What Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn’t get about Islam

Hirsi’s proposal for a reformation may be a non-starter, but that’s not to say that there’s no hope for a reformation – or rather, given mainstream majority Islam’s lack of a centralized structure – for reformations. Indeed, change is afoot, not just from radical outliers and dissidents, but from Muslims working inside the mainstream tradition. Across the world, Islamic scholars are going back to the texts, peeling off the medieval interpretations that have hardened into truths, and searching for their own answers in the Quran and the Hadith.

As every generation of Muslims has done since the 7th century, modern Muslims are seeking to interpret the spirit of the divine text in light of the mundane realities of its followers. The difference today are the effects of large-scale Muslim migration to the West and modern technology. Education, mobility, and access to information have lead to opportunities of new interpretive freedoms, sped up by the breakdown of the stature of the traditional Islamic authorities. This process cuts both ways: It has made it easy for the Kansan teenager wondering about whether Islam allows her to write her own marriage contract (it does), and it’s also made it easy for fundamentalists to spread a message of intolerance. The same historical disruptions that have produced the horrors of Al Qaeda and ISIL have also produced increasingly confident Muslim activists and scholars, who are working to square their understandings of the Quran’s divine message with universal human-rights norms.

Unlike bombs or beheadings, these gentle disruptions don’t make the news. Earlier this year, the conservative scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi reversed his acceptance of child marriage – a practice generally allowed in medieval Islamic jurisprudence – after two of his female students told him of the ways they’d seen the practice ruin girls’ lives. He also found a fatwa from an 8th-century scholar denouncing the practice. In other words, he found ways to change his understanding of his faith from within.