When those in the West ask questions like "Can Islam be Reformed?", they seem to be asking - they can only be asking - "Can Islam Be Made, Please, a Little Less Islamic?".
From the perspective of practically anyone in the West, a reform of Islam must mean making Islam more sane and human (which means, whether they realize it or not, making it more Christian). From the perspective of anyone truly within historic Islam, however, the reform of Islam can only mean making Islam more purely Islamic, which (from the Western point of view) can only mean making it less sane and human.
According to Hilaire Belloc, Islam was, in fact, conceived as a Reformation and a Christian heresy very, very much akin to Protestantism. From The Great Heresies, Chapter 4 (Read the entire book at the EWTN website);
It was the combination of all these things, the attractive
simplicity of the doctrine, the sweeping away of clerical and imperial
discipline, the huge immediate practical advantage of freedom for the
slave and riddance of anxiety for the debtor, the crowning advantage of
free justice under few and simple new laws easily understood - that formed
the driving force behind the astonishing Mohammedan social victory. The
courts were everywhere accessible to all without payment and giving
verdicts which all could understand. The Mohammedan movement was
essentially a "Reformation," and we can discover numerous affinities
between Islam and the Protestant Reformers - on Images, on the Mass, on
Celibacy, etc.
Belloc also states;
Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts made by great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed. We have in some places driven the Mohammedan master out and freed his Christian subjects from Mohammedan control, but we have had hardly any effect in converting individual Mohammedans....
To the Muslim, Islam is reform. Therefore, there can be no reform of Islam from "outside", or by the standard of any alien philosophy. To any Muslim properly so called, and especially to a Jihadist, it is a nonsense question.
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