Reality Check: David Solway Explains Why a New "Progressive" Muslim Group Is Doomed to Fail

One can applaud those who seek to bring about the equivalent of a Reformation in Islam. At the same time, though, one must be realistic, as Solway is when he says that such efforts are unlikely to make much (or even any) headway:

What these “moderates” or enlightened Muslims are proposing, however laudable, has little to do with mainstream Islam, whose fundamental scriptures cannot be rewritten on pain of apostasy and execution. Any scrupulous reading of the Koran and the attendant canonical and jurisprudential literature should make it amply clear that injunctions to slaughter, conquest, oppression and domination are inscribed in the faith. No attempt at what is euphemistically called “re-interpretation” or “contextualizing” can be expected to gain even modest traction in the larger Muslim world.

Then, too, Islam has had many "reformations"--Wahhabism, Khomeinism, Muslim Brotherhoodism--and each time it "reforms" by looking backwards, at the supposedly better earlier days of Islam's founder and his first few successors.