(Photo: Visitors view model of KAUST campus at opening, 23 Sept 2009/Susan Baaghil)

Well, that didn’t take long.

Last week, a senior Saudi Islamic cleric criticised the country’s first mixed-gender university, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), and suggested an Islamic committee to make sure it followed Islamic principled and didn’t teach “alien ideologies” such as evolution.

Late on Sunday, the state news agency SPA reported that King Abdullah had removed Sheikh Saad Al-Shithri from a top council of religious scholars.

Al-Shithri’s comments sparked angry reactions from liberals who saw the new university as a beacon for research that will eventually produce Saudi scientists, spearheading modernity in the conservative Islamic State. For those of you who read Arabic, here’s a sample of several op-ed pieces that ran in the daily Okaz.

“This is a strategy for the conservatives to control the university. Or at least to have a major say in it. This is the old trick for them to have the upper hand to sabotage reforms,” said Jamal Khashoggi, editor-in-chief of Alwatan daily newspaper, about the clerics comments on the university.

Saudi Arabia follows an austere version of Islam and religious police patrol the streets ensuring that the country’s strict segregation laws are implemented. Clerics like Al-Shitri have a major influence on school curricula as well as the judicial system and some have issued fatwas against co-education (here in Arabic).

Since coming to power in 2005, King Abdullah has reshuffled the cabinet, replacing some hardline clerics with more moderate ones, and promised the overhaul of the education system with an aim of focusing more on sciences rather than religion. He has also pledge to reform the judicial system.

“This university has become a reality, and it is for the good of the nation as the King had wanted it to be.  It is not a cake that the two ideological streams [liberals and conservatives] can compete over,” wrote columnist Khaled Alsulaiman in Okaz after the controversial statements placed KAUST in the centre of the battle between liberals and conservatives.

“This university is not a project for Westernization, as some hope it would be while others fear it might be. It is a genuine scientific project that came at a sensitive and crucial time in this nation’s age,” he added.

(Photo: King Abdullah at KAUST ground-breaking ceremony, 21 Oct 2007/Ali jarekji)

KAUST is located near the Red Sea village of Thuwal, north of Jeddah, away from the prying eyes of the religious police. The government has promised academic freedom for the university but diplomats predicted — and Shithri has demonstrated — that clerics would try to obstruct the project.

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It’s Ramadan and on a bustling shopping street on the fringes of northern Paris, the holy month is in full swing. Bearded men in long robes collect alms, women in headscarves sell sweet pastries. But the period of fasting and charitable acts has little impact on the work of activist Christine Jamaa, whose office is in a secret location not far from the busy street market.

Jamaa, who heads the Voix de Femmes (Women’s Voice) group helping victims of forced marriage,  met me there last week for a interview for my feature “New school year puts French on forced marriage alert.” In the feature, another activist, Fatou Diouf (pictured above in a photo by Jacky Naegelen), told of her family’s attempt to kidnap her and force her into marrying her uncle in Senegal at the age of 18.

While I was in Jamaa’s office, her phone was constantly ringing with emergency calls from threatened girls and women - most of them Muslims of Africa, Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Jamaa herself is a Muslim, like many of the activists who help victims of forced marriage here, and she keeps telling the families and the women at risk that Islam bans forced marriage.

In her experience, however, the families don’t care. “They just pick the parts of Islam that are convenient to them,” she told me. A few years ago, Jamaa worked with an imam to try and use religion to fight the practice. But they had to stop after the imam himself was threatened by angry families.

For now, she believes religion can play a marginal part in dealing with marriage conflicts. Once the girl has fled the family, and the parents show some regret, an imam may be able to smooth the reconciliation process. Faith can also reassure the victims, who almost always feel terribly guilty about running away. And Jamaa believes a strong stance among Muslim leaders could help: “I’m still waiting for a fatwa saying forced marriages are haram (forbidden),” she said with an air of resignation.

