An Islamic Leo XIII - George Weigel

IT IS OFTEN SAID that "Islam needs a Reformation" -- that the world awaits an "Islamic Luther" or an "Islamic Calvin." This is a bit too easy, however, in terms of its close identification of the Reformation with the emergence of free societies in the West, and in its understanding of what ails politicized Islam. Rather than an Islamic Luther, Islamic reformers might better look toward the possibility of an Islamic Leo XIII ...

... Leo understood that the highly politicized idea of "tradition" that prevailed in much of nineteenth-century Catholicism was not, in fact, traditional, and that the political arrangements it favored -- such as the use of state power and authority to enforce the truth claims of the Church -- were not the only possible conclusion to be drawn from core Catholic theological premises. Leo XIII's retrieval of authentic Thomistic philosophy as a tool of social analysis led to a remarkable, evolutionary development of social doctrine in the Catholic Church, and eventually to the Second Vatican Council's historic Declaration on Religious Freedom, a high-water mark in the disentanglement of the Church from state power -- the disentanglement of sacerdotium from regnum. That process of retrieval and development, as distinct from rupture and revolution, is a model that can be recommended to genuine Islamic reformers today.

[Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism, pp. 67-68]