In light of the many problems in the Muslim world today, many non-Muslims have called for an Islamic Martin Luther, hoping that such a reformer would liberalise, modernise and perhaps even secularise Islam, just like the famous German reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) supposedly did with the Protestant Reformation. This call is problematic on several levels, however, one of them being that such an Islamic reformation has already taken place.

This lecture will focus on how Muslim reformers have changed the course of Islamic history and the impact this has had on age-old concepts within Islam.