That said, Islamic fundamentalism is indeed a violent political force. It is supported by theologically conservative clerics, theocratic Islamist states, and terrorist groups that meld their fanatical brand of faith with a hunger for worldly power.

There are hard distinctions to be made here. Only a bigot or a fool would suggest that all Muslims are fundamentalists. One need only read entries by some of the Muslim On Faith panelists--I am thinking in particular of Pamela Taylor's beautiful interpretations of Koranic verses--to understand that there is great variety within this form of monotheism.

But it is also utterly disingenous to argue, as many western multiculturalist liberals as well as Muslims do, that there is no connection between political Islamism and the retrograde religious beliefs held by huge numbers of Muslims around the world.

International terrorism and the repression of women are connected to fundamentalist Islam in precisely the same fashion as many rationalizations for Israel's occupation of biblical lands are connected to fundamentalist Judaism. There are political reasons for both phenomena, but they are also rooted in the most irrational form of religion. Both are based on interpretations of sacred texts frozen in time and on sheer supernatural fantasy. Jehovah once made the sun stand still for my ancestors to conquer this land, so I'm entited to it now. Allah promises me a sensual paradise if I kill myself while taking the lives of infidels, so I'm actually committing a virtuous act.

As a political liberal, I have opposed America's war in Iraq from the start, and I am apalled at the climate of fear that has led to the Patriot Act and the demonization of all Muslims in America as potential traitors. But I am also apalled by the significant number of multiculturalist American liberals, many within academia, who give a pass to Islamic fundamentalists on grounds that we have no right to "impose" western values on others.

Do I think that western values upholding universal human rights and individual liberties--products of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the constitutional separation of church and state pioneered by the U.S. Constitution--are superior to what I see in the Islamic world today? You bet. I just don't believe that those values can or should be exported at the point of a gun. The Bush administration has trampled on the very values it claims to revere.

I believe that westerners can best promote liberalizing forces within the Islamic world by supporting those Muslims who have committed themselves wholeheartedly to fighting resurgent Islamic fundamentalism. One of my greatest disappointments of the past few years is that American liberals have largely left the field to conservatives when it comes to supporting courageous Muslim men and women who have spoken out uncompromisingly, often at great personal risk, against those within their faith who use religious power to suppress human liberty.

Last month, the Center for Inquiry Transnational, a rationalist think tank, sponsored a secular Islam summit in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Full disclosure: I help organize public programs for the Center's New York City affiliate.) Participants in the secular Islam conference included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch Parliament and author of Infidel, Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam, and Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim. The group issued a declaration, which reads in part:

"We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree...

"We insist upon the separation of religion from the state and the observance of universal human rights...

"We call upon the governments of the world to reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women...

"We say to Muslim believers: there is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine; to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'is, and all members of non-Muslim faith communities: we stand with you as free and equal citizens; and to nonbelievers, we defend your unqualified liberty to question and dissent." (For the full text, visit http://www.secularislam.org/blog/post/SI_Blog/21/The-St-Petersburg-Declaration.)

Not a single political candidate in either party had a thing to say about this statement; no doubt the word "secular" in "Secular Islam Summit" was enough to scare everyone away.

This conference and its resulting declaration were not covered as a news story by most major media, including The New York Times and, I regret to say, The Washington Post. But two weeks after the conference, on March 17, the Post did run an opinion column by Geneive Abdo, keynote speaker at the annual convention of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based advocacy group that has consistently attempted to delegitimize secular Muslims in the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. CAIR, as Abdo noted in her column, "denounced any notion of a Reformation as another attempt by the West to impose its history and philosophy on the Islamic world."

Abdo describe the participants in the conference as people "claiming to have suffered personally at the hands of `radical' Islam." Note the quotation marks around the word "radical" and the use of the word "claiming" to describe people who have been victimized by those whose ideas about religion are stuck in the 14th century. Presumably, CAIR is not convinced that Salman Rushdie was really under a death sentence from the Iranian government for many years or that Muslim women have been victims of honor killings simply because they wished to marry someone of whom their father did not approve.

Abdo observed approvingly that "Islamic revivalism has spread across the globe in the past 30 years from the Middle East to parts of Africa. In Egypt, it is hard to find a woman on the street who does not wear a headscarf. Islamic political groups and movements are on the rise--from Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Even in the United States, more and more American Muslims, particularly the young, are embracing Islam and religious symbolism in ways that their more secular, immigrant parents did not."

Hip, hip, hurrah! I have a good idea why it is increasingly difficult to find a woman today--even on the cosmopolitan streets of Cairo--without a headscarf. The beautiful women of Cairo, who, twenty-five years ago, walked the streets freely and wore what they wanted, have not suddenly become more "religious." They are simply scared of being harrassed--or worse--by those wonderful members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are in fact religious thugs.

It is most rerettable that Abdo's was the only lens through which readers of the Post were able to view the issues raised at this important conference.

Conservative news outlets and pundits pay attention to secular Islam not because they are in favor of secularism--they hate secularism--but because they mistakenly believe that criticism of fundamentalist Islam implies support for the Bush administration's policies.

Many multiculturalist liberals make the same mistake in ignoring and denigrating secular Islam. When I was interviewing academics from the multicultural studies establishment for a magazine article, I was shocked at many comments suggesting that Rushdie and Hirsi Ali, among others, had nothing to complain about because they had profited from writing books about their ordeals.

When I asked these university professors if I could quote them, they backed down and said their comments were off the record. They should have been too ashamed of themselves to be quoted, because they were showing just how bigoted and close-minded ideological multiculturalists can be. Yes, I am sure that Rushdie enjoyed spending a large share of the royalties from The Satanic Verses on bodyguards for several years. And I am sure that Hirsi Ali was thrilled when she learned that her friend, the movie director Theo Van Gogh, had been gunned down by an Islamic fundamentalist on the streets of Amsterdam--and that she was next in line.

I am sorry that prior commitments prevent me from attending the On Faith seminar this week at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. I will be interested to hear whether the voices of secular as well as religious Islam are represented.
Too often, conferences involving Muslim issues leave out secularists simply because Americans tend to limit all dialogue about religion to the religious.

For secular American Muslims, what it means to be a Muslim in America today is to be battered from both sides--from non-Muslims who are suspicious of anyone with a faintly Middle Eastern appearance and from American Muslims who regard every secular Muslim as a bad Muslim. Nothing proves the "Americanness" of these religious Muslims more surely than their distaste for the secularists in their midst.

The reason why young Muslims in America are free to embrace religious symbols that their more secular parents rejected is the guarantee of religious liberty written into our secular Constitution. In America--in contrast to Islamic theocracies--young women who have "taken the veil" will also be free to discard their headscarves if they should change their minds.

That fact ought to be a subject for sober reflection on the part of those in the
West--Muslims and non-Muslims--who describe concepts of universal human rights as a form of cultural imperialism.