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In Iraq, too, there are encouraging signs of reason and moderation. Much ink is spilled on the young firebrand, Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi army, those boys of the Baghdad slums who have answered Sadr's call by engaging in banditry and fomenting chaos. The much more significant story, though, is unfolding in another place, with another person.In the Shia holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani appears to have managed a tremendous historical feat: He has pulled Shi'ism back from the brink, subduing its centuries-old romance with martyrdom and revolution. Although Sistani is a man of Iranian birth, and rarely ventures beyond the confines of a modest house in the warrens of Najaf, he holds the affection of the Shia of his adopted country.
The majority of Muslims in Iraq belong to this branch of Islam, and there is no higher religious authority for the Shia than Sistani. As their supreme jurist, Sistani carries enormous authority.
It's been critically important, then, that he's given no sustenance to those who wanted war against American forces in Iraq. In word and deed, this revered scholar has thrown his weight on the side of reason and practicality.
True, Sistani's moderation has not prevented America from facing dire problems in Iraq. But the ground would have been burned and our mission there destroyed if Sistani had the soul of a radical.
He does not. When Moqtada al-Sadr attempted to take charge of the holy city of Najaf, Sistani called large crowds into the streets there to demand the withdrawal of the Mahdi army. Sistani is the reason there can be no triumph for Sadr in Iraq.
Nowhere is the war within Islam more bitter, and the outcome more critical, than in Saudi Arabia. Home to Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia also has spawned waves of terrorists, including 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11. Osama bin Laden himself comes from one of the kingdom's most exalted families.
Now, at last, Saudi Arabia's political leaders have awakened to the grave threat surrounding them. The jihadists want to bring down the royal family's secular rule and they have the means to strike hard. Unlike elsewhere in the Arab world, Saudi radicalism has never been a movement of the desperate and the paupers. The children of the poor were merely cannon fodder -- the ones who attacked clubs in Tel Aviv strapped with explosive belts.
Instead it is its massive wealth, mainly from oil, that has given this movement its virulence. It's a wealth grafted onto an austere religious tradition, Wahhabism, that is contemptuous of both the "infidels" and other Muslim sects.
In the course of the last 18 months, Saudi Arabia has become a battleground, as the jihadists pursued a campaign of subversion with great cunning and cruelty.
Determined to drive out the tens of thousands of "expats" who keep the economy intact, the terrorists gunned down five Westerners last May, including two Americans, at an engineering firm in Yanbu, on the Red Sea. Four weeks later, the militants struck again in a horrific attack on oil company and housing compounds in Khobar, with a toll of 22 lives, including 19 foreigners. The following month, Paul M. Johnson, an engineer from New Jersey, was kidnapped and then beheaded.
The perpetrators were children of Arabia, determined to bring about a reign of zeal and wrath, and to rid their land of all Westerners.
For the Saudi regime, the time of denial had ended. The rulers declared those jihadists "enemies of Islam," heretics who had lost their way. They agreed to open the workings of the country's financial and banking systems, as well as the charities, to agents of the U.S. Treasury and the FBI.
In a telling development, last June the Saudi and U.S. governments jointly announced that five charitable offices in Saudi Arabia had been designated "financiers of terrorism." All were branches of Saudi Arabia's most powerful "charity," al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which had supported terror with tentacles reaching into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Albania, Bosnia and the Netherlands.
It is too early to tell if the tempest in Arabia will subside. But the Saudis now know the high price of flings with religious bigotry.
There is a hadith (a tradition or saying) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that the condition of a people will not change unless they change it themselves. There have been scapegoating and escapism aplenty in Islamic lands. A new age of responsibility is long overdue.
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