I wouldn't give them that much credit!
But I think a lot of folks have no idea what Islam is. It is not an Arab equivalent of post-reformation, post-scientific-revolution, post-enlightenment Christianity.
Christianity (other than its silly fundamentalist versions) lays out broad principles and leaves their interpretation to individuals. Love your God and your neighbour as yourself are the overarching virtues. The Christian God makes a believer an individualist: blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted; blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth... It deliberately avoids questions of governance ("Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's) and rather than making a rule-book for daily life, it assumes that we have fallen and so it is interested in issues of personal redemption and the kingdom of heaven. The great commission of christianity is the conversion of non-believers - not by violence but through persuasion and acceptance. The harm done to non-believers is in the afterlife: "Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."
The Qu'ran is completely different. It is all encompassing. Explicitly, there is no separation of mosque and state. Islam demands submission to God and his laws (Sharia). It describes a political system. Beneath its five pillars, it lays out an unchanging set of rules about morality. It defines a person's daily activities. It groups Moslems into a brotherhood and excludes and condemns infidels/kafirs. "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers."
Consequently, Islam is extremely resistant to peaceful evolution. When Allah revealed truth to his prophet, he was laying down something permanent and all-embracing. A way of living your daily life for all time.
In its initial establishment, Christianity faced a similar issue of how to think about its role in society. Was it going to be a holistic solution that could explain everything? Was Jesus of similar substance to God, or was he the same as God? If he was similar, then he becomes a human guide, but he could not be confused with the purest divine essence - in the form of the Father. The Catholic church under the Emperor Constantine chose the other option: hence the Trinitarian doctrine. And all that followed from that model: strict construction of the text; the inquisition; the extreme punishment of heretics etc.
Ring a bell?
Islam is like the pre-reformation version of Christianity. Submission to doctrine, adherence to rules, however outdated, ignoring of contradictions or evidence to the contrary, intolerance of different ideas (eg Judaism), the application of ecclesiastical canon law to society.
The top on that sealed bottle of a system finally exploded but not until all sorts of nasty stuff was done to try to keep it in. Eventually, however, it was the truths of science that could not be contained and which led to a modern secular understanding of the world. It was folks like Copernicus who showed that the earth spins around the sun and gave man a less self-centred place in creation. Folks like Giordano Bruno who imagined the vastness of the universe and put our solar system in context. Folks like Galileo who said the book of Nature had the same authority as any book written by men and pointed his telescope towards the wandering planets and the stars. Folks like Newton who saw that the laws of celestial nature and terrestrial nature are one and the same. Folks like Darwin who explained the development of life in a way that made mankind an ordinary part of the landscape of creation and described our existence as an exercise in survival.
Set that alongside the emergence of ideas such as the the secular state, the notion of personal liberty including the right to believe what you wish, the development of the rule of law independent of religion, the desire for freedom of speech and governance by the people of themselves - and you have the rich chemical soup out of which the DNA of Western society issued forth.
Western views of religion and its place in society grew alongside its science and its politics. At the same speed, mostly in parallel spheres, but in some ways ending in the same place. For instance, we see a neat coincidence between science and the Christian interpretation of moral behaviour. Science discovers that kindness - altruism if you will - is also embedded in nature: that behaving in a way that benefits the group is actually more efficient than simple individualism. Game theory. Reciprocity. The golden rule. "Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house."
The beatitudes of nature and the physics of the sermon on the mount meet in the middle.
Is Islam capable of this kind of evolution? Is it capable of retreating from areas in which it lacks expertise? Can it find a pathway to reconciliation with different, newer truths?
It is not. Because it is inflexible. Until it has its reformation, Islam isn't going to fit into a Western model of society. There's a reason democracy and its freedoms mostly fail to flourish in Moslem nations. Islam draws the oxygen of freedom out of the air. It requires submission rather than free thought. It prevents a person from deciding - heck, I don't believe this stuff any more. It disqualifies criticism of the prophet. Until it permits people to be free of Islam's shackles, I fear it is going to be a problem for the rest of us.
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