users can keep up with news and information from around the world, learn tips for maintaining health and well-being, debate Islamic law, discuss politics, arts, and culture, and communicate with like-minded Muslims from across the globe. But by far the biggest draw of IslamOnline is the site’s popular and deeply controversial “fatwa bank.”
It used to be that if a Muslim in Cairo wanted a fatwa, or religious edict, on a disputed topic, he had to sit at the feet of the venerable scholars of al-Azhar University, whose opinions on religious and social matters were essentially law. Today that Muslim can stay home and troll through IslamOnline’s vast archive of new and previously published fatwas by a global assembly of muftis (scholars qualified to issue a fatwa) covering women’s issues, health concerns, interfaith relations, money and business transactions, sports and games, war and peace, and every other topic imaginable. There is even a section on the site that provides ready-made fatwas linked to whatever the top news story of the day may be.
There are tens of thousands of fatwas to choose from on IslamOnline, nearly five thousand of them in English. Because the fatwas are collected from a wide array of sources, the user can access multiple, and often conflicting, fatwas on a single issue; one can simply decide which fatwa one likes best. If the desired fatwa is not found in the database, the employees at IslamOnline will happily connect the user to a live “cyber-mufti,” who will chat with the supplicant in real time and issue a satisfactory fatwa in less than twenty-four hours. If the cyber-mufti’s fatwa proves unsatisfactory, the user can simply switch his browser to one of IslamOnline’s many competitors, such as Fatwa-Online.com, IslamismScope.net, Almultaka.net, Islam-QA.com (whose fatwas come in twelve languages), or AskImam.org—all of which provide their own unique (and also often contradictory) fatwa databases. If that still does not satisfy, there is always AmrKhaled.net, or the website of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (Sistani.org), or a thousand other sites run by a host of different clerical leaders, activists, academics, lay leaders, spiritual guides, intellectuals, and amateurs, any of whom can spread their influence beyond their local communities with a simple IP address. And because no centralized religious authority exists in Islam to determine which of these opinions is sound and which is not, the user can simply pick and choose whichever fatwa is most appealing from whomever he or she is drawn to most.
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact that the Internet has had, not just on Islam’s evolution, but, more significantly, on the way religious authority in Islam has dispersed and become democratized. The only possible comparison one can make is to the invention of the printing press, for just as that technological advancement propelled Christian Europe inexorably toward the Reformation, making it possible for the leaders of the movement to share their ideas with an entire continent, so too has the Internet become the primary vehicle through which the Islamic Reformation is being realized. Ideas and opinions that used to take decades, even centuries, to spread across the borders of the Islamic world can now be accessed instantly and by anyone, simply with a click of a mouse. Millions of Muslims have unfettered access to the thoughts and teachings of acclaimed religious scholars and unknown amateur intellectuals alike, leading a prominent mufti at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia to lament, “Fatwas today have become something anyone can issue. This is very dangerous, and erroneous fatwas can bring total destruction.”
The mufti may have a point. The Internet is a two-edged sword. It may be democratizing religious authority and spreading exciting new ideas, but it is also creating an environment in which highly individualized interpretations of Islam are battling one another online for the hearts and minds of Muslims. More significantly, the Internet has become a bastion for violent interpretations of Islam, and for Jihadism in particular, allowing militant preachers and propagandists to bypass the authority of the Ulama and communicate their anti-institutional message directly to Muslims across the world. And thanks to the relative anonymity of the Internet, it is often difficult to differentiate between the Ulama and the Jihadist, between the respected scholar and the dangerous dilettante.
But it is precisely for that reason that the Internet has become a principal source of spiritual guidance for a new generation of politically active, socially conscious, and globalized Muslim youth. The Internet—along with increased travel, satellite television, and a host of online social networks—has given these young Muslims a wholly new view of the world and, along with it, a healthy distrust of institutional authority, be it the government or the Ulama. In fact, for many, the two institutions are considered one and the same. After all, in almost every Muslim-majority country, the government exerts direct control over the Ulama, claiming custody over their leadership, choosing the Friday prayer leaders, and on occasion even writing their sermons for them. This has led to a widespread belief among many Muslims that the Ulama have been co-opted by the state and that their judgments on the important social, political, and religious issues of the day can no longer be trusted.
Such sentiments have been buoyed by the rapid influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe and North America, where individualism and the anti-institutional ethic are woven into the very fabric of society. A whole new generation of so-called westernized Muslims is seeking spiritual guidance not in the Grand Mosques of their parents (by some estimates, less than one-third of American Muslims go to mosques) but in smaller “garage mosques,” student groups, spiritual circles, and Islamic centers, most of which are independent of traditional institutional leadership and totally divorced from the societal and cultural restraints of their homelands. True, the number of Muslims in Europe and North America is still relatively small. Despite the hysteria one so often hears about a creeping “Islamization” of the West, Muslims comprise only about 6 percent of the population in Europe and less than 2 percent of the population in the United States; demographers do not expect those percentages to climb much higher. Nevertheless, the freedom of speech and thought that they enjoy, and their greater access to new communication technologies through which they can spread their innovative views about contemporary Islam to the rest of the world, has given these “westernized” Muslims enormous influence over their coreligionists in Muslim-majority states.
