The Very Reverend Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, last month told a Cambridge University congregation the world is witnessing a Muslim Reformation. The Times Higher asks theologians and sociologists if they agree
* The idea of reformations occurring 1,600 years into the history of "great religions" was set out last year by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. When Colin Slee posed his question, he was giving a sermon, not an academic lecture. He was therefore trying to fit current Islamic events into a preformed Christian historical template, which is his job as a cleric. The same goes pari passu for Sacks.
Analogies - in this case between complex and wide-ranging events 400 years apart - can be good teaching aids but tend to come across as patronising and can obscure vital differences. Whoever said "history doesn't repeat itself, it's only historians who repeat each other" probably had it right.
Brian Bocking
Professor of the study of religions
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
* We're witnessing a profound change in the ways that Muslim communities orient themselves to the key tenets of their faith. An important element of this is a questioning of religious authority and received wisdom.
Engagements between the identities of Muslim women and Western feminism seem a case in point.
But I have a problem with identifying this as an approximation of the Christian Reformation. There is more than a taint of Eurocentrism in attempting to understand current changes in Islamic communities through the prism of Christian history without regard to the very different conditions under which the respective religious and sociological changes have taken, and are taking, place. There's also a hint of social Darwinism in the notion that Islam is only now going through what Christianity experienced several centuries ago.
Richard Gale
Research fellow in sociology
Birmingham University
* The call for a Muslim Reformation has been circulating for more than a century now, with figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad 'Abduh urging Muslims to shake off the slavish following of tradition and emulate the Protestant reformers in returning to the original sources of their religion. This message has been commended by Tariq Ramadan in his recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary.
But just as not all Christians agreed with Luther and Calvin, not all Muslims think that al-Afghani and 'Abduh were right, in either diagnosis or suggested prescription. Furthermore, there is no agreement among would-be reformers about what needs to be reformed or how. So even if we are witnessing a Muslim Reformation in some quarters, as Colin Slee suggests, we are also witnessing a Counter-reformation among those who find the idea abhorrent, and bitter disagreements among reformers, by analogy with those that took place between Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and others.
Hugh Goddard
Professor of Christian-Muslim relations
Nottingham University
* I do not believe we are witnessing a Muslim Reformation. We cannot invokeJa concept so deeply rooted in European history. Such a Reformation needed a pope for a Luther to emerge. In Islam, there has never been a pope and therefore there will never be a Luther to lead such a Reformation.
What we are witnessing is a transformation characterised by the fragmentation of religious authority. This has been brought about by mass education, literacy and new communications technology, which encourages the dismantling of religious hierarchies, especially that of the ulema (religious scholars). Today, the ulema have no control over religious interpretation. We see the emergence of multiple voices within Islam, a perpetuation of the pluralism that characterised its early history, a pluralism now more pronounced as literacy gives more people than ever direct access to the tradition.
Madawi Al-Rasheed
Professor of anthropology of religion
King's College London
* The Muslim Reformation is hampered by the undermining of the traditional Islamic universities, which have lost their pre-colonial independence to the strong influence of the governments of Muslim countries. Figures such as Tariq Ramadan are a beacon of hope, but they walk a tightrope as they are easily discounted as expressing a colonial mentality. Ramadan's documentary revealed groups of committed, educated and thoughtful Western Muslims capable of taking this project forward.
The way in which European intellectuals and media respond is crucial. We must allow Western Muslims space to find their own ways to challenge and participate in our liberal democracies, and then respond to what emerges without prejudicial assumptions that liberal democracy is fully formed and perfectly functioning.
Anonymous
* The Reformation of Islam, if one wishes to use such an analogy, took place in the 19th century, consequent on the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon.
One could argue that what we are seeing now is a partial Counter-reformation. However, I am not sure what the analogue of the Council of Trent is, so perhaps we need to be careful in pressing comparisons too far.
Anonymous
* There have been attempts to reform Islam since the 19th century. Some courageous and outspoken reformists are around today, but they are few in number, limited in influence and often secularist in approach.
Most Westerners remain unaware of how often death threats are made against Muslim journalists, authors and other intellectuals. A recent PhD doctorate approved in Saudi Arabia listed 200 non-conformist "heretics"
as worthy of death. Last month, Osama bin Laden said that anyone was free to kill freethinkers, arguing "that the crime committed by a freethinker is the worst of crimes, that the damage caused by his staying alive among the Muslims is of the worst kind of damage".
Given that al-Qaeda and others act on such threats, reformers are up against fearful odds; as a result, most journalists and intellectuals toe the line. Even Westerners are growing fearful of even remotely criticising Islam, which means reform cannot easily be backed up from outside the Muslim world.