Even if such a fatwa were issued, most of these families would probably ignore it. For Fatou Diouf, a French woman of Senegalese descent, the practice is not about religion anyway, but about tradition. Her own ordeal began when she dated a non-Muslim Cameroonian in France at the age of 18. Her family lured her to Senegal, then told her they had already married her off to her 36-year-old uncle in a religious ceremony that did not require her presence.

(Image: Voix de Femmes poster — the text says “Forced marriage … a one-way ticket? The girls refuse.”)

“I had my father on the phone, and he said, I’m fed up with you fooling around in France, you’re going to stay down there,” she told me. Later on, after she escaped, Jamaa travelled back to France and eventually confronted her parents about their betrayal. Her father justified himself - but not by invoking religion. “He said friends had started asking why I was always out, where I was, he said I would be treated like a whore,” she said.

The activists and victims I spoke to cited many different motives for forced marriage in migrant communities here. But the strongest factor seems to be a fear of daughters becoming too independent, too rebellious, “too French”. And even though activists say some of the victims are from Christian, Hindu or Jewish immigrant backgrounds, the majority — based on their accounts — does seem to be Muslim. There are unfortunately no reliable official statistics to give a clearer picture.

One interesting insight the activists gave was that the most fervent young Muslim women - the kind who wear the full veils that have sparked such a lively debate in France - tend to pick their own partners rather than submit to their families’ will. Most fully veiled women say they have chosen to wear the niqab themselves, often against the wishes of their parents. So if their parents try to arrange a union with a man not pious enough for them, they reply by saying Islam forbids forced marriage and then choose a similarly devout spouse.

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Parliamentary and presidential elections in Indonesia this year may hinge on how the public reacts to a directive from the country’s top Islamic council –all Muslims must vote or risk going to hell.

The fatwa from the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) is not legally binding. But it does carry weight in the world’s most populous Muslim country, where Islamic conservatism has been growing since the fall of the country’s former autocratic president, Suharto, moe than a decade ago. Suharto kept a lid on politicised Islam with the same ruthless approach he took to eradicating leftist influences after coming to power following a 1965 coup blamed on communists.

(Photo: Cigarette factory where orders dropped after MUI issued fatwa against smoking in public, 2 Feb 2009/Sigit Pamungkas)

The MUI has evolved from being a pliant arm of Suharto’s regime to becoming an independent body that aims to influence public policy.  The edict does not state which parties or candidates voters should choose. But it could encourage Muslims to choose Islamist candidates at the polls, pushing  the country away from secularism toward a more socially rigid government.

Indonesia’s plethora of political parties mean relatively small shifts among voters could potentially determine which groups form alliances in the April 9 general election and which field candidates in the presidential election in July.

Whenever the Palestinian issue heats up, the temperature rises in the gritty neighbourhoods the French call the banlieues (suburbs). These areas, best known for the low-cost housing projects that postwar city planners planted out there, are a vibrant and edgy mix of local working class, recent immigrants and minorities now in France for several generations.

(Photo: Police survey housing project in Paris suburb, 1 June 2006/Victor Tonelli)

Among those groups are Muslims and Jews, many of whose families came from the same parts of North Africa. About 7-8 years ago, at the start of the second Palestinian intifada, some of the far more numerous Muslims took out their anger at Israel on their Jewish neighbours. The official reaction against that wave of anti-Semitism was slow in coming back then, but leaders in France today — especially leaders of the main religious groups — seem determined to do their best to head that off this time around.

They have their work cut out for them. According to a French Jewish Students’ Union (UEJF) list (here in French), there have been 46 anti-Semitic acts in France since Dec. 27, when Israel began its bombardment of Gaza.  That includes several firebombs and several Jews beaten by thugs. Muslim and Jewish leaders have already issued several calls for calm. In some cities such as Strasbourg and Lyon, they have joined the mayor and their Catholic colleagues. After meeting President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday evening, the national heads of the Muslim, Jewish and Catholic communities said they would produce a joint appeal soon. See my story on this here.

