One of Medary.com’s jihads is the necessity for Muslims to reform Islam to bring the religion into the 21st Century. This has to be done from within–it is folly to try to impose change from outside to a religion with over 1.7 billion adherents. But that doesn’t mean non-Muslems can’t advocate and encourage change. So, to the articles:
Stopping radical Islam[*1] , from Newsweek:
What this is about, as Tony Blair has argued, is fanaticism. Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago they would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day. Today, for Muslims, it is a violent interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism. Born in the Middle East, it has spread like a virus across the Muslim world and into the Islamic diaspora in the West.
Nailed to the mosque door[*2] , from Reason Hit and Run:
Al-Gharbawi is one of numerous Muslim writers demanding a religious response to Islam’s global crisis. Many of these writers are calling for religious fatwas against terrorist deeds, but Al-Gharbawi thinks that’s not enough. He wants a re-interpretation of Shari’a, a new understanding of the life of the Prophet, and even writes that “there is a need to discuss intensively the issue of abolishing chapters in the Koran.”
So, the calls for reform are there. But, there are (as always) those who resist. Not all of those resisters fly hijacked airliners into buildings and blow themselves up to kill children, but some do. The battle is joined.
Any Reformation has its opponents[*3] , from the Washington Post:
Elsayed, for his part, bristles at labels like moderate or conservative. He said calls to reform Islam, like recent efforts to allow men and women to pray together, are misguided _ yet he also urged his congregation to reach out to non-Muslims.
Just because we’re not Muslims doesn’t mean that we have to be stupid. Stupid would be to hand over to the most reactionary and radical Muslims the capabilities to build nuclear bombs. We already know that the extremists will kill themselves in order to destroy the infidels (i.e. us). So . . .
Some places need reform more than others[*4] : from MEMRI via Trey Jackson, here’s the President-elect of Iran:
The message of the (Islamic) Revolution is global, and is not restricted to a specific place or time. It is a human message, and it will move forward.
Have no doubt… Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.
