We may all get there in the end

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali_eteraz/2007/09/the_islamic_reformation.html

I don't want to sound pompous or uppity, but when you're right you're right.

'Since 2001 a plethora of writers have made calls for an Islamic "Reformation". Many hopes (and careers) are pinned on the idea, but there is no such thing coming. The Islamic reformation has already happened. The Muslim equivalent of nailing the 95 theses was the desecration of a graveyard and the stoning of a woman for adultery.'

It is worth reading all of this article, as it synthesises a number of things I've been saying for the last year or so. For those who imagine that all religions are bound by some hidden rule of history to follow the same patterns through their history, I present this counter-evidence.

'Wahhab's "reformation" started Sunnism's unmooring from traditionalism. The Quran and the hadith, long bound together in a legal system (and hierarchy) so complex that, according to the orientalist John Makdisi, it gave birth to British Common Law, were now left wide open for Wahhab and his followers to access. What they now had was the power to do ijtihad. Except, in their distaste of Ottoman scholarship, they made up their "method" as they went along. It was a mixture of Quranic literalism and deference to Hanbal's hadith corpus (which was much larger than competing versions).'

For those attentive readers of my blog (I'm estimating in the low hundreds of thousands at this point) you may have noticed I have stopped parroting the Robert Spencer line that Islam Is At War With The West. It isn't. Both mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam have co-existed relatively well with their neighbors for a very long time, at least since the breaking up of the original Arab empires of the seventh century. The Ottoman empire was always more to do with empire than it was to do with Islam, although it used (and abused) Islam for its own purposes while that was useful. The people who ARE at war with the west are the Wahhabis. And they are taking over a mosque near you right now.

Unless we help normal, average Muslims fight the taking over of their mosques by these noxious apostates, expect a lot more backpack bombers and 'lads' from Yorkshire trying to kill large numbers of us. Like I said before, first you identify the enemy. THEN you kill him.