As I wrote in my earlier comment to Promethea:

That’s what people mean when they call for reform in Islam. But it hasn’t happened, and that’s the real problem. If anything, the trend has been the opposite.

I see nothing that indicates that the desired changes will happen in Islam, unfortunately. And by “desired,” I mean desired by the West.

The key figure in this 20th century “Reformation” was Hassan al-Banna (grandfather of today’s Islamic “activist” Tariq Ramadan), who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (El-Ikhwan al-Muslemeen) in 1928. al-Banna thought that Islam had been lead astray, diluted and weakened by the adoption of Western notions and practices, and that this was the reason that the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate had failed and disappeared, and an innervated Islam was at the mercy of colonialist powers, and al-Banna wanted to bring Islam back to its original, core beliefs, and for the Ikhwan to bring about the establishment of a world-wide Caliphate. It is the Ikhwan out of which sprang today’s Muslim terrorist organizations–like Hamas, and it serves as an inspiration for others like Al-Qaeda, as well as having established a myriad of stealthy Ikhwan front groups to pursue its goals. According to the list of unindicted co-conspirators from the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial, these Ikhwan established/influenced front groups in the U.S. include the prominent Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a “student organization” that has chapters on many, perhaps most major college campuses in the U.S. As entered into the record by Justice Department lawyers–uncontested as to its source or contents–at the Holy Land terrorism funding trial, the Ikhwan’s strategic plan for America, dated 1991, included this key summary:

“The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions.”

Another major Muslim ideologue, writer and preacher driving this “Reformation” was Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Ikhwan who spent 1948 in the U.S. as an exchange student, who traveled around, and who was disgusted, horrified and revolted by just about every aspect of free and democratic American “unbeliever” civilization that he encountered.

It was, apparently, a church sponsored dance he attended in Greely, Colorado in 1948 that “pushed Qutb over the edge” because (this was 1948 remember, and I am willing to bet this was a pretty sedate and decorous church dance, not the “roaring twenties,” flappers included, with a hip flask of Gin in their stockings, nor today’s “Girls Gone Wild,” flashing their boobs, or deafening music and aggressive rhythms, nor was there “dirty dancing, ” a “mosh pit, ” excessive drinking or drugs, the odd full term baby delivered into a toilet at the high school prom, or drugged out rockers dropping their drawers and mooning the audience, or pissing or throwing up on them), as the minister put on a record of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” shooed the wallflowers out onto the floor, and “Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion,” for it was then that the observing Qutb realized that America and its culture and society were the embodiment of “demonic licentiousness and sinful hubris.” Apparently Qutb’s writings form the basis of the Ikhwan’s preaching, and call for the destruction of the West’s unbeliever “House of War,” and of the United States in particular, and the destruction of our “ungodly and perverse” Western society, and its replacement by Islam and the return of the Caliphate.

To expand a little on your idea of “reform” within Islam, I believe that Islam has been so resistant to reform because it was deliberately designed that way, and the death penalty for apostasy and the sequence of increasing levels of social pressure and ostracism, and threats, then violence, that lead up to the ultimate penalty of death for Muslim apostasy within the Umma have been a powerful means of stopping reform and, if need be, weeding out recalcitrant, possible reformers throughout the last 1,400 years.

As a result, I note that there is not even the hint of an alternative Qur’an for potential dissidents to rally around and to champion, nor are there–outside of the handful of Muslims calling for reform who are not located within the Umma but are here in the West (and many of them now self-described former Muslims)–calls from the “masses” or intellectuals in the Umma for such reform–and despite the characterization of this or that Muslim country as “moderate,” on examination there is no major Muslim nation, or organization, or religious center, or Imam, or Mosque in the Umma of any size or visibility (or that I have heard of in the West, with the exception of people like lone wolf, Dr. Zudi Jasser) Muslims openly calling for such major reforms, and, from “the evidence on the ground,” neither are there any popular movements calling for such reforms, and calling, in particular, for the removal of violent and xenophobic and supremacist material from the Qur’an; a reform which, if adopted, would result in an estimated 90% or more of the Qur’an having to be discarded, leaving just the Five Pillars (the confession of faith, alms, the Hajj to Mecca, prayer and fasting) and a few medieval folk tales and conceptions of the world and how it functions.

