Islam Requires Moral Reform, Not Political Reform
Daniel Greenfield writes at the Gatestone Institute:

Obama had advocated political reform for Egypt as early as his first anti-war speech in 2002. Ten years later the ashes of the Arab Spring are fluttering over American embassies and consulates. Mitt Romney has proposed economic reform instead of political reform as his prescription for change, but it is not likely that reforming Muslim economies will work any better than reforming their governments did.

As in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, each of our blind doctors steps up to feel the ten-ton elephant of Muslim violence and offers his proposed philosophical cure. The blindness of the doctors is in their Western preconceptions which prevent them from seeing the huge beast as anything but a conglomerate of familiar parts. One of the blind doctors sees a lack of democracy and another sees a lack of free enterprise, and they prescribe what they think is lacking in the Muslim world.

Their false sense of familiarity with the Muslim world, akin to the linguistic false friends that deceive us into thinking that a familiar foreign word is the counterpart of a word in our own language, leads them to see the East as the West with a few missing spots that need to be filled in. But the Muslim world cannot be fixed by attempting to graft on a few Western institutions; if it were that easy then British and French colonialism would have already fixed the Middle East.

The Muslim world is not in need of political reform; or rather it has no ability to make any meaningful use of such reforms. Trying to cut open the Muslim world to insert some tubes of democracy inside it is as futile and destructive as trying to run 13th Century England by the legal and moral standards of 21st Century England. The results would have been much the same as those of the equivalent modern attempts in the Muslim world.

What the Muslim world needs is moral reform, not political reform. Without moral reform, political reform empowers the people to be at their worst while they take refuge in the magical thinking that justice will come from an Islamic order, rather than from accountable government and common ethics.

Moral reform is not a problem that can be solved on a timetable or seen through a microscope. It cannot be exported by armies or achieved through social media protests. The Muslim world's problems cannot be solved by Western professionals promoting reform or integration. They can only be solved by Muslims taking moral responsibility for their own behavior.