Islam cannot be Reformed

This article offers a view that is too often overlooked.  Much as there are people who are culturally Jewish though religiously secular, the same is true of many Muslims.  Those Muslims who take the religion seriously, who follow the actual preaching and teaching of Muhammad, are the ones who kill the infidel and blow themselves to bits.  When a non-Muslim makes that point, it is dismissed as the ravings of a bigot.  It becomes more difficult to dismiss when Ayann Hirsi Ali or Nabeel Qureshi offer the same points.

 

Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam is not just a religion.  Judaism was a slave religion as far as the ancient Egyptians were concerned and most of Jewish history is one of being a subjugated, and usually hated, minority.  Christianity spent its founding centuries with a status similar to the Jews.  Each was a self-contained belief system that was separate from governing.  Jesus said "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."  Here is a separation of church and state from the very beginning.  Islam arose under entirely different circumstances.  Muhammad rose to be the ruler of a burgeoning empire and the religion thus has governmental aspects to it.  Islam has an integrated legal system, Sharia.  Where the West has come to revere the separation of church and state, Islam holds that church and state are inseparable.

 

There is talk of an Islamic Reformation, echoing the tumultuous Christian Reformation.  The Christian Reformation was a rebellion against the massive superstructure that was the Catholic Church.  Jesus said nothing of Popes, Cardinals, Archbishops, and so forth who lived lives of luxury at the expense of believers.  The Fall of Rome had left a power vacuum in the West that, with both positive and negative consequences, the church filled.  Martin Luther attacked this religious construct that had little basis in the teachings of Christ.  There is much to be said on both sides of that argument.  However, the reformists believed they were establishing the religion based more on teachings of the founder, discarding much of the tacked on aspects that had evolved over the centuries.  With that in mind, how could Islam have a Reformation?  Protestants sought to return to the source material.  There are currently Muslims doing exactly that with the Koran and they are called ISIS and al Qaeda.  There can be no Islamic Reformation that both quells the Jihadi impulses and is true to Muhammad.  Like the church and state under Sharia, Jihad and Muhammad are inseparable.