Where Is Islam’s Martin Luther?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic, now out in paperback, is a provocative and ambitious book that aims to reform the second largest religion in the world. Hirsi Ali, a Somali born, Dutch raised, naturalized American most famous (or infamous) for the condemnations of Islam in her previous books, Infidel and Nomad, begins her current work with a brash maxim: “Islam is not a religion of peace.” By this she does not mean that Islamic belief makes Muslims violent, only that “the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam.” This is the fundamental point from which all else in Heretic flows.

But before Hirsi Ali discusses the nature of Islam, she takes pains to identify three groups of Muslims at whom the book is directed:Medina Muslims, the fundamentalists of the faith; Mecca Muslims, the devout, who are not inclined to practice violence, and comprise the majority of Muslims; and Modifying Muslims, or, the dissidents. Heretic, we learn, was conceived as a way to engage with Mecca Muslims, the precarious middle group Hirsi Ali contends is teetering between departing the faith and joining the extremists.

So how does one go about implementing a modern-day doctrinal reformation?

Hirsi Ali proposes five emendations to the faith.