Islamic Reform: Holy Grail or Poisoned Chalice? (Part I)

by Mary Jackson (Feb. 2009)

”No.”
”Nah nah. You’re not a proper living person then.”

taqiyya.” Muslim reformers, it seems, cannot win.

I have been as dismissive as anybody about the prospect of a reformation in Islam, describing it in Pajamas Media as:

 

Muslim Institute.”

Calligraphy and Iznik tiles aside, Islam is ugly. Imagine a fifty-year-old man “consummating” his “marriage” with a nine-year-old girl. Imagine an old woman being torn limb from limb by two camels for insulting the man in question. Imagine a rape victim being stoned to death for her “crime” – you don’t need to imagine very far back, as this happened in Somalia only a few weeks ago. Islam is ugly, too, in what it forbids: sculpture, music, portraits, wine.

 

 

The Times, £85,000 a year from the Quilliam foundation, an “anti-extremist think tank” with plush offices in central London and, this year alone, £1 million of public money.  In the December 2007 edition of New English Review, I expressed doubt as to whether Ed Husain was the answer to the problems associated with Islam in Britain:

 

 

 

 He has not confronted those tenets of Islam that have wreaked havoc on this earth for the past fourteen hundred years. If he genuinely believes that it is wrong to hate and kill Infidels, why continue to hold to Islam?

do so much work?

 

Koran 4:34 or Bukari into practice.

Guardian article in June 2007, Husain equated Zionism and “Islamism”:

 

 

 

Last year I summed Husain up thus:

The Trouble With Islam 

As I view it, the trouble with Islam is that lives are small and lies are big. Totalitarian impulses lurk in mainstream Islam.

 

 

 

 

Manji has much to say in praise of Israel and critical of the Arab world, in particular Muslim complicity in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, she does not reconcile her views with the Hadith which reads:

 

 

Jens Thomas Andfindsen is less sanguine:

 

 

official website is full of comments from readers whose lives it has changed. Yet Manji herself remains unchanged.

She even looks the same, much younger than her forty or forty-one years, with the same spiky hair:

 

Does it matter that one of the most famous voices of Muslim reform is a spiky-haired lesbian? It matters in one who courts publicity. The lesbianism matters partly as a distraction, and partly because Manji gives no convincing reconciliation of her lifestyle and the Islamic prohibition against homosexuality. And the spiky hair? Yes, in that the image gives false reassurance to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Look, it says: I’m a Muslim and I’m harmless. We don’t all wear beards or veils – look at me. And people look at her, and her videos and her blog – and nothing changes. Above all, Manji’s image is unserious, and the business of Islamic reform is serious work – dirty work, as I will argue in Part II.

So far it seems that Muslim reformers cannot win: when not deceiving others, they deceive themselves. Is it a hopeless business? Perhaps. In Part II I consider where, if anywhere, there is hope. As must be clear, it is not in a handsome face, or a colourful website, or comforting words.

 

 

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