I was only having a conversation earlier this week as to why Islam can never have either a reformation equivalent or the equivalent of a New Testament. They believe that the Koran is the literal word of god and not so much as a full stop can be tampered with.
“…..Martin Luther unleashed his attack on the monolithic Catholic Church exactly 499 years ago on All Saints Eve Now (now popularly known as Halloween) when he nailed his 95 theological theses on the Church door of Wittenberg. Now, as we approach the quincentenary of that momentous event it is possible to gain some long-term perspective on its essential nature and impact on modern history. In particular, it is an ideal time to explore the grim implications of such a religious upheaval for the crisis of Islam, which is engulfing much of the world in the same type of internecine and sectarian violence that characterized the epochal upheaval that convulsed Christian Europe.
Nothing has changed: Islam remains constitutionally unable to embrace the open society that the West enjoys. Instead Islamists and other devotees of ultra-reactionary Saudi-backed Salafi fundamentalism are vigorously seeking to reassert this medieval theological irrationalism throughout the Muslim world. They are never going to yield to calls for reform.
Nor is there any likelihood that the backward-looking Muslim diaspora exploiting the welfare states of the West will rise to the challenge, contest this obscurantism, and modernize Islam, perhaps transforming it into something akin to liberal Christianity by capitulating abjectly to secular consumerism, political correctness, Green-Left ideology, and becoming a Uniting Church of Islam.
Such suggestions are preposterous, as these diaspora are largely funded and controlled by Salafists, as part of the ‘Arabization of Islam’. Consequently, Western Muslims, protected by their political front men and cultural quislings in the media and academia, are far more likely to develop and entrench their enclaves and no-go areas in the cities of the West where they can enforce the more brutal and benighted aspects of Salafist Islam. This is especially the case with their womenfolk, with radical Muslim intellectuals even prepared to defend honour killings. As their reticence to take a stand against jihadism and their eagerness to claim victimhood reveals, they are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution.
Driven by an inter-continental demographic explosion affecting a billion Muslims, the outcome of this crisis can only be an era of war, terrorism, sectarian violence, mass illegal migration and human-wave assaults on Europe and other Western nations unprecedented outside of wartime.
Tragically, there is no historical evidence to justify an alternative, less pessimistic projection of what is transpiring in the Muslim world. This bleak outlook is therefore the true lesson of the Reformation: the collapse of traditional religious systems that have served societies and great masses of people for centuries, whether they be Christian, Muslim (or, for that matter, Hindu or Confucian), can be expected to generate violence on a large scale stretching over decades or even centuries.
Ultimately, those calling for a Muslim Reformation are not only naïve, they also radically underestimate the world-historical trauma and epoch-shaping destructiveness of the Reformation that they are presently calling upon Muslims to emulate. Indeed, the devastating effects of the first Reformation are resonating still, some 500 years after the event, as its implications work themselves out and Western Christendom suffers its own final death throes under the impact of modernity. If there is any message to be gained from the Reformation experience it is that any contemporary religious upheaval on a comparable scale will involve the mobilization of hundreds of millions of people inflamed with religious passions and millennialist expectations, together with widespread violence and massive disruption on an inter-continental scale. Like the first Reformation, such an event will convulse the world for centuries….” You Say You Want a Reformation