The impromptu news conference in the courtyard of the Elysee Palace showed how delicate this project can be. Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the Catholic archbishop of Paris, could simply say a few words about peace and not have to explain too much more.

(Photo: From left, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, CFCM head Mohamed Moussaoui and Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, 12 Jan 2009/Charles Platiau)

But Mohamed Moussaoui, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), and Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim were grilled about what they and their communities should do to avoid more violence. One reporter badgered them to say they would march together at the head of a parade for peace that, until now at least, has neither been suggested nor organised by anyone. Both thoughtful and soft-spoken men, Moussaoui and Bernheim made sure they showed enough support for “their” sides in the Gaza conflict without burning the shaky bridges between their communities here.

Moussaoui has already come under fire in the Muslim community for allegedly getting too close to the leadership of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish organisations. He and CRIF President Richard Prasquier met last November and suggested creating a liaison committee to work together to defend human rights. They agreed to “create a common front against anti-Semitiism, racism and Islamophobia.” But when the Gaza operation started, the influential Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) cast doubt on any further cooperation and the CRIF criticised the UOIF’s call for Muslims to protest and imams to preach “to make the faithful sensitive to the just Palestinian cause.”

The UOIF even issued a fatwa saying that Muslims who miss their afternoon and dusk prayers because they are demonstrating could say them at midday and evening to compensate.

(Photo: Protester in Strasbourg, 10 Jan 2009/Vincent Kessler)

“Peaceful demonstrations to support just causes such as that of Palestine are an act of adoration and connection with God,” it said. A more militant group called the Party of Muslims of France, based in Strasbourg, has been holding daily demos in the centre of the Alsatian city which have ended with occasional unrest.

It’s hard to say what if any connection this rhetoric has with the actual anti-Semitic acts that have been reported so far. Police have not issued any official overall figures for attacks. French mayors interviewed by Le Monde say the mood is strained but they think their local dialogues with youths and with religious leaders have kept the situation from deteriorating further.

Cardinal Vingt-Trois said the joint appeal by national religious leaders was due “in the coming days” but if any delay comes, it would probably not be from the community that has the least at stake in this story.

P.S. The last paragraph does not mean that only Muslims are responsible for the mentioned anti-Semitic attacks or that none were committed by people with a Christian background. There may well be non-Muslim anti-Semites who take advantage of the current climate to vent their hate. Since there are no official statistics on the perpertrators, it is hard to say with certainty who is committing these acts. But the general assumption among police, politicians, religious leaders and media is that all or almost all of these cases are in the “Muslim-vs-Jew” category. Vingt-Trois plays less of a role here — despite the impression the photo of the three religious leaders above might give — because the majority is mostly sidelined in this story.

Have you seen this story in your local newspaper? Mumbai’s top Islamic clerics have refused to bury the nine Islamist militants killed during the three-day siege in the city. Declaring the rampage proved they could not have been true Muslims, they declared that no Muslim cemetery in India would accept them. A debate has broken out about what to do with the bodies, which according to Muslim custom should have been buried within a few hours of death.

(Photo: Palestinian funeral for Hamas militant killed fighting Israeli troops in Gaza, 17 Oct 2007/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

The reason I ask whether your local newspaper ran this story is that Muslims often say the media regularly link Islam and terrorism but rarely report when Muslims denounce acts of Islamist violence. There is some truth in this complaint, especially since Islam does not have central authorities, such as a pope, who can claim to speak in the name of all believers. Individual protests from small groups get lost in the flood of news. Some publications are also simply unwilling to print news that goes against their view of Islam as a violent religion, so it makes no difference there how many such protests are reported. They won’t believe them anyway.

This refusal to bury the Mumbai attackers is different. It is an original and bold protest against Islamist violence by religious authorities who would normally make sure any Muslim got a proper burial. “This is symbolically very important,” Mustafa Akyol, a columnist for the Hürriyet Daily News in Istanbul and an active Muslim blogger. “I’ve heard of imams declining to lead a prayer for the deceased because he was an outright atheist, but never of people being denied burial.”

