The only way to reform Islam is to ignore its fundamental doctrine

By Aussiegirl

Sounds great -- but what Rushdie is fundamentally proposing is the complete secularization of Islam and an embrace of Western secular liberal values. Basically he wants Muslims to ignore the Koran and all its teachings and join the 21st Century. The problem is there is no mechanism for doing this unless they kill all the mullahs. As always, it is the Koran, the foundational document of Islam which makes it incompatible with the 21st, much less even the 19th or 18th centuries.

The only way to reform it is to ignore it. Read the intro:

Lesson One for the modern Muslim: remember, this is not the 8th century, by
Salman Rushdie:

A FEW weeks ago, in an article written in response to the London bombings, I wrote about the urgent need for a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age.

The response to this article has been widespread and extremely interesting. Naturally there were those who rushed to dismiss my arguments because they came out of my mouth. The man who lost his personality and beliefs should not speak about the great religion of Islam, wrote Anna Tanha, of Glasgow.

However, there was an encouraging flood of more positive commentary, much of it coming from Muslims. Absolutely right; it is time Muslims accepted that it is Islam's 8th-century attitudes that are causing so much suffering in the 21st-century world, wrote Mohammed Iqbal, who comes from Leeds, home of three of the 7/7 bombers. Please keep dogma aside and let reason be part of the debate. We believers have done enough to harm ourselves. What European monarchs and clergy did in the Dark and Middle Ages is exactly what

Muslim rulers and clergy are doing to the Muslim world, argued Nadeem Akhtar, from Washington, DC.
Ozcan Keles, of London, insisted that only faith-based Muslim leaders could perform the act of Quranic reinterpretation known as ijtihad, but Haroon Amirzada, a former lecturer at Kabul University, felt that secular Islamic and non-Islamic Western and Eastern scholars and politicians should work together to modernise Islam to meet the realities of our time.