The Reformation of Islam

By Lorin Jenis

Martin Luther said, "If you want to change the world, take up your pen and write." For us, in the 21st century, the instrument of choice is not the pen but the keyboard. Lorin Sandor Jenis would be an ordinary computer technician if it were not for his extraordinary use of a keyboard to challenge the Muslim clerical establishment. Mr. Jenis writes without concern for his personal safety. He has no wife or children, and nothing to lose but the prospect of old age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456627522

Book preview

The Reformation of Islam

Containing the Revised Texts of

A New Kind of Muslim

And

Brief Thoughts about a New Islam

By

Lorin Sandor Jenis

A New Kind of Muslim

Preface to the Second Edition

In the second edition of this work Lorin Sandor Jenis appended his legal name to the text; he no longer used a pseudonym nor his spiritual name Amin Ahmed Khalil. It was either courage or foolhardiness that inspired Mr. Jenis to sign this work with his ordinary name. The Muslim world will certainly label him a heretic because of what he wrote---and Islam has always been quick to imprison and kill its heretics. Lorin Jenis nonetheless believes that it is necessary to be completely honest in the presentation of this tiny book. Anyone who reads it will immediately understand why, for it is a work of great inner conviction and fearlessness.

Preface to the First Edition

Islam requires its followers to believe that the Qur’an contains the unerring word of Allah and must not be criticized. In fact, Sharia law specifically states that a Muslim who criticizes the Qur’an may be sentenced to death; and heresy and apostasy are likewise subject to the death penalty. Lorin Sandor Jenis knows intuitively and instinctively that such laws were not derived from God.

A careful reading of his essays will reveal that Mr. Jenis has only the welfare of Islam at heart. The problem is that Islam is still a medieval religion. Mr. Jenis is a new kind of Muslim because he does something very simple, something commonplace in Judaism and Christianity---he evaluates his religion’s sacred text and finds that it is a fallible work, divinely inspired but human in its execution.

There certainly must be a way to go beyond an imperfect Qur’an to find an individual, unmediated relationship with Allah. Sometimes Islam helps, and sometimes it hinders us as we search for that relationship.

Salat in the Vernacular

Muslims have always valued and praised the language of the Qur’an. The classical Arabic in which it is written is thought to be the very language of Allah, and is noted for its expressiveness and beauty. There has always been a reluctance to translate the Qur’an into local languages, and a time-honored convention prescribes that salat, Islam's formal prayers, be recited in the original Arabic. Converts to Islam are accordingly expected to memorize these prayers in a language that might be foreign to them. Muslims generally believe that a uniformity of liturgical practice throughout Islam unites the faithful in a common religious culture. The use of the original language also prevents the errors that might result from faulty translations from entering Islamic thought and practice.

There may be some Muslims who are not familiar with the history of the Protestant Reformation of Christianity. In Germany the medieval era ended when Martin Luther successfully defied the authority of the church in Rome; he then proceeded to translate the Bible from the original Greek texts into the common German of his day. The German Bible that he produced became pivotal for the development of the German language and German literature. It is widely thought to be a masterwork comparable to the King James Version of the English Bible. Martin Luther’s Bible prepared the way for the King James Bible and all subsequent translations.

The Reformation inspired by Martin Luther ended an age of relative uniformity in Christian liturgical language and practice. In the Eastern Church the Bible had retained its original language, Koine Greek. The Western or Roman Church used a Latin translation of the Bible. The scholar who translated the original Greek into Latin was the Church Father Jerome, officially a saint. St. Jerome made his translation in order that the common people would be able to read the book. Ignorance of the scriptures, he wrote, is ignorance of Christ. What is ironic is that the Latin Bible itself became unintelligible to the common people when northern tribes destroyed the Western Roman Empire, and several different languages replaced Latin. If the principle enunciated by St. Jerome had prevailed, the Latin Bible would have been translated into Old English, Old French, and Old German in the early middle ages.

But the Roman Church did not translate the Latin text because Latin was believed to be a sacred language. The text was thought to be inerrant, even though it was merely