Between Pope and Prophet

Over at Talk Islam, Abu Noor talks about what the face of Islam in America will look like. He picks up two issues that I have argued previously: 1. The Catholic-Protestant divide is not a useful analogy for discussing the Sunni-Shi’ah divide. 2. We do not need a Reformation in Islam. (See more recently, my talk on Muslims in the Media (part 2)) Where I have difficulty with his argument is the extension of the analogy with Judaism. I agree that the movement approach (Conservative, Reform, Orthodox, etc.) better fits the Muslim experience. We generally speak of turuq (paths), of…