NOR WAS THE CHURCH REFORMED FROM ROME:

Islam's coming renaissance will rise in the West: A wave of rationalism is spreading from emigre Muslim intellectuals (Ameer Ali, April 30, 2007, The Australian)

IN the minds of many Muslims, an imagined West is the source of all or most of the problems afflicting the world of Islam. Similarly, in the West, an imagined Islam, purposefully structured and popularly propagated, has created a perception that this religion is a threat to Western civilisation. Between these mutually exclusive mind-sets a new phenomenon is emerging in the real West, laying the foundations for a new wave of Islamic rationalism in the 21st century.

The Islamic resurgence of the post-1970s strengthened the hands of the religious orthodoxy and engendered the spectre of political Islam but failed to rekindle the spirit of intellectual rationalism that once pushed Islam to the frontiers of science and modernity. That failure was compounded and worsened by the rise of tyrannical regimes in the Muslim world. The absence of democracy and lack of popular support forced these regimes to look for legitimacy elsewhere.

By championing the cause of religious orthodoxy of the dominant variety in each context, these regimes masqueraded as champions of popular and populist Islam. Any intellectual pursuit that threatened this state-mullah alliance was aggressively curtailed. In Egypt, in Pakistan, in Syria, and in many other Muslim countries Muslim intellectuals who challenged populist Islam faced condemnation not only by the religious hardliners but also by the secular elite that governed these countries.

One happy outcome of this tragic situation was the voluntary exodus of Muslim intellectuals to the West. From an inhospitable environment of political tyranny and ideological oppression Muslim scholars migrated to find refuge in the West, where the mind enjoys more freedom to think, debate and express. As a result, the migrant Muslim intellectuals are now producing a new genre of publications, many of which are questioning centuries-old interpretations of the primary texts in Islam. A new era of ijtihad (independent thinking) rooted in scientific, objective reasoning is spreading from the West and is beginning to make its mark in the Muslim mind-set.

One of the things this points up -- if all our military forces in the Middle East don't -- is that Islam actually is under assault from the West. Not that it's a bad thing....

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 29, 2007 10:06 AM