A call for reformation

There’s an incredibly important comment piece by Dr Taj Hargey in today’s Times.  Hargey is chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and the Imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregration, and describes the “McCarthyite” campaign which the “Muslim heirarchy in Britain” have waged against him.  In the face of fundamentalism and Wahhabism, he calls for a reformation of Islam:

“We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). But because this reformation is still in its infancy, the reactionary clergy and its supporters is doing everything to strangle it.

Most if not all the thorny problems of faith that British Muslims face today – whether it is apostasy, blasphemy, jihad, women’s oppression, homosexuality, religious intolerance or the democratic deficit in and outside the community – can be traced either to fabricated hadith or the masculine-biased Sharia.