Good morning! Today is Sunday, Feb 1,2026. Glad you’re here.
1587: Queen Elizabeth I of England signs the death warrant for her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
1884: First volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, A–Ant, is published.
1865: U.S. President Lincoln signs the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery in the U.S.; celebrated as National Freedom Day.
1964: The Beatles’ first #1 hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” tops the Hot 100 and stays at #1 for seven weeks before being replaced by “She Loves You,” also by The Beatles.
1979: Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran after 15 years in exile.
Birthdays today include: director John Ford; Clark Gable; Boris Yeltsin; jazz saxophonist Sadao Watanabe; Don Everly; Garrett Morris; actor Sherman Hemsley; jazz keyboardist Joe Sample; Monty Python’s Terry Jones; Rick James; and Andrew Breitbart.
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It seems fitting that I publish this piece on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran in 1979.
This one’s going to be a deeper dive than most of my work because, for one thing, it dives into the theoretical. Islam has fallen off our front pages for now, with the most recent discussions being driven by internal fighting in Iran.
I won’t hide from you the things that have been on my mind for years now. I will also state up front that I have no easy answers to the problems I’m addressing here. All I can do is identify the problems. You see, in the jobs I’ve had over the years—from IT professional, to the decades of radio work I did, to truck driver, to writing here at PJ Media—I am, if nothing else, a diagnostician.
I have always held, in all those positions as in life itself, that item one in fixing or even discussing problems is diagnosing them correctly. Without first accomplishing that, you don’t have any hope of solving the original problem.
Before we proceed further, let me be clear: I’m going to try to examine the problems associated with dealing with Islam from the perspective of Western, Judaeo-Christian cultures. It is my intent to discuss these matters herein from a cultural and societal angle, avoiding judgment calls specifically about religion. I am a Christian myself, but the religious aspects cannot be ignored; neither can they be the center of our examination on this topic, for what should be obvious reasons.
Problem identification is a major issue, part of our analysis of our success or failure with co-existence with Islamic cultures. I think it obvious that we have misidentified some of the problems and, thereby, all of the solutions. Some of these flaws in our approaches have been for reasons that we’ve been culturally force-fed all our lives—the equality of all men, etc., liberty being something all people want, and so on. I will certainly not argue against that wisdom. Such ideals are rooted in the culture we’ve been exposed to, most of us, all our lives.
The problem is that, while all men are created equal, all cultures are not. While we may, as a cultural imperative, believe that, the Islamic cultures we’re dealing with don’t see it that way. They are driven by something else… a different worldview, entirely.
As I’ve stated in earlier articles, when Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wasn’t talking about a universal truth at all. Even then, we were smart enough to recognize that class struggles still existed, as did slavery, as did royalty, and so on, even as they still do today. Our effort was focused on giving all men opportunity, not enforcing outcome.
Jason Pappas at Liberty and Culture made this important point years ago by way of John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College‘s Santa Fe campus. That point being, when we make judgments about our success or failure in dealing with Islamic cultures, we miss in both directions because of a complete misunderstanding of the rocky culture and the religion on which so much of it is based. Agesto was writing this in 2004, and so the subject was our dealings with Iraq, which was, of course, in the forefront at the time. But it is true for the whole of Islamic culture.
We generally have a benign view of religion. We always insist that those who kill infidels or torture in God’s name have somehow “hijacked” their religion. We consistently failed to understand that not all religions have the same view as we do of peace, of brotherhood, or of justice. Islam in general, and parts of Islam in particular, are not post-Enlightenment faiths. But why would they be? We desperately kept looking for the supposed “moderates” among the clergy in Iraq. Moderate as compared to what? Just because we believe that God wants everyone to enjoy equal rights, or that killing Jews or stoning apostates is wrong, doesn’t mean that our beliefs are shared in other faiths.
And therein lies a point that I have been making for many years now.
Looking at the developments in each culture since the 14th century, I come to the conclusion that Islam is still waiting for its Martin Luther.
Now before you go rushing for the exits, hear me out.
As a historical matter and as a framework for this discussion, I would suggest to you that Luther, more than anyone else at this time, paved the way toward our age of enlightenment. Prior to Luther’s arrival, there was no such thing as a moderate Catholic. Similarly, then, there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim today. Indeed, I defy the reader to show me where such exists.
