A Later Reformation? Rethinking the Christianity–Islam Timing Argument

A Note on Why This Matters Here

This is not an abstract argument. It is being written in an Australia still counting the cost of the Bondi Beach attack of 14 December 2025, in which two men, acting in the name of Islamic State, opened fire on a Hanukkah gathering at Archer Park, killing fifteen people – the youngest ten, the oldest eighty-seven – and wounding forty more, before one gunman was shot dead by police. Three civilians who confronted the gunmen were killed doing so. It was the deadliest attack of its kind on Australian soil in thirty years. None of that is contested, and none of it should be minimised in the service of a tidy argument about comparative theology.

It is precisely because the atrocity was real, ideologically explicit, and carried out in the name of a specific reading of Islam that the political argument which followed it deserves scrutiny rather than a shrug. Pauline Hanson’s remark that she could not name a “good” Muslim, made on Sky News and defended rather than withdrawn, was condemned across the parliament – including by members of her own side of politics – as vilification of an entire religious community on the basis of its founding texts rather than the conduct of any individual within it. Her burqa protests in the Senate, in 2017 and again in November 2025, drew open support from figures including Ralph Babet. This is not a fringe current; it sits inside a parliamentary party with Senate representation, and in the climate after Bondi it finds a wider audience than it would have a year ago.

The timing argument this essay interrogates sits at the exact point of maximum political temptation: to treat Hanson’s and Babet’s conclusion – that the problem is Islam as such, fixed and undifferentiated, rather than a specific and contested current within it – as the honest naming of a threat rather than as a civilisational claim the evidence does not support. Refusing that temptation is not the same as refusing to name the ideology that killed fifteen people in Bondi. Both refusals are owed to the people affected, and this essay attempts the harder of the two cases rather than the more expedient one.

I. The Claim, Stated Plainly

There is a comfortable argument, popular among secular liberals who want to avoid the charge of civilisational bigotry, that runs as follows: Christianity and Islam are not fundamentally different in their capacity for coercion, supremacism, or violence. They differ only in timing. Christian Europe went through the Reformation and then the Enlightenment; large parts of the Muslim world have not yet completed an equivalent passage. Give it time, the argument runs, and Islam will secularise the way Christendom did. The gap people notice today – between, say, apostasy law in Afghanistan and a Uniting Church synod in Sydney – is a gap in historical stage, not in kind.

This argument deserves to be taken seriously, because it is substantially true. It also deserves to be tested, because “substantially true” is not the same as “complete,” and a great deal of contemporary argument – on both the apologetic and the polemical side – depends on collapsing that distinction. My purpose here is to hold the timing thesis to the same standard I would hold any other historical claim: state it as strongly as it can be stated, then ask what it leaves out.

II. Christendom’s Own Ledger

Start with the historical record the timing argument rests on, because it is real and worth stating without euphemism.

Christian Europe burned people for witchcraft as a matter of settled law and popular consent, not as an aberration from official doctrine but as an expression of it. The last legal execution for witchcraft in the British Isles was Janet Horne, burned in a tar barrel at Dornoch, Scotland, in June 1727 – within living memory of the Enlightenment figures who would soon make such a sentence unthinkable. On the continent the practice persisted longer: Anna Göldi was tried and beheaded in the Swiss canton of Glarus in 1782, in a case now widely regarded by Swiss historians as judicial murder dressed in legal form, with a formal apology not issued until 2008. A final burning is recorded in Poland in 1793, decades after Voltaire, Hume, and Beccaria had already published their case against the practice.

Behind the individual executions sat institutions of considerable sophistication: the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, ecclesiastical courts empowered to try heresy as a capital matter, and a body of scholastic legal reasoning – the Malleus Maleficarum chief among the texts – that treated the prosecution of heretics, apostates, and witches as a theologically grounded duty rather than a political excess. The Thirty Years’ War killed a substantial fraction of the population of central Europe under confessional banners. None of this was marginal or heterodox. It was mainstream, scripturally defended, and popularly supported, in the same sense that comparable practices are mainstream, scripturally defended, and popularly supported in parts of the Muslim world today.

This forecloses a lazy version of Christian exceptionalism – the idea that Christianity was always, in its textual DNA, gentler than Islam, and that the difference we observe today simply reflects that gentleness working itself out. It did not work itself out on its own. It was fought out, over centuries, against considerable resistance from within the Christian institutions themselves.

