Call it whatever, this is the Islamic Reformation!

Today, thanks to an increase in literacy and education, the advent of technology like the Internet, increased political and secular divisiveness and a "swelling sense of individualism," the authority of Islamic clerics and their schools of law are being challenged as never before. The institutions are becoming more and more marginalized.

Traditional authorities, beginning in the time shortly after Muhammad, viewed holy law as the revealed will of God and subordinated politics to holy decree.

Historically however, it was politics (tribal or otherwise) that invariable shaped Islamic law and led to complex discourse on a subject that was contentious on the surface but at its base rather simple.

The religious precepts are pretty straightforward, but the task of explaining them and choosing a method for their application is left in human hands. This means they are automatically constrained by human limitations.

In the past, for example, a person who had a question about Islam would go to a mosque and question an Imam, who would issue a legal ruling - or fatwa.

Now, anyone can go to any number of websites to access any number of rulings. This allows believers to search for rulings they like, not the one’s they dislike.

Remember, the Koran, just like the Bible, is more than capable of supporting both sides of an argument!

This scattering of interpretations has led, precisely as it did during the Christian Reformation, to a whole host of competing ideologies.

There are groups, individuals and institutions that are literally killing each other to maintain the loyalty and the following of the world's Muslims.

Just as the Protestant Reformation opened the door to multiple, sometimes conflicting and often baffling interpretations of Christianity, so has the Islamic Reformation created a similar situation in which you have voices competing with one another to be heard!

Since there is no single voice - no Pope who speaks for the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world - it is the loudest voices that are heard, and frankly, nothing is louder that the voice that rams planes into skyscrapers.

As individuals seized this authority, it was inevitable also, that men and women with radical ideas of Islam would surface - men like Bin-Laden, who have killed Muslims in pursuit of their goals, but who have also taken on the West.

This is why Al Qaeda is so widespread and popular amongst the radical sects of Islam and it has also given rise to the mis-perception that the West is his primary target.

Bin Laden's (Al Qaeda’s) own messages have often referred to the West as the "far enemy," while his immediate foe is anyone who doesn't share his puritanical version of Islam.

Bin Laden, who is not a cleric or a scholar, issues his own fatwa’s to deliberately challenge the authority of the clerics and he has found a following of disaffected young people, particularly second generation Muslims living in Western countries.

This disaffection, combined with political, sectarian, and even tribal frictions has brought Islam to the point where it is in danger of sliding into a general conflagration in the Middle East.

In Afghanistan, various Islamic factions still loyal to the Taliban are brutally murdering those who are trying to create a secular nation and Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank are little more than civil wars between various Islamic factions!

The question we have to ask now is, what are the factions in Iraq?

Both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites appear to be splitting into smaller, mutually hostile elements. There are indications that among the Sunnis, the secularists, who are mostly Ba’athists and the Islamists, are starting to go at it as well!

Several secularist militias recently made a public announcement that they want the head (severed or otherwise) of al-Qaeda's local rep, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's recent war with the Americans had less to do with resisting the occupation than with positioning himself within the Shi'ite community.

Meanwhile, the shaky ceasefire between Israeli and Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip held more or less during December, due mainly to Israeli restraint in the face of dozens of unprovoked Kassam rocket attacks upon Israeli civilian communities. At the same time, violent clashes escalated between supporters of the PLO Fatah party and the militant Hamas movement.

This came as international pressure grew upon Israel to hand over more land to the Palestinians - despite the fact that they are obviously engaged in a substantial domestic struggle for power, and therefore can hardly be trusted as reliable peace partners under such tumultuous circumstances.

Then, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday declared Hamas' militia in the Gaza Strip illegal, and the Islamic movement responded by defiantly announcing plans to double the size of the paramilitary unit.

When this is combined with the American's attack upon the Muslims as a recreation of the Crusades, and this all played out against the intensifying Iranian nuclear program, it threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a major war in 2007.

To show you just how divided Muslims everywhere are, we only have to travel to the U.K. where a "potentially explosive" dispute between Islamic factions inside Wandsworth prison has been revealed by an independent watchdog.

The Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) published a report last week detailing a "schism" that had emerged in the prison between Asian Muslims and those from North Africa and Afro-Caribbean areas.

A particular Imam was said to have caused deep division among the prison's 265 Muslim prisoners and there was a warning that some inmates were pressuring others to adopt "more militant lifestyles and belief systems".

Yes, the fundamentalists, extremists, factions and sects are causing trouble left right and centre, and if the U.S. and Israel are smart, they will just step back and let Islam sort it all out internally!

Your "wait and see" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com