What Muslims in Europe and North America do share with Muslims worldwide is that nearly three-quarters of them are under the age of thirty-five. In some parts of the world, most recently in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Yemen, this “Muslim youth bulge” has created restive populations who are fed up with their lack of political and economic opportunities and who are willing to rise up against their governments to demand their rights and privileges. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have provided this global youth population with a glimpse of a different world, of different opportunities and different social structures. Indeed, for many young Muslims, the Internet is more than a means of communication and spiritual sustenance. It is the platform through which a new vision of the Ummah is being realized—a virtual Ummah, based not on creedal adherence or cultural affiliation, but on a shared sense of common interests, values, and concerns.
The same desire to recast religious authority and redefine the meaning and makeup of the Ummah is also what has drawn so many of these young Muslims to the militantly individualistic and radically anti-institutional version of Islam advocated by Jihadism. Jihadist leaders use the Internet to reach out to young Muslims who may feel a sense of social, economic, or religious alienation from their own communities, and to offer them an alternative source of community and identity, one whose aims and conclusions ironically hark back to those of the more radical reformers of the Christian Reformation. Bin Laden, in particular, used the Internet to present himself as a rival source of religious authority, issuing his own fatwas and expounding upon his own Quranic interpretations, even though, like Amr Khaled, he was not a cleric and had absolutely no seminary training of any kind.
Yet it is through their total disassociation with the clerical institutions that Jihadist leaders base their authority. Indeed, the entire Jihadist identity has been developed in direct opposition to the Ulama, which is why their leaders must also be viewed as walking in the footsteps of the great religious reformers of the past, particularly with the so-called radical reformers of the Christian Reformation, men like Hans Hut, Jacob Hutter, and Thomas Müntzer, who, in pushing the principle of religious individualism to its limits, called for the violent overthrow of the social order. In fact, bin Laden may have had more in common with mainstream Christian reformers like Martin Luther than many would like to admit. Luther may have advocated a similar anti-institutional reading of the scriptures and traditions of Christianity, but he also adamantly opposed any interpretation that challenged his. (He even went so far as to rank the different books of the Bible as more or less valuable depending on whether they agreed with his theology or not.) Nor was Luther hesitant to call for unrestrained violence against fellow reformers with whom he disagreed. During the Peasants’ Revolt in 1525, led by Luther’s rival Thomas Müntzer, Luther not only aligned himself with the secular magistrates but publicly called for the mass murder of the peasants, writing “Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab [them], secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be so poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.” More than one hundred thousand peasants were massacred.
It is no wonder that the reform movement Luther is considered to have founded soon began to regard him as the problem and not the solution. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Christian Reformation had more or less left Luther behind in favor of more populist movements like the Zwinglians in Switzerland, the Anabaptists in the Rhineland, and the Calvinists in Geneva, the latter of which quickly became the most dominant branch of Protestantism in western Europe. A similar process is now taking place in Islam, as Osama bin Laden and his Jihadist ideologues have been left behind by a movement they neither initiated nor led, yet brilliantly used to their advantage in promoting their religious and political agendas. An ideology that only ever appealed to a tiny fraction of the global Muslim movement has become even less tolerated over the last decade, as overwhelming majorities in nearly every Muslim-majority state have turned their backs on the Jihadist message.
But the reformation phenomenon that gave birth to Jihadism continues unabated. It has even begun to influence the very same clerical institutions against which it initially arose. A new class of so-called “dissident Ulama”—scholars and teachers who have declared independence from the accepted schools of law—has begun to gather large followings throughout the Islamic world. These Ulama have transformed themselves into something akin to itinerant preachers, creating a parallel authority structure at odds with the traditional clerical institutions. Meanwhile, the traditional institutions have themselves begun to re-exert some measure of influence and authority by adopting the same tactics as their reformist rivals. Call it a “counter-reformation,” if you will. Al-Azhar has even begun its own television network that broadcasts in English, French, and Urdu (among other languages) as a means of combating the influence of popular preachers like Amr Khaled. Nearly every clerical institution in the world now has a significant online presence. There is a widespread recognition by the Ulama that its authority and reputation rest upon its ability to use new social media tools to engage young Muslims in discourse at their level and on their own terms. The result is a cacophony of voices from a variety of sources representing a veritable cornucopia of ideas, values, thoughts, and interpretations, many in conflict with one another, all claiming the right to define the future of what will soon become the largest religion in the world.
Reformations, as we know from Christian history, can be chaotic and bloody events. And the Islamic Reformation has some way to go before it is resolved. It may be too early to speculate about how the sense of radical individualism and anti-institutionalism that has seized Muslims across the world will influence Islam in the coming years. But one thing is certain: the past, and the idealized, perfected, and totally imaginary view of it wrought by those puritans and fundamentalists who strive to re-create it, is over. The next chapter in the story of Islam will be written solely by those willing to look forward, to confront whatever lies ahead, confident in the knowledge that the revolution launched by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago to replace the archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radically new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism still continues to this day.
It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here.
We are all living in it.
* Palestine was the name given to the vast tract of land encompassing all of modern-day Israel/Palestine, as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon during the Roman era.