Denis MacEoin
Royal Literary Fund Fellow
* The term "Reformation" is not helpful. What is happening in contemporary Islam in the West - as with Christianity and Judaism - is a restructuring along progressive and conservative lines. The basic fault line lies in the reactions to modernity: a conservative approach that engages modernity from particular understandings of religious texts and traditions, and a progressive approach that seeks to interpret religious tradition in the light of contemporary knowledge and liberal values. Both are likely to play an integral part in the religious landscape of the West for the foreseeable future.
Gordon Lynch
Senior lecturer in religion and culture
Birmingham University
* People forget that the initial stages of the Reformation included incredibly bloody civil wars involving the decimation of civilian populations, inquisitions, purges, persecutions and forced migrations. This is what we can expect over the next century throughout much of the Muslim world, before the ensuing reflection on those entirely foreseeable events leads to the eventual acceptance of appropriate practical political and spiritual wisdom.
As I and other Muslim colleagues have illustrated, on an intellectual and cultural level the supposed Reformation will involve the popular RE-discovery of foundational aspects of the Koran and the wider Islamic tradition. The loss and forgetting of those central spiritual and humanistic dimensions of Islamic civilisation have been driven by the same world historical factors that led to the mass appeal and violent dominance of Marxism and National Socialism.
History does indeed repeat itself, in understandable and predictable ways. The intrinsic shortcomings of reductionist totalitarian political ideologies and the fantasies underlying the momentarily irresistible popular appeal of their empty slogans are unfortunately rediscovered, by each new generation only through the shared experience of their appalling consequences.
Anonymous
* The analogy with the Protestant Reformation is not helpful: quite apart from the flaws it demonstrates in its understanding of historical context, it will be perceived by Muslims as deeply patronising. It appears to the West that the Muslim world is dominated by the reactionary Islamism of Wahhabi "orthodoxy" and the theocratic ideology of Iranian Shiaism, both seen as medieval and therefore in need of reform. In reality, Muslim intellectual life is far more complex; there are powerful traditions of humanitarianism and spirituality that are as Islamic as those whose voices are loudest in the media and politics.
Renewed interest in the contribution of Islamic culture to world history is tantamount to a Renaissance as much as a Reformation. As it happens, Iran has been the main source of civilising forces in this region, from the reforms of Zoroaster and Cyrus the Great, author of the first charter of human rights, down to the Abbasid dynasty, which rediscovered and developed Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophy and Alexandrian scientific thought.
The West owes a great debt of gratitude to the Islamic world; it can help the process of Renaissance by remembering the principles of tolerance, scientific discovery and freedom it inherited from the ancient world - and that was long in the care of Iranian and Islamic civilisation.
Alan Williams
Senior lecturer in comparative religion
* The political climate of the Muslim world has been defensive since the post-colonial period. Paranoia and rhetoric against everything Western dominates much religious thinking. In the absence of central authority, dogmatic assertions by religious "leaders" stifle the capacity to remain receptive to internal and external challenges. Muslim societies must retrieve the spirit of self-questioning that helps them deal honestly and critically with the moral, political and social issues of the day. This means looking faithfully at the scriptural traditions, but in their contexts and where the challenges of modernity are recognised rather than resisted as un-Islamic.
Scholarly communities have begun "reformative" discussions, but fear and political expediencies prevent many ordinary people from positive engagement.
Mona Siddiqui
Senior lecturer in Arabic and Islamic studies
Glasgow University
* In a postmodern era, it is comforting to know that some people are still willing to peddle grand narratives and are brazen enough to claim their particular historical trajectory as the default model that all others must imitate. Colin Slee suggests that there is a moment in religious development when older frameworks for interpreting the world are no longer relevant and reform is necessary. At best, this is an anachronistic Orientalist position, at worst, an example of neo-colonial and ethnocentric posturing designed to chime with the discourse of "civilisation clash".
"Tradition" has become a dirty word when discussing religion.
Contrasted with "modern", it is associated with blind obedience, accreted cultural practices and synonymous with parochial conservatism. Reform is therefore usually associated with loosening the grip of a stifling tradition. In Islam, however, authority, developed practice and conserving are seen as positive features. It is difficult to imagine an Islam without tradition. This is why no reform is necessary, for each new generation calls on scholars to reinterpret what has gone before. On the contrary, where things start getting shaky, and most recently much more than shaky, is where authority is ignored and tradition is sidestepped. This latter phenomenon is part of the present crisis within the Muslim world.
Andrey Rosowsky
Lecturer in education
Sheffield University