Fazlur Rahman is a modernist and wrote Islam, which goes through the intellectual threads and discussions in history. His theories where roughly the same as yours.
Fazlur Rahman was trying to reconcile Islam with modernity, it seems to me, in the sense that he was attempting to make Islam 'contain' modernity - that science, free thinking, liberal thought, all of these things could be made to in some way be Islamicised, rendered 'legitimate' by Islam.
As a strategy for reforming Islam, a gentler, tolerant Islam, it is on the surface, commendable. But it still doesn't confront the flaw - that Islam sees the need to contain that which it sees as competing with it and that it is profoundly spooked, and frightened of modernity in a way in which nothing else frightens and spooks it.
In the past, Islam confronted other belief systems that were rooted in their own supernaturalisms and illogicalities, and hence Islam could prevail by having the greater power, and shouting the loudest, and usurping them by imposition. Democracy, human rights, gender equality, secularism, freedom of conscience, these are (to orthodox Islamic eyes) utterly insidious, uncontrollable precepts, the oxygen in the air of humanity, which modern successful societies need to breath, but which cannot be seen, are hard to pin down and scream and destroy and usurp, they are nonchalant, relaxed, and corrupting the purity and aspiring hegemony of Islam.......at the thinnest end of the wedge Islam responds with blockheaded crudity - societies with modernity at their core are derided as godless heathen locations full of sluts, whores and debauched fornicators (Islam always rescinds in its defensiveness to sexual neurosis)..........at the more sophisticated end Fazlur Rahman resides.
As an incremental process to wean Muslims off the sanctity of literalism, you want to encourage this, even if you doubt its chances of success, because you want the principles of modernity to have primacy as an ideal. When it becomes, however, tenuous, or dawah-ish, when it refuses to address the flaws of Islam directly, I still think we should speak up and criticise the process, especially when it inculcates an idea as an adjunct to that, which is that modernity should accomodate Islam, rather than Islam accomodating modernity. The hegemonic impulse has to be pointed out and guarded against.
Topic: Progressive Islam