Some ex-Muslims believe Islam is resistant to change. They think there are a few reasons why the Islamic tradition is more resistant to change and the creation of a secular liberal breathing space for adherents than many other religious traditions appear to be.

The reasons are:

(1) Islam has historically had an expansionist and political dimension.

It was formulated at a time of war and is completely embroiled in the Arab imperialistic ambitions of the time.

While there is war and brutality in the Old Testament, there is no call for global war – the conflicts are quite local. In effect Islam became a kind of meta-tribalism when it was formulated.

Also, orthodox Islam explicitly sees no distinction between the sacred and the secular: social spheres have to be patterned according to sacred dictates.

Contrast this with Christianity, in which Jesus reportedly tells his followers to render unto Caesar his due, and unto God his due.

(2) Islam sees its core text, the Quran, as being, more or less, God incarnate.

What Jesus is to Christianity, the Quran is to Islam.

Jesus is the logos in Christianity, the Word-made-flesh, whereas in Islam, it is the Quran that is the logos, the Word-made-flesh.

This is problematic because it means that Muslims have a hard time accepting that parts of the Quran are highly situated in very specific temporal contexts. Add to this the idea that Islam believes it is the final religion and the Quran is therefore the final text for all time and all places, and you can see that the seeds of literalism are sown right into the orthodox, classical tradition itself.

By contrast the idea of an eternally infallible text is not found in Christianity (the Bible is considered inspired, but still the work of human minds) or in the Indian / Asian religions.

(3) Islam has somehow gotten saddled with this arrogant claim of Muhammad being not only the final prophet, but also the best human being to have ever existed in human history.

This is in contrast to the prophets of Israel in the Old Testament, who are seen as being basically human beings dealing with the challenges of life and existence as best as they could.

My impression of Muhammad as a man is that he seems to have started off as a humble and honest merchant, but the second half of his life shows that some major transformation took place: he behaved no differently from an average Arab warlord of that era (not that I am judging it by modern-day ethical standards — just observing), and it looks like the military conquests, multiple wives and influx of concubines and slaves just went to his head.

Many people have pointed out the differences between the conciliatory Meccan and more aggressive Medinan suras of the Quran.

(4) Unlike Hinduism or Buddhism or other Eastern religions, it can be reduced to a single man and a single scripture.

The same is true for Christianity as well of course, and Judaism to a lesser extent. This kind of reductionism encourages a religion to be a more closed system and discourages diversity and pluralism.

(5) The traditional Sunni orthodoxy is anti-innovation to the core, and all new ideas are considered as the devil’s handiwork and to be approached as cautiously as possible.

This has caused Islam to stagnate remarkably and has prevented its growth or evolution in any meaningful way. Here even Christianity and Judaism are different from Islam and have shown some fairly strong progressive and innovative movements through the ages (most recently, witness the rise of Emergent Christianity under which even evangelicals are taking a post-modern turn, and Process Theology inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, a contemporary of Bertrand Russell).

(6) Every orthodoxy needs a heterodoxy to keep it from stagnating too much, and every heterodoxy needs an orthodoxy to keep it from becoming reckless.

This is true not just for religion but also for science and for virtually every human endeavor.

Whether we are conservative or liberal, the future terrifies us even as it beckons us, and it is just natural to want to regress to the comforts of what is stable and known no matter how stale it has become.

But the Sunni Islamic tradition has exaggerated this fear of the unknown to such monumental proportions that it has squashed freedom of expression and thus every single heterodox movement. The only “heterodoxy” that has survived is the Shi’ites, and they only differ with the Sunnis on doctrinal issues that don’t have much of a bearing as far as social realities go.

(7) Islam is, to my mind, the only religion in the world with developed orthodox doctrines on how to treat unbelievers and apostates, and convinced of its universalizing mission which can even be implemented by coercion.

In other words identity politics are built right into the orthodox Islamic tradition. This makes the radical politicization of Islam even more problematic and endangers all those who dare to question the received wisdom.

Christianity is also a universalizing, prosyletizing religion, but its imperialistic ambitions (a) were not really based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth who was nonviolent (see also the comment above about rendering unto Caesar his due and rendering unto God his); and (b) have largely been surrendered in today’s context.

( 8 ) There is hardly a female voice to be found in Islam.

Christianity still has the figure of the Virgin Mary and even Mary Magdalene in the non-canonical Gospels, as well as numerous female Christian saints. Christ definitely had a feminine side and used to take female disciples, which was revolutionary for his era. Some of the Hindu scriptures are partially authored by women, and likewise for Buddhism. Both Hinduism and Buddhism have Tantric schools that elevate women to the status of goddesses and also certain very spiritual schools of thought according to which experience is supposed to trump intellectual dogmas which has allowed them to evolve.

Some of the reasons are good but nothing can prevent religion or religious people from changing, reforming and evolving. I am more interested in modern humans than ancient religions. Muslim rulers have been using Islam for their own interests. They keep people in ignorance, keep women in slavery, and allow the persecution of the people of different faiths. They do not allow criticism of Islam. You suppress critical thinking means you suppress the ability to think clearly and rationally, to engage in reflective and independent thinking. If criticism of Islam were allowed in the Muslim countries, many Muslims would have become agnostic or atheists, or secularists who could ask for a secular state with secular laws and secular education. It is not true that Islam can not be changed. Islamic laws have been slightly reformed in different Islamic countries. But this is not enough. It doesn’t matter how much you sugarcoat myths, myths will never be facts. Revolution is always better than reformation.

Ignorance about true Islam is one of the main reasons for most Muslims to believe in Islam. Changes happened in most of the Western countries because free thinkers were allowed to criticize churches, priests, and Christianity. Enlightened people in the Christian societies abolished religious rules, separated state and religion before other religious communities did. We now see more non-religious people are in the Western Christian countries than in the Muslim countries. Muslim men and women whoever leave Islam or criticize Islam still get killed, harassed, tortured, exiled. But I do not think Muslims will take infinite amount of time to be secular or liberal if Muslim rulers instead of talking action against the people who criticize Islam, take action against the religionists who violate other’s human rights and the right to freedom of expression. Christians were not less violent than Muslims. If Christians can change themselves, Muslims can. They are all humans.

There is no need to make ancient religions evolve to modern religions. Religion will always have conflicts with rationality and science. Religious scriptures and religious laws are not compatible with the modern concepts of human rights, women’s rights and the laws that are based on equality. All religious scriptures are out of place and out of time. Religion alone is powerless. People have enormous power to make a religion survive for centuries, or to go extinct. I am hopeful that someday Muslims will make Islam die out. Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes, Athena, Apollo, Neptune, Jupiter, Odin, Thor and thousands of gods died, Allah will die too.