Salman Rushdie has a proposal for, as he calls it an Enlightenment in Islam or a Reformation, an accommodation of the religion to the modern world. It is an ambitious project (via Times of London), and would take place first in the non-Islamic world:

Reformed Islam would reject conservative dogmatism and accept that, among other things, women are fully equal to men; that people of other religions, and of no religion, are not inferior to Muslims; that differences in sexual orientation are not to be condemned, but accepted as aspects of human nature; that anti-Semitism is not OK; and that the repression of free speech by the thin-skinned ideology of easily-taken “offence” must be replaced by genuine, robust, anything-goes debate in which there are no forbidden ideas or no-go areas.

Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes and stop worrying so much about locking up their daughters. It would emerge from the intellectual ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.

We wish him well, and hope this is the beginning of something. We long for the day when terms like Dar al-Harb disappear from common currency.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 9:44 am and is filed under art, culture, General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.