Westerners have been saying for a while now that what the Islamic world needs is its equivalent of the Reformation. “Where is Islam’s Martin Luther?” they ask anxiously as they watch radicals rise from the wreckage of the Arab Spring and make good showings in Pakistan’s recent elections.
In fact we have been witnessing the fruits of just such a Reformation over the past few decades, with the Wahhabis in some ways playing the role of a few of the more radical sects in the Protestant Reformation, advocating a very strict and literal interpretation of the holy texts, attacking traditional brotherhoods and practices as heretical, and smashing buildings and ornamentations they denounce as idolatrous. And the bitter fruits of this Reformation haven’t been making people happy.
Maybe a Counter-Reformation is more what the Islamic world needs. And it could be coming from Turkey.