The Protestant Reformation is coming to Islam and you won't like it. Updated: "Is Islam's Counter Revolution at hand?"

Those hand-chopping, burka-shrouding Islamists are reformers.  In place of the caprice of despots, they want Sharia rule of law based on the written word of Allah.   In place of tribal allegiance, they want a brotherhood of faith transcending borders.  An individual who reads the Quran can see for himself what Allah calls for and urge others to heed it without kowtowing to sultans.  The Islamists' text, sadly, has less to say about forgiveness, patience and our inborn capacity to sin than the Christian one.

The Protestant Reformation considered the written Word of God as the only proper foundation for civil law, as binding even the rights of emperors and kings, as an unmediated message to the reader from God, a message with more power to command your life than any earthly authority, and as Bunyan pointed out, offering the prospect of a righteous heaven worth more than anything this world can offer.

Iran getting taken over by the mullahs and the Arab Spring being captured by the Muslim Brotherhood get counted initially as reform in those cultures.  You won't like it.  Most reformers will discover the appetite for corruption, force, arbitrary rule, and blood will be spilled for years to come.   My marker of spring will be signs of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for women.

A similar take from the Economist  "That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform"

And from ViaMedia: Is Islam's Counter-Reformation at Hand?

Westerners have been saying for a while now that what the Islamic world needs is its equivalent of the Reformation. “Where is Islam’s Martin Luther?”  In fact we have been witnessing the fruits of just such a Reformation over the past few decades, with the Wahhabis in some ways playing the role of a few of the more radical sects in the Protestant Reformation, advocating a very strict and literal interpretation of the holy texts, attacking traditional brotherhoods and practices as heretical, and smashing buildings and ornamentations they denounce as idolatrous. And the bitter fruits of this Reformation haven’t been making people happy.