This raises a few questions about religion and politics. Is it proper to deny a religious burial to the dead because they were extremists? Should religious leaders use the dead to make a political point?

(Photo: Mumbai Muslim leaders meet to denounce Islamist attacks, 2 Dec 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

Given the way Muslim protests against Islamist violence do not seem to attract much attention, is this a proper way for the religious authorities to dramatise their stand? And, as asked above, did you see this in your local newspaper? If not, do you think it should have been there?

By the way, this decision did not come out of the blue. Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, one of India’s leading Islamic groups, endorsed a fatwa against terrorism in early November. More than 6,000 clerics signed the edict, which follows a similar one issued in February by India’s top Islamic seminary, Darul Uloom Deoband.

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

Just when relations between the Vatican and Muslims were improving, Pope Benedict has taken a highly symbolic step that could set them back again. On Saturday evening, at the Easter Vigil Mass, he baptised seven people including one of Italy’s best-known Muslims. Magdi Allam, the new convert, is deputy director of the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera and an outspoken critic of radical Islam. The Egyptian-born journalist, who has lived in Italy since his university days, was one of the few Muslims who defended the pope after his controversial Regensburg speech in 2006. Allam’s outspoken articles have already prompted death threats from Islamists and he lives under constant guard. Announcing the surprise move only an hour before it took place, the Vatican stressed the Catholic Church had the right to baptise anyone who wanted to join it and that all were equal in the eyes of God.

That is certainly true, but such a high-level conversion can’t be seen outside its wider context. Islam considers conversion to another religion a grave insult to God. In some Muslim states including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, it is punishable by death. Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity pictured at right during his trial for apostasy, only escaped death in 2006 because of an international outcry; he found refuge in Italy. Not all Muslims agree with this. An Italian Muslim spokesman, for example, stressed that Allam’s conversion was a personal decision and only questioned why Benedict chose to make his baptism such a public event. He could have been baptised in his local church without all the publicity, he said. This high-visibility baptism looks likely to provoke protests from Muslims in some parts of the world and raise questions about Benedict’s intentions.

France 24 television interrupted my Easter lunch en famille to interview me about this and their main question was whether it was a response to Osama bin Laden’s threat against the pope. That assumes a U.S. campaign-style readiness to react that is miles or centuries away from the way the Vatican works. Easter is the traditional time to baptise adult converts. Allam had to go through a long period of study before being accepted for baptism. Benedict had to know about this at least several weeks ago. In his article in Corriere (see below), Allam mentions a meeting with Benedict where he told him of his intention to convert and the pope said he would gladly baptise him. But Allam does not mention the date.

If challenged, the pope would probably first say that both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions for which conversion is legitimate as long as the person makes the choice to change religions freely. What is objectionable, he would argue, is proselytism, i.e. aggressive efforts to win converts (”stealing sheep”, some clerics would say). There are progressive Muslims who will agree with this view intellectually, but probably few would be comfortable with it.

If Benedict were pressed to explain this step further (which is not, by the way, something that we journalists get to do that often!), I think he would say that differences about conversion would be a perfect topic to discuss in the new Catholic-Muslim Forum that was just launched two weeks ago. The experts in this dialogue could explain each faith’s view of religious freedom, personal commitment and divine will. Over the course of several meetings, maybe several years, they might come to a better understanding of the relationship between individual believers and faith communities. Maybe such discussions could even influence leading Muslims to take a broader view of religious freedom, leading to greater liberty for Muslims and for the non-Muslims living in Islamic countries. Seen this way, the question to ask at the next opportunity (when? maybe in the papal plane to the United States on April 15?) is: “Holy Father, did you baptise Allam to put the issue of conversion firmly on the agenda for the Catholic-Muslim Forum talks?”

