Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Page A

has already begun and will only accelerate in the years that lie ahead.
    Recall the three factors that were crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation: technological change, urbanization, and the interests of a significant number of European states in backing Luther’s challenge to the status quo. All three are present in the Muslim world today.
    Modern information technology, like the printing press in Luther’s time, can certainly be used to promote intolerance, violence, and millenarian visions. But it can also act as a channel for the very opposite things, just as the printing presses of seventeenth-century Europe went from publishing tracts about witchcraft to treatises about physics. The case of Hamza Kashgari in fact perfectly illustrates the way the Internet has the opportunity to be to the Muslim Reformation what the printing press was to the Protestant Christian one. Raised a religious conservative, Kashgari is said to have become a “humanist” under the influence of what he read online.
    There is also a constituency for a true Reformation in the Muslim world, just as there was a constituency receptive to Luther’s message in sixteenth-century Germany. Muslim city-dwellers are much more likely to be resistant to the people I have called Medina Muslims than people living in the countryside—not least because in practice the imposition of sharia is highly disruptive of a whole range of mainly urban businesses (among them, tourism).
    In 2014, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 14,000 Muslims in fourteen countries. In only two nations, Senegal and Indonesia, was concern about Islamic extremism felt by fewer than 50 percent of the surveyed population. 12 The numbers in the Middle East and North Africa were astounding: fully 92 percent of Lebanese, 80 percent of Tunisians, 75 percent of Egyptians, and 72 percent of Nigerians—huge majorities of people—said they were worried about Islamic extremism. There is good reason to think that it is city-dwellers who are doing most of the worrying.
    Moreover, Islam is now a global religion with what might even be called a global diaspora. As a result of postwar migrations, there are more than 20 million Muslims living in Western Europe and North America. These Muslims are, as we have seen, confronting the daily challenge of existing in the modern secular West while still remaining Muslim. In short, there is a rapidly growing potential audience for ideas about a new direction for Islam.
    Finally, just as in sixteenth-century Europe, there is now a political constituency for religious reform in key states of the Muslim world. On New Year’s Day 2015, to mark the approaching birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, gave an astonishing speech at Al-Azhar University itself, in which he called for nothing less than a “religious revolution”:
    Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
    I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.
    All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
    I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution . You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move . . . because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands. 13
    El-Sisi is by no means the only Muslim leader who sees the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk as posing a fundamental threat to his country’s political stability and economic development. Similar