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Notes -
Sufism is also a big deal in Turkey - it was heavily sponsored by the Ottoman empire. I don't know how much of a counterforce to Erdoganism it is.
Re. "Reformation", thing to remember is that "Wahabbism" (Salafism in the Arab world and Deoband in the Indian sub-continent) is a Reformation in Islam. Both movements are based on throwing away the cruft of 1000 years of tradition and returning to a simpler Scripture-based religion. Both are tied to the spread of mass literacy in the cultures they spread in. Both are tied to a decadence-critique of a failing empire that was legitimised by the old religion (HRE/Ottoman/Mughal) and received support from secular forces seeking independence from the decadent empire (or its British successor in the case of Deoband). And both led to large increases in religious persecution and associated political violence - the Christian world starts moving slowly towards freedom of religion after it is utterly exhausted by the 30 years' war (adjusting for population growth, worse than WW2) and doesn't get there until the 19th century.
What we need to make Islam a religion we can do business with is an Islamic Enlightenment, not a Reformation.
That's what made me laugh when reading all the earnest thinkpieces about "Islam needs a reformation" when the Taliban etc. were at their height. This was their Reformation, or what do you, dear journalist, columnist or opinion writer, think the Reformation was about?
It was so plain that the only view of the Reformation they had was the pop culture notion of "break away from repressive, authoritarian Roman Catholic church, the Pope is not the boss of me, freedom of conscience trumps all". Modern mainstream Protestantism having accepted liberal social attitudes, and the churches being just there for weddings and funerals but not having any influence on their own lives in the experience of the majority of these writers, this was what they took away about 'reformation' - that it means becoming less religious and more secular. Religion is a private matter, it has no influence on wider society and nor should it have.
But the Reformation wasn't about that! It was the direct opposite, it was - as you say - clearing away the worldly accretions and additions, and going back to the plain unvarnished word of the holy scriptures. Religion was vitally important. It wasn't merely a private matter, and it should and did influence society and government - Geneva is the most extreme example of this. It wasn't about 'live and let live, you have your view of what the holy book says and I have mine'.
The people who blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas were activated by the same principles as the mobs who smashed statues in churches or defaced and whitewashed over murals. They were both sets of Reformers. Put the thinkpiece writers back into the past into a Reformation town, and they wouldn't like it.
I don't know, my mental model of (white)writers for The Atlantic and to a lesser extent other liberal elite papers is that they would feel right a home in puritan New England, or, say, Calvin's Geneva, after a period of adjustment to the ruling ideology.
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