For proof of concept, I pose the question to you: Where are the long lines of local Muslims angry at what’s been done to their peaceful religion? There are none, or not enough to make any difference. We see occasional uprisings, such as what has been going on in Iran over the last several weeks, but usually, because of the ruthlessness of such regimes, they tend to peter out pretty quickly, as we have seen.
The more I investigate this, the more I’m convinced that Pope Benedict XVI, of all people, got this one right. His words were to the effect that Islam, being Islam, simply cannot reform itself. Therefore, I submit that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Perhaps more correctly, there is no such animal as a moderate Muslim—at least, for the moment.
Which translates to “it may be possible to inject some change down the road.” But, frankly, I consider it an open question whether reform can ever occur, particularly in the short term.
Consider the state of Islam vs. the state of Christianity since the Luther-driven reformation of the latter. From an objective standpoint, Christianity at least has the advantage of viewing government and religion on two separate levels. This view, this arrangement, is the foundation of Western culture.
Indeed, if you’ll recall, it was Christ himself who urged us to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. (This has implications for the West’s view of charity which I will address in a future article.)
Islam, meanwhile, has no separated perception in this area. At least part of this is a problem of point of view from the average Muslim; the Islamic world looks forward to the 15th century. So, perhaps viewing it from this angle will help your overall perspective. If you were a citizen of 14th-century Spain, let’s say… would you have been able to envision such a separation between Rome and Madrid?
On the other hand, and by the same token, the point of view differs from our standpoint. Part of our inability to get our mental arms around this whole concept of the limitations of Islam to reform itself is due to the fact that, whereas we deal with religion, social values, and indeed law and government on separate levels, those in the Islamic world do not, as a rule. And that’s really not much different from the point of view of the ostensibly Christian denizen of fourteenth-century Spain, is it?
That’s problem number one, and it’s the easiest to describe in terms of trying to propagate a secular society.
Now, understand, please, I still take the question of Islam’s ability to reform within the bounds of the religion’s framework as an open question. Mostly, this is due to a lack of understanding of what the religion encompasses at its foundations. I don’t pretend to fully understand Muslim culture. I doubt anyone from outside that culture truly does. That said, I can’t help but speculate.
What if the problems of reforming Islam are due to a lack of understanding of the religion by its adherents, much the same as there was a lack of understanding of the Christian faith among most of its adherents in Luther’s time, pre-Gutenberg?
You see, Luther and Gutenberg were the turning point. Luther’s biggest contribution to the Catholic Church, and ultimately to the world, was the concept that he opened the Bible—and the understanding of it—up to the average parishioner. Most of the people of that day who called themselves Christian really didn’t understand the religion they claimed as their own. That’s because the majority of them couldn’t read. Even if they could read English, they couldn’t read Latin, and were therefore utterly dependent on what the priest told them the book said. Then, of course, there was the scarcity of the Book itself, which, pre-Gutenberg, was exclusively hand-written. (All of which, I hasten to note, caused a good deal of grift by some of the clergy in those days.)
So it was that, up until the time Gutenberg’s printing press came along, that intimate understanding—that study—was pretty much limited to the clergy, and even there, to the upper levels thereof. I’m willing to bet that’s the case in Islam, which steadfastly refuses, for example, to provide education for its women. We saw just last week women being banned from attending school in Afghanistan, as an example.
Along comes Luther with his printing press, who teaches them how to read the Bible for themselves and gain the needed understanding of it—who tells them that a personal, one-on-one relationship with God is necessary, and that with this personal understanding comes the reform of tolerance, which, over hundreds more years, becomes the Church we know today.
In light of this, I would suggest to you a trend:
Here in Western society, people tend to be better educated than they are in everyday Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and so on—or even in the more liberal societies within Islamic influence, such as Egypt and Turkey, for example. This results in vastly different perceptions of everything in the world, including religion. Those in the West tend to read more, for one thing, having the ability.
While I am sure that Western civilization tends to breed more placid people, particularly in regard to spiritual matters, because of cultural influence alone, I would also suggest that the violence we see inherent in Islam is directly connected to the education level—and therefore the understanding—of that religion by its adherents. We can thank God for that, because, as a matter of history, ignorance has provided us in the West with a level of protection against the more radical elements of Islam we would not have otherwise had.
