This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Recently, fans of The Rest Is History podcast were treated to a rare peek behind the curtain. Pressed to comment on his co-host Tom Holland’s view that Islam is “uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset”, Dominic Sandbrook described it as “total tosh”, adding “I think he’s completely bananas about his Islam stuff, frankly.”
It was a classic expression of the playful antagonism that we have come to know and love. There is something there of Plato and Aristotle: Holland points upwards, at ideas and “the sacral”; Sandbrook points downwards, at a profane world full of people who simply “get on with it”. The debate, however, is about more than one’s philosophical orientation. It gets at the great Orientalist Bernard Lewis’ famous question about Islam and modernity: “What Went Wrong?”
Its stakes in Britain today could hardly be higher. Can our secular mindset digest Islam? If not, can our society accommodate it? Not yet, used to be a common refrain; not until the Muslims catch up with us, perhaps by having their own “Reformation”. The Western media has anointed various characters over the years as “the Muslim Martin Luther”: Fethullah Gülen in Foreign Affairs; Tariq Ramadan (now imprisoned for rape) in Salon; Egypt’s strongman el-Sisi in the Financial Times. It’s not the most propitious analogy: Luther was hardly enlightened by our standards.
Still less auspiciously, Islam, as the commentator Mehdi Hasan often likes to point out, did have a “Reformation” — one which sought, no less ardently than Luther and Calvin, to “purify” the faith and return it to its early, pristine state. It was called Wahhabism, and it produced the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Wahhabism was not, however, the only attempt to reform Islam from within. The past three centuries have witnessed many such efforts. These movements, spanning the Islamic world from India to Nigeria, are the subject of Fitzroy Morrissey’s excellent new book, The Renewal of Islam. The title is aptly chosen. Muslim reformers do not innovate; they renew.
They find Islamic belief or practice to be broken in some way, and they seek to mend it. They take heed, in this pursuit, from a hadith, in which the Prophet Muhammad promises that, at the beginning of each century, God will send to earth a “renewer of Islam”.
They find Islam in a sorry state, but disagree on the details. Do Muslims revere prophets and saints too much or not enough? Are they too tolerant of other religions, or should they strive towards pluralism? Does “jihad” mean violence, or is it merely (as the Metropolitan Police tells us) a benignly internal struggle? Does or should Islam make room for “the secular”?
What Sandbrook called Tom Holland’s “bananas” will be familiar to readers of his bestseller Dominion (2019), which argues for the Christian origins of modern, secular liberalism. We in the West, Holland argues, tend to make assumptions which are narrower than we prefer to think. We assume, for example, that other religions have a concept of “the secular”, analogous to that found in the Christianity we are used to.
In asserting that Islam has no such concept, Holland finds himself in agreement (unusually, I daresay) with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna. Christians, al-Banna thought, have their “render unto Caesar”; but for Muslims, “Caesar and what belongs to Caesar is for God Almighty alone”. Islam ought to be a totalising, all-encompassing religion. There is nothing beyond it or outside of it, least of all the state — which, in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideal, has sharia for its law and the Qur’an for its constitution.
From time to time, there surfaces in Islamic thought a tradition contra Hollandum, but its prospects, at least in the Arab world, have never looked especially good. When, in 1925, Ali Abd al-Raziq argued that politics could exist apart from Islam, that Islam mandated no specific type of regime, he was stripped of his degree and denounced by the former Grand Mufti. In the 1990s, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd traversed somewhat similar ground and ended up being hounded out of Egypt. These were, perhaps, the Muslim Luthers we Westerners were rooting for.
The Wahhabi renewers, on the other hand, distinguished themselves by their intolerance. Shi’ites, Bedouins, readers of saucy love poems — all these were, in the harsh view of their 18th-century founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, worse in their blasphemy even than Christians and Jews. They were, it seems, killjoys of Cromwellian proportions. Morrissey also introduces us to other, rival renewers, who took a more hearteningly ecumenical outlook. In 1712, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi addressed the Christian patriarch of Antioch as “one of our brothers in spiritual practice, whose noble souls and subtle essences have become moons in the heavens of monotheism”. The thinking of the medieval Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, which impressed itself deeply upon many of the “renewers of Islam”, often pointed in this direction.
Some were stimulated, at least in part, by external polemic and critique. A particular point of contention between Muslim scholars and Western interlocutors concerned the role of women. In 1840, the Frenchman Eugène Daumas issued 20 questions on this subject.
He received a swift reply from the most famous Arab of his day, Abdelkader, hero of the Algerian struggle (or jihad) against Daumas’ colonising countrymen. Abdelkader was, Morrissey stresses, no feminist: he liked to boast that he rarely went 24 hours without having sex with one of his wives. But he insisted nevertheless that Islam was not, or at least not especially, misogynistic.
Later that century, the Scottish Orientalist William Muir attacked Islam for permitting two great violations to the sanctity of marriage, polygamy and divorce. The Indian writer Sayyid Ahmad Khan deployed his knowledge of Christianity and Western culture against Muir’s charges. Polygamy, he pointed out, was not prohibited by Christian scripture (across the ocean, the Mormons were still busy exploiting this fact). Ahmad Khan likewise defended the permissibility of divorce by appealing to no less an authority than John Milton.
Much as Islam retains its reputation in the West as an especially misogynistic religion, so too do its critics contend that it is hostile to reason and science. Ernest Renan argued in the 19th century that Islam, “the heaviest chain that humanity has ever borne”, had “always harassed science and philosophy”. In response, the Muslim modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani cast his eye upon the Catholic Church and Europe’s Dark Ages, concluding that Christianity was no better.
Some even went so far as to argue that Islam was the scientific religion par excellence. Muhammad Abduh and his associate Rashid Rida put forth a reading of the Qur’an that sought to reconcile every detail with the cutting edge of modern science. Hence they found, lurking in the surahs, some hints of germ theory and natural selection.
As with so many of islam’s renewers, Abduh liked to imagine himself as a Muslim Luther, opening up the faith to its ordinary adherents. At the same time, his disciple Rashid Rida drifted towards Wahhabism. The versions of Islam which strike us as the most dogmatic and the least compatible with modern society are thus products of modernity — of the age of science and reason — as much as its antithesis.
It was not only Mehdi Hasan who drew the parallel between the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Wahhabism: the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt wrote in the early 19th century that “the religion of the Wahabys, may be called the Protestantism or even Puritanism of the Mohammedans”.
The analogy, Morrissey argues, applies beyond Wahhabism. Seeking, in Morrissey’s words, to “democratise” the faith, several renewers of Islam translated the Qur’an into vernacular languages. Much like Luther, they wanted to make it possible for ordinary believers to access revelation without recourse to intermediaries, gatekeepers and “experts”.
Towards the end of his book, Morrissey quotes the American scholar Kecia Ali: “modern Islam is a profoundly Protestant tradition”, whose believers “read scriptural texts in isolation from their commentarial traditions and often without expert guidance”. If that is true, it is thanks to “renewers”, who have generally striven towards encouraging each Muslim to turn to the Qur’an directly and to so commune with the divine.
The Renewal of Islam makes clear in each of its thoughtful and engaging chapters that Islam has not been static and stagnant since the Middle Ages. It’s had its Reformation — in fact, it’s had plenty. Whatever has “gone wrong”, to recall Lewis’ phrase, it wasn’t for lack of Luthers.
