I do wish people would stop saying that Islam needs to experience the like of the Christian Reformation. This is exactly what it is already experiencing, and it is as bloody and brutal as the historical European template.
Haldrych Zwingli, Martin Luther and John Calvin were not nice people. They were as intolerant and violent as many of today’s puritanical ideologues.
The grotesque violence in the Muslim world today can quite easily be attributed to a reformist movement, which claims to leapfrog back to a truer, purer faith, allegedly not practised for hundreds of years.
The parallels are innumerable. Calvin had the printing press; today’s puritans have the internet. Zwingli chose which books of the Bible were apocryphal; today’s puritans just burn the books which delegitimise them and pretend they never existed. The Protestants whitewashed church walls and pulled down monasteries; the self-righteous of today blow up the graves of scholars and bulldoze the remnants of ancient civilisations.
So don’t tell us we need reform; we need reprieve from this simplistic, binary mind-set. A Protestant Islam is not going to work for us.
Last modified: 5 April 2015
