The most significant cultural event in the Muslim world of the past 100 years has been a very major Reformation, a shift from mediationist religious brokerage to a symmetrical relationship between the deity and believers in conformity with the old, but previously unpractised, high theology. Suddenly religion is egalitarian and symmetrical, centralized, with an exclusive single deity and without mediators.

XREF: Parallels the Protestant Reformation's removal of priestly mediation, an explicit comparison the author draws.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 2046