You said it all.
The fun fact (or sad fact, for you), though, is that the Catholic and mainline Protestant establishment is inerrantist but not literalist. People do get heresy charges for questioning inerrantism (I posted one example in #227, repeated below for your convenience). Now it's true that in mainline Protestantism, being charged with, and convicted for, heresy means you loose your ministry, while in some Islamic contexts it can mean you loose your life. But that's
not the point. The point is that this is enough to show that your claim that moderate Christians are not inerrrantist is false, and thus demanding of Muslims to give up inerrantism hypocricy.
Peter Cameron (Presbyterian, Australia, 1992)[edit]
On 2 March 1992, at a Dorcas Society rally in the Ashfield Presbyterian Church, Peter Cameron, Principal of St Andrew's College at the University of Sydney, preached a sermon entitled "The Place of Women in the Church". As well as supporting the principle that women should be ordained to the ministry, it argued that the Bible had to be understood in the context of the times in which it was written. Cameron was tried and convicted for heresy. He appealed, but resigned before the appeal could be heard.
I do not deny that there are problems with Christianity and I am actually very critical of the aspects which are below the standards of Enlightenment. However liberal (or moderate) Christianity definitely embraced the methodologies of Enlightenment science as the basis for interpreting the Bible, contrary to what you say renouncing innerantism is not only far from anathema but it is actually applied. Actually even more conservative Christians are open to it (I remember now one of Bart Ehrman's stories; when he tried during his school years, he was a fundamentalist at the time, to explain away some contradiction in the New Testament, if I remember well, by writing a very very long essay his conservative professor wrote under it 'Well maybe Mark was wrong'). The way toward extending the rejection of inerrancy to much more important aspects of religion is paved.
From what I see people here focus on some negative aspects of Christianity (especially form USA) but fail to see the sea of positive parts which bring this religion eons ahead of Islam (where innerantism is dogma and the prospects dim, no chance to hear soon 'maybe Muhammad was wrong' in the day light). Sadly there is not even a liberal islam (on a par with liberal Christianity) not to mention the so called 'Progressive Christianity'* (see Wikipedia, I do not really like the term 'progressive', the so called 'western progressives' apologists of islam brought the term progressive into disrepute
, but I can only be very sympathetic with their approach).
There is a cause that islam is slow to modernize and this is of course the well known fact that its core is much more reactionary (having also a lot of 'special' mechanisms to prevent important change and replacement, thus inherently more difficult to bring it in line with Modernity). Only an important change can bring it beyond a certain 'barrier of potential' which to make very plausible that it will not fall back toward the past (small reforms do not really work, see the near end of the Ataturk experiment, the same await the more modern approaches of many dictators in the Islamic world in the future, sadly at the base the masses are still too indoctrinated with the defective parts of islam). And here I think we have a moral obligation to catalyse the apparition of a new islam via simply telling the truth.
Personally I am very sympathetic with a liberalist approach (very good ideas can be chocked by too much authoritarianism), we are not that far away as you think (actually I come from your direction, moved away after understanding islam), but sometimes we have to be capable to just put a bridle to some extreme ideologies. Sadly islam is in this category (especially it shows little prospect that it can reform to be totally in conformity with Modernity**). It's as simple as that: tell the truth about islam by rejecting the view that sharia is fully compatible with Modernity (or that islam is peace, feminism, democracy, equalitarianism and so on) yet give all the secular rights we enjoy to its adherents.
*its basic tenets, of progressive Christianity, are summarized here:
1. An insistence on personal intellectual integrity, paying attention to one’s reason and experience in conversation with traditional teachings and contemporary scholarship
2. A resistance to claims that Christianity is the only or best religion and a desire for interfaith dialogue as an avenue to peace and global understanding
3. Public advocacy for the full participation of woman and of gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender people
4. A strong commitment to social justice and ecology
5. A desire for creative worship and spiritual vitality. [9]
http://www.valwebb.com.au/index.php/progressive-christianity-in-the-uniting-church-in-australia/
**
When Muhammad Ali as-Sanusi (1787–1859) attempted to reopen the gates to ijtihad, he was rebuked in a typical fatwa by the mufti of Cairo, who said, “For no one denies the fact that the dignity of ijtihad has long disappeared and that at the present time no man has attained this degree of learning. He who believed himself to be a mujtahid [a scholar qualified to exercise ijtihad] would be under the influence of his hallucinations and of the devil.”
Robert Reilly 'The closing of the muslim mind' chapter 2
In spite of centuries now of exposure to Modernity the 'gates of the ijtihad' remain (almost) closed, the medieval Islamic jurisprudence (which in large parts is not considered immutable) is still with us, almost untouched. What reasons are there to expect renouncing inerrancy in the quran?