But a lot of water can flow down the Tiber and the Nile between now and then. No matter how matter-of-factly the Vatican may try to present Allam’s baptism, the new Catholic has pulled no punches in his apologia. In a front-page article in today’s Corriere entitled La Mia Scelta (My Choice), Allam wrote that his mind “has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimises lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny, permitting me to join the authentic religion of Truth, Life and Liberty”. He knew this could put him in even more danger, but said: “I realise what I am going up against but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith.”

The Islamist death threats against him in recent years had led him to ask “about the attitude of those who publicly issued fatwas denouncing me, a Muslim, as an ‘enemy of Islam’ and a hypocrite … a liar and a defamer of Islam, in this way legitimising a death sentence against me. I asked myself how it was possible that someone like me, who was working strenuously and with conviction for a moderate Islam, who stood up and denounced extremism and Islamic terrorism, ends up being condemned to death in the name of Islam and on the basis of the Koran. I had to recognise that … the root of evil is innate in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictual.”

Wow… this is the “message of Regensburg” all over again. In that speech, the pope quoted a Byzantine emperor asking what the Prophet Mohammad had brought the world but things “only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. After that sparked off violent protests in the Muslim world, Benedict protested that he had only quoted the emperor and that did not mean he shared that view. But a pope speaking in public is not a professor debating in a seminar room. Rightly or wrongly, words, contexts and interpretations got amalgamated then and will be mixed up again now. If anyone out there seriously thinks this baptism, the Regensburg speech and Allam’s article won’t be rolled into one by commentators (Muslims and non-Muslims alike), please let me know how high you’d like to place your bet.

Talk about complicated… Who should do what in this situation? Should the pope be more of a diplomat or should he put Catholic priorities above all others? And how should Muslims react to this? These are important issues for this embryonic Catholic-Muslim dialogue and it would be interesting to hear what you think about this.

Here’s a multiple-choice question about fatwas — in the information age, the Islamic practice of issuing fatwas has become…

1. enriched
2. chaotic
3. more open
4. less transparent
5. all of the above
6. none of the above

The number of fatwas, or religious edicts, has exploded in recent years as sheikhs, muftis and others use the Internet, satellite television, radio, telephone call-in services and the print media to globalise the practice. Once limited mostly to scholars in their cities or countries, Muslims can now put their questions to experts around the world — and often get quite different answers depending on where they ask.

One might think the decision of Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti to launch a fatwa Web site might help bring some order into this confusion. The Saudi government says it wants to challenge radical Islam on the Web, which is why Sheikh Abdel-Aziz al-Sheikh has ventured into cyberspace in the first place. But with so many sites now up and running, as Senior Correspondent Andrew Hammond reports from Riyadh, his site may turn out to be just one more pious portal.

The plethora of fatwa sites is not the only hurdle he faces. As Hammond writes, “the mufti isn’t everyone’s favourite, though. His edicts condemning Muslims who take up arms against the U.S.-allied Saudi government and advising the devout not to fight with al Qaeda in Iraq are seen by hardliners as blatant examples of fatwas-for-hire. Governments often elicit politically expedient fatwas from their favoured sheikhs.”

Modern technology has also put the spotlight on odd fatwas that are ignored or laughed at in the Muslim world. There was a Saudi fatwa against camel beauty contests last month, but it seems to have had no effect reining in this popular tribal custom. Another one in Egypt had an effect its author never imagined. Cairo’s al-Azhar Islamic University suspended a lecturer in May after he suggested that men and women office colleagues could use “symbolic breastfeeding” to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

With so many edicts about, Osama bin Laden has also issued what he calls fatwas, even though Islamic scholars would dispute his qualification to do so. These are usually quite political in spirit, but they get referred to in media reports as fatwas, as if they were somehow equivalent to a well-considered religious opinion issued by a competent sheikh.

Fatwas are clearly important for believing Muslims, otherwise there wouldn’t be such demand for them. But the confusion surrounding them makes it difficult to report on them. Is it worth writing about serious fatwas that might be ignored anyway? If we only report on the unusual ones, are we making fun of Islam? Please let us know what you think — and how you would answer the multiple-choice question above.

