Western intellectuals and pundits, most of whom understand neither religion nor history, are often quoted as saying that what Islam needs is something akin to the Protestant Reformation to turn itself away from the clarion call of radical Islam.
The problem what that argument, in addition to being an incomplete historical analogy, is that it ignores what really happened after the Reformation:
People who call for a “Muslim reformation” seem to have completely forgotten what happened during the Protestant Reformation. The dime-store version, though, is massive religious wars in which huge numbers of people died. This happened on the European continent and also in the British Isles. It’s true that in the long-run the Reformation led to the development of doctrines about religious tolerance and liberalism, but it took a good long time. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were written in 1517 whereas John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration was written in 1689. In between came an awful lot of wars, witch-burning, fanaticism, etc.
And that was back in the era before mechanized warfare, biological weapons, and nuclear bombs.
