Sorry, but I just can't quite get over the irony. Unless I have this completely mistaken, Tony Abbott just called for both a Reformation and a revolution "within Islam". This is, of course, perhaps the most well-worn and ill-informed cliche of Western discourse on Islam – the kind of thing people like to say when they want to sound serious but know almost exactly nothing about Islam, Muslim societies, or indeed the Reformation.

But it takes on a special instructive quality coming from Abbott: a self-described conservative Catholic. If that description has an antonym, it's something like a revolutionary Protestant: pro-Reformation, pro-revolution. And yet here is our former prime minister, arguing against his very self.

Unless, of course, he isn't because when it comes to Islam, all the normal rules are suspended. Including, it seems, whatever rules require that the words we use are meant to have meaning. So much could be said here. Of how Islam's own version of the Reformation already occurred in the 18th century. Of how this episode gave birth to Wahhabism, with its disdain for traditional religion and its austere scripturalism. Of how that finally became expressed in the nation state of Saudi Arabia. Of how it combined with the anti-colonial movement of Islamism – self-consciously a reform movement, by the way – to create (eventually) al-Qaeda and through it Islamic State.

And of how we should hardly be surprised that Islam's Reformation has turned so bloody and so ugly given that Christianity's Reformation claimed somewhere between 5 million and 15 million lives in the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War alone.