October 31 was Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther issued his famous 95 Theses, and as such a fitting occasion for Lutherans around the world to reflect on the reforms he brought to Christianity. It was probably inevitable that a Lutheran cleric somewhere would comment on the relevance of the Reformation to a major issue in today’s religious world — the future of Islam. Margot Kässmann, the Lutheran bishop of Hannover in Germany, told the local newspaper: “Something like a Reformation would also be good for Islam.”

Bishop Kässmann is one of the most prominent religious leaders in Germany, an effective preacher and a popular talk show guest. It’s clear that she means Muslims should question their traditions and shed abuses, much like Luther did in Christianity. That’s a view that Muslim reformers can also support in principle. It leads to the question, though, of how far the paradigm of the Reformation is applicable to Islam. Has the term “Islamic Reformation” become a soundbite that brings more confusion than clarity?

The Reformation in 16th-century Europe ended the Catholic Church’s monopoly of religious authority and led to a multitude of Protestant denominations. One of the driving forces was the liberating effect of questioning traditions, Kässmann said in her interview. The result was the de-centralisation of Western Christianity. By contrast, Islam already has a multitude of different schools and interpretations. Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden are not religious scholars, but they issue fatwas on their own that reinterpret traditional views of Islam. So part of the religion’s problem today, some Islam experts argue, is that there is no central authority that can settle disputed issues. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest — and only partly in jest — that Islam actually needs a Luther or a pope to bring about the reforms Kässmann refers to.

The idea of an “Islamic Reformation” has been discussed at least since 9/11. For example, British author Salman Rushdie made just such a proposal after the London bombings in 2005. “The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities,” he wrote.

Another term that sometimes pops up in the media is “Muslim Martin Luther” to describe the person who could inspire such a Reformation. One man who sometimes gets that label is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born intellectual popular among young Muslims in Europe. He preaches an Islam that stays loyal to its traditions while adapting to life as a minority religion in Europe. When the online magazine Salon asked him what list of demands he would nail to a church door, he first said he didn’t have a list. He then argued for more rather than less agreement in reading Scriptures. “This is the problem we have today in the Muslim world,” he said. “We repeat slogans, but we don’t know exactly what they mean.”

Another discussion, on the website of the Brookings Institution, asked “Is Osama bin Laden the Martin Luther of Islam?” The link made here is that both Luther and the founder of al Qaeda preached that every believer could understand Scripture without needing clerics to interpret it.

In a recent seven-part series on the reform of Islam, a young U.S. Muslim blogger named Ali Eteraz says “The Islamic reformation has already happened.” The “Muslim Martin Luther” in this interpretation was Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi school of Islam in the 18th century. By contrast, the conservative U.S. author Dinesh D’Souza places the “Islamic Reformation” in the present time: “Islam is in the middle of a reformation. What is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism if not a sign of the Islamic Reformation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Eteraz argues that we should actually speak of an “Islamic Counter-Reformation.” A few years ago, Paul Marshall from Freedom House in Washington used the same phrase and described it as “something akin to a ‘Catholicisation‘ of Islam.”

Is it confusing enough now, or should we go on? The Iranian historian Hashem Aghajari has called for an “Islamic Protestantism” — an appeal that earned him a death sentence, which was later commuted. Others call for an Islamic Enlightenment. Eteraz looks forward to Post-Islamism (at least that’s getting away from the Reformation paradigm).

This is not to say that anyone using Christian terms to advocate change in Islam has nothing useful to say. Kässmann followed up her Reformation comment with the warning that change in Islam “cannot be imposed from outside” — something not all non-Muslim observers recognise. But as well-intentioned as these comparisons are, they seem to ask more questions than they answer and confuse the argument the authors are trying to make.

What do you think? Does it help non-Muslims to have issues explained with Christian terms? Do Muslims think these Christian precedents are helpful?