Other People’s History: Contemporary Islam and Figures of Early Modern European Dissent
Abbas, Sadia
Early Modern Culture, No. 6 (2007)
Abstract
Everyone seems to think Islam needs a Reformation. The demand is almost ubiquitous. Neoconservatives have made it part of their radical project for the transformation of the planet. FrontPagemag.com, David Horowitz’s Neo-McCarthyite online journal has hosted, along with columns by Ann Coulter and Daniel Pipes, an entire symposium on “The Islamic Reformation.” On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, too, declared that Islam needed one, which gives us a good idea of how that reformation is meant to proceed. Liberals have joined the chorus. Salman Rushdie has recently said a Reformation is just what Islam requires. Sometimes Islam’s very permission to remain on the planet seems to depend upon it.
It is perhaps hard to appreciate the full incongruity of a Zionist neoconservative, like Wolfowitz, in a government headed by a Methodist evangelical, urging upon a third religion the doctrinal revolution associated with Western Christianity; and, of course, the change being urged is not only doctrinal. This Reformation is meant to bring Islamic societies into line with liberalism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, all at once. It can become difficult to tell liberals and conservatives apart when it comes to sorting out their views on Islam.
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