III. What Actually Broke the Cycle

If Christendom’s violence was not aberrant, its dismantling was not automatic either, and the mechanism matters more than the fact of change.

The Reformation did not, in itself, produce religious toleration – Luther’s Wittenberg and Calvin’s Geneva were not liberal societies, and the wars of religion that followed were in some respects more lethal than what preceded them. What the Reformation did was break the monopoly of a single interpretive authority. Once Rome’s claim to be the sole legitimate reader of scripture had been successfully challenged, the principle that scripture could be read differently – with different readings each claiming institutional backing – became structurally available in a way it had not been before. That structural fact outlived the specific theological disputes that produced it.

The Enlightenment then subordinated revealed authority, of any confessional stripe, to standards external to it – reason, evidence, natural law, and eventually individual rights understood as prior to religious sanction. Locke’s argument for toleration, Bayle’s case for the rights of conscience even of atheists, Voltaire’s campaign against judicial torture in cases like Jean Calas – these were fights, not inevitabilities, fought against the settled weight of ecclesiastical and state power. Print culture, a growing lay reading public, and a Europe fragmented into competing states too weak to enforce confessional uniformity across the whole continent created the conditions in which the fight could be won. It was not won because Christianity’s texts contained an Enlightenment in embryo. It was won because a specific set of institutional, political, and intellectual conditions arose in a specific place and time and made the fight winnable.

This is the crux of the timing argument’s strongest form: not that Christianity was destined toward liberalism, but that a contingent, hard-fought process broke a religious monopoly on interpretation and subordinated religious law to secular and rights-based constraint. If that process was contingent rather than essential to the religion, there is no principled reason an equivalent process could not occur, in its own idiom and its own time, within Islam.

IV. The Parallel Inside Islam

The evidence that such pressure exists inside Islam is not speculative; it is a live and substantial current within the tradition.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic modernism – Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, Sayyid Ahmad Khan in India, and later reformist currents – argued for reopening ijtihad, independent legal reasoning, against centuries of juristic consensus that had treated the classical schools of law as effectively closed. State-driven secularising projects went further: Atatürk abolished the caliphate outright in 1924, replaced sharia courts with a civil code adapted from Switzerland, and disestablished Islam as Turkey’s state religion. Bourguiba’s Tunisia banned polygamy and instituted one of the most far-reaching personal-status codes in the Arab world, grounding the reform in an ijtihad-based reading of the Quran rather than a rejection of it. Contemporary reformist scholars – Abdullahi An-Na’im, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohammed Arkoun, and others – continue to argue, from within the tradition and using its own tools, for historicising classical fiqh and separating its penal provisions from its ethical core.

This is not a phenomenon invented for Western consumption. The same kind of internal argument that produced the Reformation – a contest over who gets to interpret the text, and on what authority – is actively underway inside Islam, has been underway for over a century, and has achieved real, state-level results in specific places. In this limited but genuine sense, “Islam is earlier in the sequence” is a coherent historical hypothesis, not merely a comforting evasion.

V. Where the Parallel Holds – and Where It Strains

Both traditions are Abrahamic, scriptural, and monotheistic; both have produced extensive systems of religiously sanctioned coercion defended by mainstream clergy and popular sentiment alike; and both have produced internal reform movements contesting that coercion on textual and rational grounds. On all these points the parallel is real, and anyone arguing that Islam is simply and essentially more violent than Christianity has to explain away Dornoch, Glarus, and the Thirty Years’ War to do so.

But a parallel in kind is not identity in degree, and here the timing thesis, taken as a complete explanation, strains against three further differences that are not simply about calendar position.

VI. The Comprehensiveness of Classical Law

The first difference concerns the relationship between scripture and law.

