266 No god but God
Soroush. And if ever there is a conflict between the two, it must be
the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy, not
the other way around. It has always been this way. From the very mo-
ment that God spoke the first word of Revelation to Muhammad—
“Recite!”—the story of Islam has been in a constant state of evolution
as it responds to the social, cultural, political, and temporal circum-
stances of those who are telling it. Now it must evolve once more.
The tragic events of September 11, 2001, may have fueled the clash-
of-monotheisms mentality among those Muslims, Christians, and
Jews who seem so often to mistake religion for faith and scripture for
God. But it also initiated a vibrant discourse among Muslims about
the meaning and message of Islam in the twenty-first century. What
has occurred since that fateful day amounts to nothing short of
another Muslim civil war—a fitnah—which, like the contest to define
Islam after the Prophet’s death, is tearing the Muslim community into
opposing factions.
It may be too early to know who will write the next chapter of
Islam’s story, but it is not too early to recognize who will ultimately
win the war between reform and counterreform. When fifteen cen-
turies ago Muhammad launched a revolution in Mecca to replace the
archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radi-
cally new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism, he tore
apart the fabric of traditional Arab society. It took many years of vio-
lence and devastation to cleanse the Hijaz of its “false idols.” It will
take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and
fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s
original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred
and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform
cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are
all living in it.