Salman Rushdie calls for ‘Muslim reformation’

LONDON (RNS) — Salman Rushdie, the Muslim novelist whose 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to call for his death, has urged for a Muslim Reformation that would expose the Quran and Islam to scholarly analysis.

In an Aug 11 article in The Times of London, Rushdie said the “closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims” foster terrorism among alienated young men – as exemplified in the July 7 London bombings.

“What is needed is a move beyond tradition,” he wrote, “nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age.”

Rushdie said a reform movement would require a new educational impetus, with new scholarship that replaces the literalism and narrow dogmatism that plague present day Muslim thinking.

What’s more, Rushdie said it is time for the dawn of Islam to be viewed “as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.” Viewing the Quran – the Muslim holy book – as soley the “infallible, uncreated word of God” makes scholarly analysis “all but impossible,” he said.