The New Testament contains remarkably little detailed public law. It offers ethical teaching, eschatological expectation, and – in the “render unto Caesar” formulation – an explicit, if underdetermined, distinction between religious and civil authority. Whatever theocratic ambitions later Christian institutions developed, they had to build them substantially beyond the text, importing Roman law, Germanic custom, and canon-law invention to construct the comprehensive legal edifice of medieval Christendom. This is precisely why that edifice could later be dismantled by appeal to scripture itself: reformers could argue, with real textual traction, that centuries of canon law were human accretion rather than divine mandate, because the New Testament contains no developed penal or civil code to defend.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence developed differently. Over the first three centuries of Islam, the major schools of Sunni law built a comprehensive system – covering criminal, family, commercial, and war law – derived through recognised methodologies directly from the Quran and the Sunna. This is not a later imposition on a religiously neutral text, as canon law was; it is, in Islamic jurisprudence’s own self-understanding, a direct extraction of law from revelation, using interpretive tools (qiyas, ijma) themselves considered part of the received methodology. Treating large sections of that system as contingent, historically bound accretion – the strategy that worked for Christian reformers dismantling canon law – requires contesting not an accretion onto revelation but revelation’s own claimed legal content: a considerably steeper argument to win.

It would be a mistake, though, to let this flatter Christianity by implying its own legal claims were always modest. Canon law enforced jurisdiction over marriage, usury, blasphemy, and heresy for over a millennium, under state power, with real teeth. The honest comparison is not “Christianity never claimed comprehensive legal authority” but that its textual warrant for that authority was thinner, more evidently borrowed from Roman and civil sources, and therefore more vulnerable to the argument that it was human construction rather than divine mandate – which is exactly why the edifice could later be argued away. The relevant variable is not the presence of legal ambition, which both traditions had, but the depth of the textual root that ambition could claim, and therefore how easily a reformer could sever law from religion without appearing to attack the religion itself.

VII. Diffuse Authority: A Double-Edged Structure

The second difference concerns institutional architecture, and it is more double-edged than it first appears.

Sunni Islam – the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims – has no equivalent of the medieval papacy: no single office whose holder can bind the whole tradition, no single court whose authority, once broken, cascades into pluralism the way the fracturing of Rome’s monopoly did. Religious authority in Sunni Islam is distributed across independently credentialed scholars and competing schools of law – Al-Azhar in Cairo carries immense prestige but no binding jurisdictional power over Muslims elsewhere – oriented toward the text and its interpretive methodology rather than toward any single human office.

The usual argument is that this diffusion is why no equivalent Reformation moment is available: no single institutional target whose defeat opens the door to pluralism, because there was never a monopoly to break. That argument has force, but diffusion cuts the other way too. The same diffusion that removes a single target to defeat also removes a single throne to seize and redirect. Luther’s revolt succeeded partly because breaking one institution’s monopoly was sufficient to open the field, and secular princes had a concrete office to expropriate. Reform movements within a diffuse, text-centred structure like Sunni Islam have no such lever. Mu’tazilite rationalism in the ninth and tenth centuries, one of the most sophisticated bodies of speculative theology produced anywhere in the medieval world, was marginalised not by a single decree but by a slow accumulation of scholarly consensus (ijma) – and by the same token, no single decree could reverse that marginalisation either. Centralisation was Christianity’s vulnerability and, eventually, its lever for change. Diffusion is Islam’s protection against a single point of institutional capture, and simultaneously its obstacle to a single point of institutional reform – the timing argument, in its popular form, generally notices only the second half.

VIII. The Formative Period

The third difference concerns the earliest history of each tradition, and here the divergence is least contestable.

Christianity spent its first three centuries as a persecuted, politically powerless minority within the Roman Empire, developing its central texts with no access to coercive state power and, in the “kingdom not of this world” tradition, a theological reason to expect none. It only acquired the capacity to legislate for a whole society after Constantine – one reason its founding texts contain so little public law: they were not written by or for people in a position to need any.

Islam’s formative period ran differently. Muhammad was, within his own lifetime, both a religious prophet and the political and military leader of the community he founded, governing Medina and commanding armies; the Rashidun and later caliphs who succeeded him inherited both religious and political authority as a single, fused office from the outset. This is not a moral judgment on either trajectory – a persecuted minority faith and a rapidly successful state-forming one are simply different starting conditions – but it is historically consequential. Christianity’s public law had to be invented from prior powerlessness, centuries after its founding texts were fixed. Islam’s public law developed in direct continuity with the founder’s own exercise of political authority, recorded in the same textual corpus Muslims regard as scripturally authoritative. The comprehensiveness discussed in Section VI and the formative fusion discussed here are, in a real sense, the same historical fact viewed from two angles.