What I have observed tells me that there isn’t really any call for such reforms as you envision, and even if “democracy” were to come to any of the nations of the Umma, and some reforms made, does that mean that Islam’s view of us “unbelievers” and what should happen to us (estimated to be the subject of the great majority of the Qur’an) would somehow necessarily be modified as a consequence?

I cannot help but remember that the 2006 elections among the Palestinians in the Gaza strip were supposedly “free and “democratic” elections, and yet, they resulted in the terrorist organization Hamas being voted into power.

Moreover, while you hope for some way that the milder Meccan verses can be seen by Muslims as controlling, and the violent verses received at Medina can be dropped, you are aware, I take it, that the leaders of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence agreed in the 10th century A.D. that all discussion and questions concerning the doctrines and content of Islam were settled and that no further discussion or revision of its tenets were necessary or possible, which state is what is meant by the phrase, “The Gates of Ijtahad Are Closed.”

Really.

Having just spent the last several years delving into all things Islamic and Muslim–both ancient and modern, and that whole repugnant, bleak, alternative universe, and coming up empty handed as far as “moral things” within and about Islam are concerned, especially things that are “moral” in actual practice, I’d like to see what “moral” things about Islam you have found to put on your list, and how–for the purposes of your reading and analyzing the Qura’n, the Hadiths and the Sira, and looking at the morality they teach, and the morality demonstrated in the contemporary Umma–you define what is “moral” and good within Islam.

And please don’t say that it is how Muslim children love their mothers and mothers love their children, for then I will have to produce the example of the current day “culture of death” practiced most especially well by the Palestinians, and many of their mothers and children (http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/all-mothers-should-sacrifice-their-children-for-palestine/) .

I think the problem is what we’re looking for isn’t moderate Muslims, it’s Muslim reformers, which are a far smaller and much harder to find group.

In my earlier comment addressed to Promethea, I was attempting to respond to her comment where she said:

Islam is an evil totalitarian ideology. There is nothing in Islam that is moral. It teaches its followers to destroy non-conformers.

If someone here can tell me one good thing about Islam, I’d like to read it.

There are plenty of things in Islam that are moral. The problem is whether they are predominating in the religion and its practice today and in the future.

Muslim religious scholars interpret the Qur’an using the key technique of “naskh” or abrogation, which is that the earlier, more peaceful verses are abrogated, nullified, superseded, and canceled by the later, much more militant, violent and xenophobic verses ,and the last “received” verse in the Qur’an. is verse 9, the “Sura of the Sword” i.e. which contains the command from Allah to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them,” which verse alone Muslim scholars say abrogates more than 120 prior more pacific verses; facts that Muslms and their apologists do not like to share with us “unbelievers”

Another way Muslims look at the chronological progression in the violence of these suras is that in the beginning of his prophetic career, when Muhammad was initially trying to gather adherents adn Islam was very vulnerable, he needed for his new religoin to appear innocuous so as not to atttract the hostility of the existing Christian, Jewish and Pagan communities in Mecca, so these early, initial verses stressed peace, accomodation and harmony, then there was a middle period in which the verses now counseled a more aggressive self-defence and, finally, in the later Medinan verses when Islam was secure and growing , these verses counseled aggreeeive attack against all unbelievers and terrorism, warfare and slaughter.

In this contect, of interest today is this video of the president’s top “terrorism Advisor” John Brennan–who is OK with not even using the term “Jihadist,” storming out of a conference room at the Washington Times in response to a question by a Times reporter as to whether, in history, there had ever been an armed Jihadist attack (http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/.

There are contradictory messages in Islam; parts of the Koran are tolerant and parts are not. If Muslims would jettison the latter and follow the former, we’d have much less of a problem. That’s what people mean when they call for reform in Islam. But it hasn’t happened, and that’s the real problem. If anything, the trend has been the opposite.

After WWII Europe become largely Jundenfrei, courtesy of the Nazis. And Arab lands became Judenfrei as well, although the latter occurred mostly through postwar, post-Israel, emigration from those countries. The effect, however, is the same: in both cases, areas in which Jews had lived for thousands of years became nearly entirely free of them, and the Jewish population of the world now clusters predominantly in two places: Israel and the US.