Progressors

Confronted by Irshad Manji's Moral Courage Project, one person noted on Facebook dim prospects for Islamic Reform nonetheless.

I thought I'd reprint my response here, my own blog providing a more persistent platform than Facebook for supporting, for a while, ideas and observations.

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Check out Tarek Fatah's Canadian Muslim Congress, M. Zuhdi Jasser's American Islamic Forum for Democracy; also Daniel Pipe's estimate regarding Islamism.  The scale x population x wilfulness is unknown, leaving that most common question about enemy -- "how many?" -- quite open. 

In Somalia, the discrepency between known Al Qaeda / Al Shabaab figures (fewer than 14,000 fighters) and displaced people fleeing or resisting their administration is 1.25 million, all of them Muslim.

The world's largest Muslim-majority state is Indonesia, and while it sports some punitive and puritanical laws, it would not compare well to, say, Saudi Arabia (or Pakistan with its Hudood laws) as a "sharia state".

While the measuring set continue to look over the size and character of the challenge, I've asked an unkind question: apart from laws that might serve self-serving Muslims, i.e., special dispensations for dress and prayer, what contributions, if any, would Islam contribute today to western legal code? 

Anyone?

Religion as a profession of faith seems to want both dogma and rules that serve it, but the Judaic and Christian ethics and philosophies that form the basis for the western recognition of issues in law have little room to none for reconsiderations involving beheading, honor killing, polygamy, enforced dress codes, stoning, discriminating between men and women in courts and laws, death penalties for adultery and homosexuality, and so on. 

One could go on to other areas of contribution -- art, education, health, politics, science, and technology -- and ask the same about the complement to be generated by distinct Islamic tenets.  I've enjoyed wagging the index finger with "There is no compulsion in religion" and "One scholar is worth more against the devil than ten thousand worshippers" but was not Moses as wise so many thousands of years before the birth of Muhammad? 

Of course, what Muslim identity will mean tomorrow is up to Muslims. 

With such as CAIR undersubscribed, much unknown about true underlying or latent Muslim sentiment, and civil war a presence everywhere in Islam, we can see a portion of the struggle without drawing clear answers.  The reformers or, really, "progressors" may be small today for the numbers they're leading -- that too strikes me as an unexamined queston -- but they are each a part of Islam's best hope for behavior good in the sight of God.