Reform Islam?

Last updated on: March 29, 2012 at 6:33 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

Reform Islam? 2012-03-29T18:33:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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If you’re a liberal Jew, there are denominations for you. If you’re a liberal Christian, you’ve got them, too. Liberal Muslim? Not so much.

HuffPo has a piece about how this might be changing:

On this brisk Monday night in late October, members of Muslims for Progressive Values, a nascent American reformist organization, had gathered from around the country to celebrate a milestone: In four years, the group had grown from a few friends to a thousand members and spawned a string of small mosques and spiritual groups that stretched from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

Today, as America’s Muslim leaders debate controversial topics like political radicalism inside mosques and states’ attempts to ban Shariah law, this growing network of alternative mosques and Islamic groups is quietly forging a new spiritual movement.

They’re taking bold steps, reinterpreting Islamic norms and re-examining taboos. While far from accepted by mainstream clerics, these worshippers feel that the future of the religion lies not solely with tradition but with them. Women are leading congregations in prayer, gay imams are performing Islamic marriages, and men and women are praying side by side.

I’ve long believed that the best opportunity for creating a liberal Islam is right here in America. Our open society, increasingly (if slowly) offering equality to women and gays, is the perfect laboratory for this.

Like their Jewish counterparts, progressive Muslims will struggle over the relative authority of their written scripture and its oral interpretation. Early Jewish reformers, beginning in the late 18th century, faced similar issues. And it wasn’t until they came to America that they were able to really experiment with their new approaches.

Of course, there are naysayers:

Dalia Mogahed, director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies…takes a critical view of the progressives.

Muslims for Progressive Values “are little more than a footnote or a special interest,” she writes in an email. “Their actual influence in the [Muslim American] community is virtually non-existent,” adds Mogahed, who spent six years collecting 50,000 interviews for the book “Who Speaks For Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.”

That may be true now, but Reform Judaism started out in a few parlors in German households and ultimately gave birth to all of the non-Orthodox religious denominations that we have today.

Who knows? Maybe some day, a long, long time from now, there will even be a movement for secular humanistic Islam. I suspect that by the time that happens they’ll be traveling to their meetings via transporter beam.

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