I offer this intriguing and well-argued article for consideration in the debate about how we in the West might faciliate a reformation of Islam that marginalises and removes the dangerous Islamicist movement.

It offers one of the best rationales I have seen for the appropriate adoption of the term "Islamo-fascist" and looks at the development of political Islam and thought behind that evolution.

I will be interested in any thoughts provoked, preferably constructive. (The article is long, but well worth persisting with).

While both the clerical establishment and al-Qaeda revile such “whisky liberals”, they see as their real adversary the Islamist reformers who advocate far-reaching change, many of whom have rediscovered the thinking of Islamic revivalists of a century ago. The ideas of, for example, Mohammed Abduh on maslaha (public interest), shura (consultation) and above all of ijtihad, or independent reasoning to marry Islamic belief with modern challenges, have resurfaced almost as a newly minted currency. The idea of civil society was reborn, with Muslim credentials the Wahhabi establishment justly fears. The turning point was the 2003 petition, called “A vision for the present and future of the homeland”, signed by leading Islamist reformers and liberals – although the former were and are the real force. As this pluralism implies, the document is founded on the principles of confessional and political diversity in Saudi Arabia. But for the first time, reformers both liberal and Islamist broke the taboo about speaking out against Wahhabism, implying that its totalitarian ideology was the deathly hand holding back the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a successful modern state its citizens would easily support.