Last Sunday I was scheduled to speak at the Islamic Centre of Southwest Ontario. As I took my place behind the podium, I quickly scanned the audience and immediately decided to change my topic. A representative cross section of the Muslim community, I thought to myself, was at hand to help me answer the question posed by Tom Schaefer the day before. Is Islam approaching reformation?

Even though the question on the surface appears to be innocent, it has some serious implications that need to be addressed. The Standard College Dictionary defines reformation as: “making something better; restoring to a better condition.” If the question is examined in light of this definition, one may conclude that Islam, as demonstrated by the teachings of the Quran and the Prophetic tradition, is incompatible with human development, and as such needs to be restored to a better condition. Islam, or for that matter any other divine message, does not need human intervention or manipulation to improve its tenets. What is needed, however, is a constant re-examination of human understanding of the real meanings of religious principles.

In the Quran, chapter 5, verse 3, one reads: “This day have I perfected your religion for you and completed My favour unto you, and have chosen ISLAM as a religion for you.” Who am I then to challenge God’s authority and claim that the religion He has chosen for me is laced with imperfections and that reformation is inevitable if it were to survive. As one person from the audience at the Islamic Centre so aptly put it, Muslims and non-Muslims alike need to be re-educated about Islam. What we really need is re-education and not reformation.

It is a disturbing phenomenon to notice that after September 11th, many columnists have begun to denounce Islam as the cause for the problems facing the Muslim world. They scratch the surface to come up with arguments supporting their theories that Islam has failed in coping with modernity. The air has become thick with such theories, which claim that Islam has been paralysed by its “fundamentalist tendencies.”

In his article, Tom Schaefer cites six issues that were originally raised by Deborah Caldwell on the Beliefnet.com website. Resolving these issues, he says, will “determine whether the religion of one billion people around the world breaks through its fundamentalist tendencies.” This method of classic damnation by accusation does not leave room for an objective examination of issues. It is not the scope of this article to discuss each of the six issues raised by Caldwell; each one requires an article on its own. I am more interested in dispelling the notion that Islam is to blame for issues like gender inequality and political chaos in the Muslim world.

One has to realize that the Muslim world of today is still trying to recover from decades of colonization which resulted in the multitude of problems it is currently facing. Before their departure, colonial powers left behind corrupt regimes that continue to thrive in the Muslim world. Their survival depends on honouring their colonial contract, which requires them to maintain a repressive apparatus that specifically targets those who want to realize the full potential of the Islamic faith in their society. This repression led to the appearance of extremists who ended up tarnishing the image of the system they wanted to proclaim.

There is no doubt that some Muslims have fallen into extremism and excess. But one cannot look at the problem in isolation. If the West is really interested in seeing a satisfactory resolution to extremism, it has to accept its responsibility for helping to create the problem in the first place.

Like people of other faith traditions, there is no question that Muslims need to do a better job of studying the Quran and the Prophetic tradition. This requires a constant struggle to try and redefine one’s understanding of Islam. Islam does not oppose modernity. However, if things keep on changing with time, one should not seek to reform Islam but rather gain a better understanding of the faith in light of these changes. Such a conclusion seemed to gain unanimous support from the audience at the Islamic Centre.

False notions of Islam are to a large extent due to Orientalist narratives that misrepresented Islam as irrational and fanatical. It is time for Muslim intellectuals to tear off the Orientalist veil and show the real face of Islam, in order to create a deeper understanding of the dynamics of derailed Islamic societies.