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Check out: The Minaret of Freedom
and: New book says the Qur'an gives women the same rights as men
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[snip]

Yet much more is now required of the adherents of Islam: the reinvention of their religion. No longer can the words of the Koran be considered inerrant, infallible, those of Allah himself. The words must be read thoughtfully and critically, and the wisdom they contain extracted with reflection, not reflexively.

Christianity emerged from its Dark Ages when its sacred texts were considered infallible and criticism condemned (often to death) as heresy, to subject itself to historical examination and rational discussion. It is stronger for it. For a religion's strength does not lie in fanatical belief, in an unquestioned assumption that disagreement or criticism of it is an incomprehensible perversion. A religion's strength lies in the goodness it does for people's souls.

As Al-Rawandi puts it:

The claims of Islam do not depend on historical origins, but on an inner knowledge of God, the accompaniment and reward of piety. What makes Islam true is the spiritual life of Moslems, not religious history but religious experience.
These are the teachings of a school of Islamic thought known as Sufism. How Islam must reinvent itself to emerge out of the Islamic Dark Ages it has inhabited for the last several hundred years, and join and flourish in the civilized world, is to combine the teachings of Sufism with those of Jadidism, the attempt by Central Asian Islamic scholars 100 years ago to make a revitalized Islam compatible with the modern world.

While Jadidism was snuffed by the Soviets, its revival, combined with the inner peace and truths provided by Sufism, could reinvent an Islam prepared to participate and prosper in the 21st century.

The combined synergy of Sufism and Jadidism would be the salvation of Islam. Today it stands in dire need of being saved. I hope that dedicated Islamic scholars will appear on the scene to create such a salvatory synergy. In the meantime, none of us any longer needs to be afraid or intimidated by the Myth of Mecca.

-- Jack Wheeler, HERE