What Happens to Reformers

In December 2015, after a launch event at the National Press Club, two members of the newly formed Muslim Reform Movement walked to the Islamic Center of Washington and posted a two-page Declaration on its door, deliberately re-enacting Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the Wittenberg church door. The Declaration was not shy. It rejected violent jihad. It rejected “institutionalized sharia” and called for secular governance. It affirmed full equality for women and non-Muslims, and it defended the right to leave Islam or criticize it without penalty. About a dozen signatories put their names on it, among them M. Zuhdi Jasser, Asra Nomani, and Raheel Raza.

The paper came down fast. Not one major American Muslim organization endorsed the Declaration; the response from CAIR, ISNA, and the major mosque networks ran from silence to hostility, and whether that reflected institutional gatekeeping or a fair allergy to the founders’ political alliances is still disputed. The outcome is not disputed. Ten years later the movement is a letterhead: filings attributed to it show about $33,000 in annual revenue, no congregations and no scholars’ council.

The theses were not the problem. The door was. Luther’s door belonged to a church with a pope and a legal hierarchy, an institution that could excommunicate him and eventually be split by him. Sunni Islam has no such institution. Its orthodoxy is a distributed scholarly consensus, policed from below by takfir, the declaration that someone has ceased to be a Muslim, and backed in 22 countries by criminal apostasy law. A schism needs something to schism from. So the useful question is not why Islam never had its Luther moment. What actually happens to the Muslims who try? This last article in the series is that record.

The price of a proposal#

Mahmoud Muhammad Taha made the boldest version of the proposal, and readers of the previous article already know his ending. The Sudanese engineer who argued that the Quran’s peaceful Meccan verses should govern its Medinan legislation was convicted of apostasy and publicly hanged in Khartoum on January 18, 1985, at age 76, his movement banned and his books burned.

Rashad Khalifa’s proposal was different and his ending was the same. An Egyptian-American biochemist in Tucson, Khalifa taught that the Quran alone is binding and the hadith are not, a position with enormous legal consequences, since stoning, apostasy execution, and much of classical jihad doctrine rest on hadith rather than on the Quran itself. Saudi-sponsored scholars declared him an apostate, and in 1990 a member of the jihadist group Jamaat ul-Fuqra assassinated him in Tucson. Not in Khartoum. In Arizona.

Mustafa Akyol is the gentlest case on the list, which is what makes him instructive. A Turkish journalist and Cato Institute fellow, Akyol argues in Reopening Muslim Minds entirely from inside the tradition: no verse denounced, no doctrine inverted, just a recovery of Islam’s own early rationalist school and a case that apostasy and blasphemy coercion are un-Quranic. In September 2017, after he lectured in Kuala Lumpur on freedom of conscience, Malaysia’s federal Islamic-affairs officers arrested him for “teaching religion without authorization” and held him overnight. He kept publishing. From Washington.

Three registers, from radical re-sequencing to polite retrieval, and one pattern: the argument is safe to make only where sharia is not law.

The schism that already exists#

No speculation is needed about what would happen if an entire community adopted the reformers’ platform, because one did, and it has been running the experiment for 130 years. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, founded in Punjab in 1889, renounced violent jihad from the 1890s, teaching that the age of the sword was over and jihad continues by the pen. Its motto is “Love for All, Hatred for None.” It preaches loyalty to whatever state its members live under, and it numbers somewhere between 10 and 20 million people under a caliph headquartered in London.

The mainstream’s answer was not a counter-argument. In 1974 Pakistan passed a constitutional amendment declaring Ahmadis non-Muslim as a matter of fundamental law. In 1984, Ordinance XX criminalized their practice: an Ahmadi who calls himself a Muslim, offers the salaam greeting, or calls his place of worship a mosque faces up to three years in prison, and the statute feeds Pakistan’s capital blasphemy charges. The persecution travels. Gunmen killed 86 Ahmadi worshippers in Lahore in 2010, and in January 2023 jihadists in Burkina Faso executed nine Ahmadi men after their imam refused to renounce his faith.

Honesty requires a caveat. The formal ground for excommunicating Ahmadis is their founder’s claim to prophethood, which mainstream Islam holds to violate the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood, not their pacifism as such. But the functional lesson stands either way. A peaceful, pro-secular-state Islamic community with millions of members has not moved mainstream doctrine an inch in 130 years; instead the mainstream, holding state power, redrew the boundary of Islam to expel it. The other half of the lesson matters just as much: the same community operates openly and grows in Britain, Germany, Canada, and West Africa. The doctrine is sustainable. It only needs a state that will not prosecute it.

What governments call reform#

On New Year’s Day 2015, Egypt’s President Sisi stood before the scholars of Al-Azhar and called for a “religious revolution” against extremism. A decade on, even sympathetic observers judge the promise unfulfilled: Al-Azhar’s leadership resisted doctrinal change, fought the state for control of the pulpits, and Egyptian courts went on jailing secularists for “contempt of religion” after the speech.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince announced a “return to moderate Islam” in 2017 and delivered real change in practice: the religious police were defanged and women drive. What the program never touched were the capital statutes on apostasy and blasphemy, and it jailed in both directions, hardline clerics like Salman al-Awda alongside liberals like Raif Badawi and Loujain al-Hathloul. Analysts at the Brandeis Crown Center and the Middle East Democracy Center read the project as authority consolidation, religion re-subordinated to the throne, though the degree is contested and some observers credit it with real generational secularizing effects.

