Individuals coming together, as in Florida, to push for Islamic reform may be small in number and generally unknown to the public outside their circle of friends and supporters. Such modest beginnings for events of great consequences are not uncommon in history.

It might be worth recalling how efforts of individuals not widely known to the public unleashed the Reformation of Christianity and made for the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Martin Luther was an obscure monk when he posted his 95 propositions on the doors of All Saints' church in Wittenberg in October 1517, and he could not have imagined how greatly he contributed to the convulsion that consumed Europe for the next several centuries.

A successful Islamic reform will occur when many more Muslims insist on the "release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy."

Then Muslims might find for themselves "a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine" as the brave individuals gathered together at the first Secular Islam Summit dared publicly to imagine.