IX. The Empirical Record, Stated Carefully

None of the preceding sections settle the matter by argument alone; the timing thesis is, at bottom, an empirical claim about trajectory, and it deserves empirical scrutiny rather than assertion in either direction.

The data on formal law is unambiguous, even if its interpretation is contested. Roughly half of the world’s forty-nine Muslim-majority states maintain apostasy laws – laws found in no non-Muslim-majority country – and thirteen states, all Muslim-majority, prescribe death as a possible penalty for apostasy or blasphemy. Blasphemy laws more broadly exist in roughly four in ten of the world’s countries and territories, and Pew Research Center’s cross-national analysis found that countries with such laws experience markedly higher levels of both government restriction on religion and social hostility over religious matters than countries without them.

Survey data on opinion complicates any simple reading of these laws as merely imposed from above, while refusing to support the opposite claim that they reflect a monolithic Muslim consensus. Pew’s landmark thirty-nine-country survey found support for making sharia the official law of the land ranging from 8 per cent of Muslims in Azerbaijan to 99 per cent in Afghanistan – an extraordinary spread within one tradition, driven substantially by national legal culture and the constitutional status Islam already holds in a given state, not by theology alone. Turkey, the state that underwent the most thoroughgoing Kemalist secularisation, showed only 12 per cent support for official sharia status in the earlier survey and 32 per cent in a later one – a quarter to a third of the level recorded in Pakistan or Morocco. Even within high-support countries, what people mean by “sharia” varies enormously: majorities favour its application to family and property disputes; markedly smaller shares favour corporal or capital criminal penalties, and many supporters explicitly qualify their support as applying only to Muslims.

The honest reading supports a directional rather than a uniform claim. Where the conditions the timing argument identifies – a state-driven break with clerical legal monopoly, sustained exposure to Enlightenment-descended constitutional norms, a pluralised religious authority structure – have actually occurred, attitudes track measurably closer to secular liberal norms; Turkey, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, are the clearest cases. Where those conditions have not occurred, support for comprehensive religious law remains high, in some cases nearly universal. This is what the strong form of the timing argument predicts: not an essential difference, but one that tracks a specific historical process, measurably, across cases. It is also evidence against the thesis’s crudest version – “just wait” – since Turkey’s secularisation was not simply time passing; it was a forcibly imposed political project, contested from the start and significantly rolled back over the past two decades under Erdo?an, which suggests the process is reversible as well as inducible, and therefore not a clock running down on its own.

X. What the Religious Argument Leaves Out

Everything argued so far stays inside the internal logic of the two traditions – scripture, jurisprudence, institutional structure, formative history. That is a legitimate scope for an essay about theology and law, but treated as a complete account of why reform has advanced further in some places than others, it is not honest. Much of the variation in outcome has less to do with doctrine than with the political economy of the states these traditions have had to operate within over the past century.

Begin with the post-colonial state system itself. Most Muslim-majority states as they exist today are twentieth-century constructions, their borders drawn substantially by departing colonial powers with limited regard for existing communal or sectarian boundaries – the Sykes-Picot partition of the Ottoman Middle East being the paradigm case, Pakistan’s 1947 partition another. States built on borrowed, externally imposed legitimacy have historically reached for religion as a comparatively cheap source of internal cohesion: Pakistan’s founding as an explicitly Islamic state, or Sadat’s turn toward religious legitimation in Egypt after Nasserist secular nationalism visibly failed to deliver dignity or development, are political actors instrumentalising religious law for state-building purposes that have nothing essentially to do with the content of the Quran.

Oil rents complicate the picture further, and in a traceable way. The mechanism by which European monarchs were forced to concede rights ran substantially through taxation: a ruler who needs revenue from a population needs that population’s consent and needs institutions through which consent can be organised. Rentier states that draw their revenue from oil rather than taxing citizens face no equivalent structural pressure – Saudi Arabia is the clearest case – and this has done real work insulating clerical establishments in oil-rich states from the bargaining pressure that reshaped European monarchies. Those same rents funded export: since the 1970s oil shocks, Saudi Arabia has spent, by various scholarly estimates, tens of billions of dollars financing Salafi and Wahhabi institutions abroad – mosques, madrasas, publishing houses, scholarships. Reform currents documented in Section IV were competing, over the same decades, against a rival current with resources reformist scholars mostly did not have. That is a difference in money, not in the persuasiveness of ideas.

