Today I attended a fascinating and vital discussion hosted by the Centre for Social Cohesion. It featured Ibn Warraq, the acclaimed scholar of Islam and the Koran who has written such works as Why I Am Not a Muslim, and whose new book, Defending the West, is a critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Ibn Warraq is taking part in tomorrow night’s Intelligence Squared debate, ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values’ where he is proposing the motion with David Aaronovitch and Douglas Murray against Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass. You can listen to that debate live here.

Today’s discussion centred on a question at the very heart of the global crisis posed by Islamism and how the free world must respond to it: can the Muslim world reform itself, or does its theology prevent it from doing so? Ibn Warraq, who is described as a ‘secular Muslim’, says that while there are and have been in the past reformist trends and traditions in the Islamic world, no real reform such as separating mosque and state can come unless the Koran itself is tackled. Since the Koran is considered to be the word of God, however, this is clearly unlikely; so the inevitable conclusion is that Islam cannot be reformed. There were actually three Islams, he said: one, what was in the Koran, two, what was in the hadith and Islamic legal rulings, and three, how Muslims actually lived their lives. And while two and three might throw up reformist trends, number one could never do so because its words were immutable.

This upset various reformist Muslims at the meeting, who protested that defenders of freedom like Ibn Warraq were advancing the same fundamentalist error as the Islamists — and in the process cutting the ground from under the feet of Muslims like themselves who were trying to defeat the murderous madness that was consuming their religion. Instead, they put forward a rival and most interesting argument. It wasn’t just that they adduced various Islamic authorities and traditions which took a reformist position over issues such as the death penalty for apostasy. They argued that the concept of the absolute authority of the Koran itself was a profound misapprehension, because every statement of what it meant was merely a matter of interpretation. It was therefore a question of whose interpretation should be regarded as authoritative; and since there were reformist traditions in Islam, it followed that it was possible for there to be an Islamic ‘renaissance’ of Islamic values which renounced the jihad and the cult of death. In other words, while the words of the holy text are regarded as divinely inspired, the religion itself is simply contestable commentary. And so, theologically speaking, there is everything to play for.

If they are right, this is not only grounds for optimism but it means we should be giving every encouragement to reformist Muslims in their courageous endeavour to excavate from their own tradition precepts which marry their religious faith with an accommodation with the west. It accords with the conclusion reached by the former CIA spy Robert Baer in tonight’s Channel Four documentary, Cult of the Suicide Bomber that the human bomb death cult will be brought to an end not by intelligence or defensive actions by its victims — necessary as those are —but by the Muslim world itself reaching into its own theology to cast it out. Whether this is indeed possible is the great issue of our time.