We should…reject the standard liberal wisdom according to which Islam still needs to accomplish the Protestant revolution which would open it up to modernity: this Protestant revolution was already accomplished more than two centuries ago, in the guise of the Wahhabi movement which emerged in (what is today) Saudi Arabia. Its basic tenet, the exercise of ijtihad (the right to reinterpret Islam on the basis of changing conditions), is the precise counterpart to Luther’s reading of the Bible. …The Wahhabis were extremely ‘purist’ and 'dogmatic’, opposed to any kind of cheap accommodation to new trends of Western modernity; and, simultaneously, they advocated the ruthless abandonment of old superstitious organic mores - the very formula of the 'Protestant’ return to origins against the corrupting inertia of tradition.

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