Hi, Matt--

I defer to your experience of Islam in the Islamic nation or nations in which you lived.

You have not lived in all of them, I believe.

Criticism from the outside is a valid activity, informed as it is by a different point of view. Reform can only be effective from the inside. I can be forced to appear to give up a way of acting and a way of thinking, but inside I will seethe. If I am forced to give up a system that gives meaning to my life, the system which will ostensibly replace it will be vacant of meaning for me, except as the not-what-I-was, and will create a vacuum in my heart and in the society in which I live. If, however, I reassess a system, find it wanting, and look for new ways to make it work, this is a useful and effective reform with a chance at success.

Does all of Islam need reform? Really?

You can't draw any valid comparaisons at all between Western religious intolerance and Islamic religious intolerance. Actually, you yourself did, very effectively, when you used the word "medieval". The Islam you witnessed apparently bears a close resemblance to the Christianity practiced in Europe in the 13th and 14th Centuries. I repeat, Christianity has been saved from itself by the rise of the secular state, that has enabled us to maintain distance between temporal power and spiritual fervor.

The problem for us is that the expression of Islam that has the highest profile is not modern. The problem for the conservative and fundamentalist Muslims is that religion in the West has been absorbed by the modern context. The problem for the Islamic modernists (your very, very few exceptions) is that they are put in the same box as all their co-religionists, and are not given vocal public respect as Muslim nations. If those who walk in the modern world are not reaping its rewards, where is the incentive for the conservative to reevaluate the role of religion in public life? I will not even pretend that the fundamentalists are open to the idea of self-examination.

Spiritual reform only comes from some incentive, some perceived spiritual need. The need to stop the bombing is not a spiritual need, but a question of worldly power. Worldly power brought to bear on a religious objective fails. Ask Caesar how he destroyed Christianity.

So -- besides telling the Muslims what's wrong with them, do we have any idea what's right? Reform: what's in it for them? Can we think in ways that might appeal to Muslims and offer them ideas that could conceivably mean something more than "You get to be just like us"?

Mary Anne