Edward Feser asks "Does Islam Need a Luther or a Pope?" As a Mormon, I'd say neither. It needs a new prophet, or at least to listen to the prophets God has sent in the last 173 years.

The Christian church ceased to be Christ's church when the apostles ceased to be replaced, and leadership fell into the hands of competing bishops and philosophers. Our knowledge of the earliest Christians is very sparse, but the New Testament makes it clear that they anticipated a falling away, the infiltration of false teachers, even antichrists. It was not their aim to gain eartly power, which is why Constantine's conversion and making Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire signaled that its apostasy was complete.

Christ's church was guided by him through continuous revelations to men he chose, not the kind of men who constituted the councils which later met and hashed out orthodoxy. Christ would never have sanctioned the use of military power as in the Crusades, let alone the Inquistion. He would not have approved of the greed that was practiced by Conquistadors in his name, or worldly display that marked the Byzantine and Roman churches.

When people like Luther finally recognized how corrupt the church had become, it was so dominated by a worldly anti-christian class that it put a price on their heads for the crime of thinking and preaching their own ideas, and touched off centuries of struggle that ended in a reformation which still denied the power of God to communicate with men. Luther wasn't all that tolerant himself, nor Calvin, nor the Puritans.

The Pope is a central authority, but he is routinely attacked by more liberal bishops around the world. The Episcopal Church is in crisis because it has sanctioned homosexual priests and bishops, which is an abomination to many of its members. Judaism has no central spokesman, but its divisions show that it has succumbed to the natural tendency of power vacuums to be filled by those with strong opinions and opportunists. Islam is in the same boat. A prophet arises and teaches, then dies. Then his sayings and writing go through the hands of scholars and and are interpreted, reinterpreted and commented upon until they lose their original meaning and the scholars themselves become authorities. The problem is not in the original revelation; it's in the tendency of men to take over and impose their own ideas on religion.