The title question is in no way meant to be provocative, let alone insulting. But the world, including vast numbers of Muslims, needs this question answered.
After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.
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Both suppositions are highly controversial. Few believing Muslims think that Islam needs to be reformed; the suggestion would strike most religious Muslims as absurd, if not insulting and ultimately blasphemous. And it would strike many non-Muslim critics of Islam as naïve. As Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt 1883 to 1907, put it in a quote known to all Western students of Islam, “Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”
Let’s deal first with the question of whether Islam needs reforming.
The case for it is compelling. Here are a few reasons:
• Majority-Muslim and Islam-based countries are not, and have not been, free societies. According to the 2010 Freedom House “Freedom in the World” survey, of the world’s 47 Muslim-majority countries, only two are free, 18 are partly free, and 27 are not free. There is no honest explanation for this nearly total absence of liberty in Muslim countries that does not reflect in some way on Islam.
• Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians in places such as medieval Spain was morally far superior to the treatment of non-Christians by European Christians during the same period. But in the modern period, nowhere Islam controlled afforded non-Muslims anywhere near the equality that non-Christians came to take for granted in the Christian world.
• There was a burst of intellectual and scientific creativity in the Muslim world for a few hundred years, but then the opponents of reason came to dominate Islam, and with that development came a loss of scientific and intellectual curiosity. How could it have been otherwise? The dominant Muslim view was that the natural world had no laws. Everything that occurred did so solely because Allah willed it. If an arrow hit its target, it was not because of the archer’s ability or wind patterns or laws of physics; it was because Allah willed it. According to a United Nations report written by Arab scholars, the Arab world’s lack of interest in the non-Arab and non-Muslim worlds is so great that in any given year, comparatively tiny Greece translates more books into Greek than all the Arab countries combined translate into Arabic.
• Regarding women, one cannot name a culture or religion in which the status of women is as low as it is in many Muslim societies. Moreover, the status of women has actually declined in many Muslim societies in the present generation. For example, the veil is more common in Egypt today than it was a hundred years ago.
• In nearly every Muslim country in which non-Muslims live (usually Christians) — from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq — they suffer persecution.
• A very small percentage of Muslims are terrorists. But nearly every international terrorist is Muslim. And according to every poll I have seen, at least 70 million of the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims support Islamist actions and theology.
• Every state that calls itself an Islamic republic and rules according to Islamic law is a totalitarian state, and it is usually a bloodthirsty one. Saudi Arabia is an example of the first; Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Iran, and Islamist Sudan are examples of both.
So, yes, Islam needs to be reformed. This is no insult to Muslims. Judaism and Christianity have undergone major changes. And needed to.
Can Islam be reformed? I do not agree with Lord Cromer. I believe it can.
I hope Prager is right, and the fact that Islam was less intolerant (relative to the West) and less incurious about the world around it is a sign for hope.
I wonder how Andrew McCarthy would respond to this article.
And more importantly, I wonder about the reformist Muslims that Prager mentions: can they plausibly justify their positions on the Koran?
If they can't, then, in a sense, Islam has already had its equivalent of the Reformation. It's possible that the Christian reformation has been modernizing and liberalizing (in the good, original sense of the word) ONLY because of the contents of the Bible, and so a recommitment to a different religious text may indeed lead to wholly different results.
Mr. Prager: I'm going to side with Lord Cromer on this. Islam may have once been a religion; today, though, it is a totalitarian political ideology pretending to be a religion.
Mike, Kiryas Joel (whatever that is) is not large or influential enough to present mainstream Jews with a struggle for the soul of their faith. If it did, then it would indeed be the responsibility of Jews to "do something" about it -- if nothing else, to oppose and criticize, and make clear that it did not become the dominant face of Judaism that is presented to the world.
Likewise, if I do not want Christianity to be domineering, tribal, imprudent, or dishonest, it is up to me to make the case that it is most truly, and ought to be, otherwise. I know that nobody likes criticism from the neighbors, but if the criticism is true and insufficiently made from within, it ought to be welcomed.
"There was a burst of intellectual and scientific creativity in the Muslim world for a few hundred years, but then the opponents of reason came to dominate Islam,..."
Actually if you track muslim advancement you will find that it stopped just as they ran out of new free thinking societies to conquer. They were stopped in their attacks in the West and they never had a chance against China.
BTW, many of the 'muslim' advancements were either not theirs at all or were made by non-muslims living in muslim lands.
To reform islam would require rewriting (and reinterpreting) the koran. It is not going to happen.
I do think Islam can be reformed -- but people need to want to reform. In the past few years I have noticed more and more that reform Muslims are coming forward. Granted, for every reform Muslim there are probably thousands who do not want reform.
But I think the only way that Islam will be reformed is if the non-Muslim world challenges them. Up to now, for the most part, we have been allowing them to do just what they want, but if we fight the worst of them, free the suppressed of them and support the best of them (like the above mentioned thinkers) we can be a force for good in the world and bring the world to a better place. Whether this will happen or not is up to us. IMHO.
The Koran teaches world domination, I believe its the crux of the "religion". At its core, its a political religious system aimed at discrediting jews -- it can not be reformed. And it hard to trust the ones that say they would, as the Koran tells them to lie in the name of world domination.
The Great Commission has long been the motivating scripture for Christianity to "go and make disciples of all nations". Which is world domination by another avenue if one perceives malicious intent. And the OT account of the subjugation of Canaan is a pretty good exhibit in the case against the bloodthirsty and overtly imperialistic history of the children of the Bible
And if the "children of the Bible" acted that way *today*, in view of the further light and knowledge history, reflection, and further revelation have brought them, it would be evil, and would be opposed by righteous Christians.
I am sure Mr. Prager has read Bernard Lewis and others. Islam has indeed "reformed" or changed. The rise of the position of Imam as an authority over muslim societies is new. And the Ayotollah is very recent creation.
But these changes have not been for the better. No Imam or Ayotollah that expresses moderate views has arisen with prominence. And I suspect this cannot happen because of the way the Koran is written and to be read, and the doctrine of abrogation.
Mr. Prager, you are trading in fantasy. Moreover, it's dangerous fantasy: about like Wile E. Coyote running pell-mell off a cliff edge and only beginning to fall when he looks down and realizes there's nothing supporting him.
Broaden your reading a bit. Your notions about Saracen Spain, in particular, are wildly mistaken.
"Broaden your reading a bit. Your notions about Saracen Spain, in particular, are wildly mistaken."
The black legend dies hard. Not that it's in any danger of dying at all.
Funny how those who crow about the tolerance of the Muslim occupiers of Spain miss the point that you had a small Muslim overlord population ruling over a much larger population of subject Christians (and Jews). Of course they ruled with a lighter touch than Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa did!
There is a reformed Islam, called Baha'i, and the mainstream muslims are right about one thing: it is not really Islam anymore. I would claim it is better (than Islam...not a high bar to clear), but it is not Islam in a meaningful way.
The Islamic power structure persecuted and chased the Baha'i into exile. Not a good sign for anyone hoping for reform.
I have a question for the historians out there. Was there such a thing as a moderate Nazi? Were German soldiers during WWII less of a threat if they were not Nazis? If Islam gains an upper hand over the west will moderate muslims come to the defense of the west? Just think about this and what the predominate view that is being sold today is saying?
The analogy of Naziism and Islam does not fit. Few in the German army fought for Naziism, most fought for Germany. The core of the resistance to Hitler was in the German high command and Abwehr.
The muslim view of the world describes the muslim world as the wold of peace, and the non-muslim world as the world of war.
