From Bold Challenge
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.
Long Overdue
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.