Muslims we see here in the West are, as a rule, at least somewhat more peaceful than what we’ve been seeing in the Middle East. Sure, we’ve had outbreaks of violence here in the U.S., but it’s certainly not as common as what we see in the Middle East. It seems logical to question if this is a result of their having a better understanding of their religion. A good understanding of one’s religion is difficult to obtain at the point of a machete, which is how Islam is so often taught in that region today.
This is one reason I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with the phrase “Islamic fundamentalism.” There is still a great deal of argument as to specifically what that phrase means, because the fundamentals of Islam are still in the discussion stage, even among its most adherent followers. For someone to call themselves a fundamentalist assumes that the person has a fundamental understanding of their religion. Yet that understanding is still ill-defined at best, because they themselves can’t agree on what it means beyond a superficial level. Without that understanding, the phrase “Islamic fundamentalism” simply does not apply—any more than “fundamental Christianity” does to pre-Gutenberg Christians.
Thus the question: If greater understanding of the religion by the very people involved in it is the answer, does this suggest a path for us to take?
If it does, then that path is going to be made somewhat more complex by the fact that there is no real hierarchy within the Muslim religious world, as there is in, say, the various offshoots of Christianity. Even the various Christian sects are not nearly as disparate in their beliefs—and thereby in the definition of being within the religion—as Muslims would seem to be.
This presents some serious complications in terms of getting the “true Islam” message out. The various leaders themselves, because there is no hierarchy, cannot seem to agree on what Islam is—the tenets of the religion. Without a strong leadership model, the messages being sent are mixed at best. In a very real sense, there’s nobody to question regarding religious tenets. Leave aside, for the moment, that anyone raising such questions tends not to survive for long.
Think about this: when it came time in the Christian Church for reform, Luther had the advantage of having Pope Leo to proverbially set on fire—a focal point, if you will, to aim at. I daresay that Luther would not have been nearly as effective had he needed to fight a decentralized authority, as exists in the Islamic world.
In the Islamic world, there is no such person, no such leader, not even such a group, to ask these questions of. Worse still, the process of asking such questions can often be dangerous, if not fatal. That makes the process of questioning these radicalized versions of Islam all the harder, even assuming one isn’t going to be killed for asking the questions or raising challenges.
To whom does one go for an authoritative view on what, specifically, Islam is? I have asked that question many times in the past and usually get referred to the Qur’an. That answer, of course, is problematic, given the number of different slants on the meaning of the Qur’an. Certainly, there are a number of different slants on the Bible as well. However, I would point out that there is still an authority structure in place there, which tends to narrow the interpretations down quite a bit.
Without such a structure in Islam, all kinds of things pop up. The religion becomes whatever certain protagonists say it is—such as the Wahhabi, for example—and there’s nobody of authority within the religion to say “no.”
For comparison, the Catholic Church certainly had its bloody periods. And why did these stop? Someone sitting in authority was there to challenge, and once that authority saw the reason in the challenge, somebody within the Church said “stop.”
Who is of the like in the Islamic world? Nobody that I can see—yet.
And therein lies the core issue.
Islam is still waiting for its Luther.
I figure that was part of the idea of going into Iraq in the ’90s: establishing a democracy in such a place, after all, would ideally lend itself to working toward altering—and, need I say it, pacifying—Islamic society, and controlling the more violent and radical elements. My take is that if such a person or group were to rise up against the Wahhabists or Salafi, they would be the product of a freshly reformed Islam. This would do a fair job of explaining why the Syrias, the Jordans, and the Irans are so very concerned.
Now, of course, the plan in Iraq, as an example, didn’t work well, because establishing cultural change cannot be done long-term from the end of a gun. It must, in fact, be done organically, not by force. “Social Darwinism” seems an apt description. Every place democracy has sprung up, it has done so in an organic, natural, and agonizingly slow—and occasionally bloody—fashion, as our own has done.
Changing hearts and minds is always the longest, slowest, hardest job there is. History repeatedly shows that governments do not possess the patience for that process, particularly when the time required for success is measured in terms of the years between election cycles.
I say again: forced change is never long-lasting, and seldom satisfactory for anyone concerned. We need to sit back and allow an Islamic version of Luther to stand forth, so that the culture can change itself.
As for how long this will take, there are no shortcuts to this process. Changing minds is always the hardest path. It’s also, in the end, the most rewarding. All we can do, I suspect, is hope that when Islam’s Luther shows up, he doesn’t get killed off by those seeking to hold on to political power.
I wonder if we will ever see that transition happen in our lifetime.
Thought of the day: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
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