Melanie Phillips demonstrates a decided paucity of intellectual depth and the strong psychological temptation to believe in miracles in her blog post 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.

Warraq is on absolutely solid ground. See his essay on Koranic exegesis here. It is only by subjecting the Qur'an to such critical scrutiny that the actual truth of its genesis will ever be known. But Phillips and these other "reformers" aren't interested in the truth about the Qur'an or the words contained within it. Everything is relative, a matter of interpretation, you see. The Qur'an can be anything Muslims want it to be and, so long as words are meaningless, we have endless cause for optimism.

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.

In the immortal words of Michael Corleone, "Who's being naive now?"