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A daring Muslim journalist in her 30s, Irshad Manji, stepped forth last January with a bold challenge to the Islamic world. "I have to be honest with you -- Islam is on very thin ice with me," said Manji, a Canadian citizen of Pakistani ancestry. "Through our screaming self-pity and our conspicuous silences, we Muslims are conspiring against ourselves. We're in crisis, and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?"The alarm bells have been sounded. Manji, a fearless "refusenik" who campaigns for the rights of Muslim women, makes her sweeping indictment in her book, The Trouble With Islam.
There is a battle underway for the soul of Islam, and it isn't a fight that soldiers from Vermont or Kansas or Indiana can win. This struggle pits mainstream modernists against cruel bigots with a warped vision of the faith.
What's at stake is nothing short of peace or global war. If the fundamentalists triumph, we will see more terrorism of every kind: killings of innocent people, attacks on symbols of freedom, sabotage of business and trade interests. If the secularists win, bored and angry Muslim youths -- who fill the ranks of terrorist groups -- could reap the rewards of a dramatic economic and cultural renewal.
Today, the destitution in the Arab heartland is overwhelming. The entire Arab world, with 300 million people, has a combined gross domestic product valued at $60 billion less than that of Spain. The whole Arab region translates less foreign books than Greece with its 11 million people.
The blame for keeping people poor can be laid at the feet of the obscenely rich ruling families in places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. But keeping people ignorant is a deliberate strategy of the jihadists. They feed on poverty and ignorance, and blame these woes on secular rulers and the corrupt West.
The outcome of this struggle between moderate and radical Muslims will likely hinge on this: Does Islam have, in its midst, enough reform-minded men and women like Irshad Manji? Does it carry within itself the seeds of renewal?
If reform is to take root, it may start in a surprising place: Iran. It was there that the radical Islamists first came to power, in the late 1970s. A quarter-century later, large numbers of Iranians have come to realize that the theocratic revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has brought them only misery and economic ruin.
In the richest of ironies, one of the chief critics of the regime is a grandson of the radical Ayatollah. Sayyid Hussein Khomeini is attaching his revered family name to a campaign for a civil society, the rule of law, the separation of religion and politics, the return of the mullahs to the mosques and to the functions of traditional religion.
Khomeini is tapping into a lot of resentment, especially among the disaffected young. Even though the mullahs still rule, the revolution has not aged well. The regime is riddled with official hypocrisy and corruption, and few Iranians today believe in the export of "revolutionary happiness" that had seized them in the era of Ayatollah Khomeini's pan-Islamic revolt. The clerics may rail against America, but younger Iranians have a fixation with the ways of America. Their faith in the clerics is a thing of the past. Sayyid Hussein Khomeini is one of several prominent reformers who are stirring hopes for a fresh revolution.
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