Look at the History of the Christian Reformation First
Reader comment on item: A Muslim reformation?

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (Taiwan), Oct 6, 2003 at 01:19

Before you talk too much about a Reformation in Islam, you really ought to take a long, hard look at the Christian Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. The period was a pretty rough one for Western Christendom, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, which cut Germany's population by about two thirds, and setting the German states back politically, economically, and socially. The horrors of these relgious wars made "secularism" plausible to many--until the 20th century showed us that scientific secularism can be just as evil as any traditional theism.

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