Twentieth-century Islamism as an organised political movement is itself substantially a reaction to secular nationalism’s failures rather than an independent development. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, grew under British occupation and a secularising monarchy widely seen as foreign-aligned and corrupt; its later growth tracked closely with the discrediting of secular nationalist governments – Nasser’s Egypt, Baathist Iraq and Syria, the Shah’s Iran – that promised modernisation and delivered authoritarianism or defeat. Where secularism arrived hand in hand with dictatorship and economic failure, it was secularism itself that lost credibility – a dynamic with a rough echo in how Marxism’s association with Soviet failure discredited egalitarian politics well beyond the regimes that had claimed the label.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 then converted a diffuse Islamist current into two rival state projects. It gave political Islam its first successful modern seizure of an entire state apparatus and triggered a sustained, heavily funded Saudi–Iranian competition for leadership of the Muslim world – waged through proxy conflicts and competitive religious patronage – that has shaped Sunni–Shia relations and religious funding across the region for four decades since. Neither side of that rivalry is best explained by appeal to Islam’s founding texts; both are modern geopolitical competition conducted substantially in religious idiom.

None of this displaces the argument made in Sections VI through VIII. But it changes what those sections can be asked to explain. The internal, doctrinal factors do real work at the level of comparing traditions: they are a large part of why the reform argument was harder to win inside Islam than inside Christianity in the first place. They do comparatively little work explaining the variance within Islam itself – why Tunisia moved and Saudi Arabia did not, why Indonesia diverges so sharply from Afghanistan – because that doctrinal substrate is held roughly constant across all these cases, while the outcomes range from 8 to 99 per cent. What varies alongside that outcome is colonial history, oil geology, and Cold War-era geopolitics, not scripture. Put plainly: doctrine sets the ceiling on how hard the argument is; political economy decides, case by case, whether anyone gets to make it, and whether it holds once made. Turkey’s reversal under Erdo?an is a case in point – not a theological current reasserting itself after a secular interlude, but the domestic cost of a secularising project that was imposed rather than argued for, compounded by decades of external religious patronage working the other way.

XI. The Precise Claim

Put together, the argument that survives scrutiny is neither the polemical claim that Islam is essentially and permanently more prone to religious coercion than Christianity, nor the fully symmetrical claim that the two traditions are identical except for a few centuries of calendar time.

The more precise claim, and the ranked one, runs as follows. At the level of comparing the two traditions, the internal factors carry the greater weight: a more direct and comprehensive textual claim to legal authority, a diffuse institutional structure offering no single point of capture for reformers, and a formative history fusing political and religious authority from the outset together explain most of why the Reformation-and-Enlightenment argument was, and remains, harder to win inside Islam than it was inside Christianity. At the level of comparing outcomes within the Muslim-majority world – Azerbaijan against Afghanistan, Tunisia against Saudi Arabia – the external factors carry the greater weight: colonial border-drawing, the fiscal politics of oil, and forty years of Saudi–Iranian religious competition since 1979 explain a wider spread in observed outcomes than doctrine, which is held roughly constant across those cases, plausibly can. Doctrine sets how hard the fight is; political economy has done more to decide, case by case, who has actually been winning it.

None of this licenses the conclusion that the 14 December attack, or the ideology behind it, was a natural or inevitable expression of Islam as such – the internal reform currents this essay has documented, and the external forces working against them, are both evidence against that reading. Nor does it license the comfort that timing alone will resolve the matter if Australians simply wait. What it licenses is the harder claim: that the gap people notice is produced by a specific, contested, and only partly religious process, still being fought out by identifiable people against identifiable obstacles – and that naming those obstacles precisely is owed, both to the victims of Bondi and to the Muslim reformers this essay has named, more than folding them into either a civilisational indictment or a civilisational alibi.

Timing is a real part of the honest answer. It is not the whole of it, and treating it as the whole of it – in either direction – does no favours to the argument, to the people still fighting the fight inside both traditions, or to a country still deciding what conclusions to draw from why it buried its dead in January.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, August 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010