The 2016 Marrakesh Declaration is the most substantive item in this category, and I want to credit it accurately: more than 250 scholars invoked the Charter of Medina to argue that religious minorities in Muslim lands deserve citizenship, not the old protected-subordinate dhimma status. That is serious Islamic legal reasoning. It also shows the ceiling. The Declaration addresses the collective rights of minorities, not any individual’s freedom to leave Islam; no enforcement or follow-up mechanism ever materialized; and the signatory states kept their blasphemy and apostasy laws.

The common structure across every state project is the same: soften practice and tame the clerics while keeping the government’s monopoly on religious meaning. None touched the freedom to leave. A regime that freed interpretation would also free opposition, so independent reform movements are as illegal in these systems as jihadist ones. State moderation does not open a path to the reformers’ goal; it forecloses one.

The route that survives#

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im was Taha’s student. Sudan jailed him for nineteen months without charge, and he left for the United States, where he became a law professor at Emory. His Islam and the Secular State (Harvard, 2008), deliberately published in Arabic and Indonesian as well as English, makes the one reform argument that never has to touch a verse: sharia enforced by the state ceases to be sharia, because coerced belief has no religious value. “There is no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256, Pickthall). Therefore, An-Na’im argues, Muslims need the secular state as Muslims, not as a concession to the West. Nothing is denounced, and a takfir court finds nothing to seize.

The polling shows why that indirection is the live route. Support for sharia as official law runs from 99 percent of Muslims surveyed in Afghanistan down to 12 percent in Turkey, and support for executing apostates reached 64 percent of all Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan while sitting in single digits across the Balkans and Central Asia. Yet the same Pew survey found supporters disagreeing sharply about what sharia contains, with majorities in most countries saying it should bind Muslims only. For many respondents “sharia” works as an identity marker whose content is up for grabs, so an argument that changes the content without attacking the marker has somewhere to land. An-Na’im’s case is respected in scholarship and read by liberals in Indonesia; it has produced no mass movement. It has also kept its author alive and publishing, which on this list is a distinction.

The Reformation that already happened#

A serious scholarly argument holds that calls for “an Islamic Luther” misread what Luther did. The Reformation was a scripturalist, anti-clerical purification movement: strip the accumulated hierarchy and tradition, return to the bare text. Mehdi Hasan argues that Islam’s version of that already happened, and it produced Salafism, the modern stripping-away of centuries of jurisprudence and mysticism in favor of the plain sources, with Saudi Arabia as its state expression. Graeme Wood presses the point to its extreme: the rise of the Islamic State is the modern Reformation. On this reading, what liberal reformers actually want is not a Reformation but an Enlightenment, the historicism and toleration Europe developed more than a century after Wittenberg, on the far side of its wars of religion.

The counter-argument is live and worth stating fairly. Tom Holland holds that the analogy survives in a weaker form: a scripture everyone may read unmediated is a scripture no clerical class can finally police, so the same solvent that produced Salafism can open space for liberal readings too. Mun’im Sirry at Chicago surveys the whole “Muslim Luther” debate and finds it unresolved. I flag it as contested because among serious people it is.

Here is my own conviction, labeled as such. The evidence in this article fits the strong version. Salafism got the Reformation’s mechanics, scripture against hierarchy, and none of its liberal aftermath, and the people doing Enlightenment-shaped work, Taha and An-Na’im and Akyol, share one requirement the Reformation never supplied: ground where losing a theological argument is not a crime.

Where the survivors live#

Line up the addresses. An-Na’im writes from Atlanta. Akyol writes from Washington. The Ahmadi caliphate operates from London. The Aga Khan’s Ismaili Imamate, a quietist community of roughly 12 to 15 million with no sharia-state ambitions, is based in Europe. Every reform current in this article that survived did so under the protection of a non-Muslim state. That says less about Western virtue than about legal architecture: with 79 countries criminalizing blasphemy and 22 criminalizing apostasy, concentrated where Muslims are the majority, the West is where takfir has no state behind it.

As a Christian I read this record through what Jesus told Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36). A faith confident in its arguments does not need a gallows to win them. I apply that standard to my own house first; church history has its tribunals and its stakes, and I will not pretend otherwise. But it is the right standard, and by it the record above is an indictment of a legal system, not of the ordinary Muslim families living under it or beside you, most of whom have never held the rope and many of whom, the polling shows, quietly disagree with it.

Your Muslim neighbor in America lives in one of the few jurisdictions on earth where every question this series has raised can be asked out loud with no statute in the room. The people with the most to lose if that ever changes are not Christians; they are Muslim dissidents, the next Taha or Khalifa. So two assignments. Read the two-page Declaration those reformers posted in 2015; it takes five minutes, and you should know in their own words what they asked for. Then, whenever a headline announces that some government is “reforming Islam,” check the one detail this article has trained you to check: whether that government will let a Muslim leave Islam alive. Nobody refuted Taha. Sudan hanged him. Keep those two facts distinct and you will read the next decade of reform announcements correctly.

Go deeper#

• Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State (Harvard, 2008). The surviving reform argument at full length: why coerced sharia is not sharia, from Taha’s student.
• Mustafa Akyol, Reopening Muslim Minds (2021). The inside-the-tradition case for freedom of conscience, by a man detained for lecturing on it.
• USCIRF, Ahmadiyya Persecution Factsheet. The documented cost of the one community that already made the reformers’ move.
• Mun’im Sirry, “The Muslim Luther and Reformation”. A short, fair survey of the debate this article’s closing argument comes from.