In “No God but God” US-American religious scientist Reza Aslan argues that Islam at present is in a historical phase comparable to the Christian Reformation of the 16.th century. The article tries to find out if this is true. It goes through some central aspects in the social and intellectual life of Muslim societies now and Christian societies then. The intellectual personal of Church and Ulema are being compared, as are the impact of new media on the two Reformation processes (printing press, the internet) and the pictures of an idealized enemy of the religious communities, (“the Turks”, “the West”). The ideologies of Thomas Müntzer and Sayyid Qutb are being closely looked at, in order to see if their religiously animated radicalisms can be compared. The article comes to the conclusion that referring to the Reformation in order to describe the nowadays Muslim world makes a lot of sense. But in order to get the whole picture it is helpful to compare Islamism also with left wing extremism and the various Muslim groupings with the fate of protestant churches in North-America.
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