Opinionduel.com is an offshoot of National Review Online, where two writers take opposing sides of an issue and have a frank intellectual debate.  This week's topic: Can Islam Reform itself?  The debaters are Andrew C. McCarthy and Mansoor Ijaz.  The columns go from newest to oldest, so you need to start at the bottom.

Please do not send this thread downhill.  This debate is worth reading and I don't want to see the thread get locked.  Thanks.

excellent dialogue except for one thing - I cannot see effective reform come from anyplace except from the top - the ayatollahs, mullah, clerics. It has not happened for centuries. Will it ever?

BTT for the end of the debate.

Reform only begins at the top, and reform threatens those at the top the most.

Quoted: Opinionduel.com is an offshoot of National Review Online, where two writers take opposing sides of an issue and have a frank intellectual debate.  This week's topic: Can Islam Reform itself?  The debaters are Andrew C. McCarthy and Mansoor Ijaz.  The columns go from newest to oldest, so you need to start at the bottom. Please do not send this thread downhill.  This debate is worth reading and I don't want to see the thread get locked.  Thanks.

Definitely worth the read.

The one problem, however, as much respect as I have for Monsoor, he did not do a very good job at contering Andrews points.

To my reading, he basically skirted the issues by providing relatively weak examples of ways Islam has "reformed" itself.  He talked about isolated incidents regarding himself, other American Moslems, and some, what seemed to me, half hearted attempts at cooperation with the U.S., as thourough attempts toward reform.  He dodged the main issue of whether or not Islam as a whole is reformable.

One point that he made hit me like two tons of bricks.  In his post, Allah and Modern Man in America he states, "but I was born in America and chose to remain there, and so my religion's prophet teaches that I should respect the laws of America as they are, not as I would like them to be."

Now, clearly, Monsoor has the integrity not to try and make America, "As he would like it to be," but for other less thoughtful Muslims, how many of them will take what is written in other portions of the Koran and actually, "try to make America into what they want it to be."  How many of them will say, "Allah intended for us to be good Moslems and help others see the proverbial light.  And to do that, we must make the world into what He intended, and that includes America.  Allah would want it to be this way, so we must try to make it so."  And I don't mean remake it into the free Republic that it was intended.  

Mansoor Ijaz would be labeled a heretic anywhere in the "muslim world".

There is no room for reform in Islam, because Islam is intended to BE the reform. The koran instructs Islamics that they are to convert or kill non-believers to Islam, not convert Islam to fit the tastes of non-believers. The very name indicates a lack of flexability within the religion. Islam means submission! How do you submit to something that you can bend to your will? You cannot! Islam is rigid and cannot be reformed. Period.