Our fourth guest blogger is an Islamic thinker, well known throughout the blogosphere and outside it: Ali Eteraz. Ali picks us where Shadi Hamid left off: will an Islamic reformation ever come?

I was recently commissioned to write a seven part series on Islamic reform at the Guardian and thought I might jump into the discussion on whether the Islamic reformation will ever come.

The answer is that the roots of Islamic reform — dissent, criticism and re-evaluation of the orthodoxy — have been going on for a long time. In fact, the Islamic equivalent of the protestant reformation has already happened, and the results haven’t been pretty (as was the case with the actual Protestant reformation). While there has been some attempt by Muslim clerics to reassert their control by way of an Islamic counter-reformation, it is a case of too little too late. Instead, Islam finds itself moving beyond an Islamic enlightenment, characterized by high levels of individualism and characterized by a rejection of traditional authority structures. This individualist push could have been beneficial but for the twin evils of colonialism and rise of political Islam. The Islamists of the 20th century found the Muslim world hankering for direction and utilized a number of propagandist and geopolitical tricks to take control, all of which now requires a counter-movement to create a Muslim “left” which is anti-theocratic and pro-liberty.

This “limited leftism” — since by the standard of western leftism it is conservative — can be described as a sort of Muslim secularism. Once political parties around the Muslim world start adopting its basic premises — that the best way to solve human problems is through politics and not religion — it will create a “post-Islamist” push (one that has already started). Only if, and when, this post-Islamist push is successful will genuinely secular groups in the Muslim world start to raise their heads.

It should be clarified that this discussion is limited to “Islamic reform” i.e. Islam centric ways of creating equality and freedom in the Muslim majority world. If you want to discuss the presence of secular, entirely non-theistic ways of creating equality and freedom in the Muslim world (Marxism, anarchism, socialism, atheism), that is an entirely different discussion, and shouldn’t be confused with Islamic reform.

Ali Eteraz is a writer, blogger and columnist for the Guardian.