Thousands ask, can Islam be reformed?
What they fail to realise is that Islam has already undergone a reformation. It began nearly a century ago, and the Islamic terrorist organisations the world fears are the reformers.
Let me explain.
In religious history, ‘reformation’ means stripping away centuries of cultural overlay to return to the core teachings, the pure source.
Just as the Protestant Reformation peeled away tradition to expose the raw biblical text, reforming Islam means discarding centuries of jurisprudential buffering and non-Islamic influence and returning to the unfiltered Quran and Hadith.
This process began in earnest after 1924, when the Ottoman Caliphate, the last Islamic empire, was formally abolished.
For the first time in 1,300 years, the Islamic world found itself without a central religious-political authority.
Ideologues like Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abul A’la Maududi, and Abdelhamid Kishk, the so-called ‘reformers,’ rejected British and French influence and sought to revive Islam’s original political-theological structure: the caliphate.
Funded by Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, former king of Saudi Arabia, who saw in them a powerful tool to counter the secular pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, former President of Egypt, these movements were unleashed across the Arab and Muslim world.
They sparked what was branded the Islamic Awakening, a sweeping, calculated campaign to revive the purest form of Islam, stripped of modernity and stripped of compromise.
The result was a tidal wave of radicalisation.
Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, and 96% of global Islamic terrorist organizations were the logical outcome of a reformation that returned Islam to its unfiltered, foundational texts.
What we need is to pull Islam away from reformation, not toward it.
The article has been sourced from Dan Burmawi. Burmawi is a bestselling author based in the United States. He tweets at DanBurmawy.
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