THE BLEEDING HEART OF ISLAM
By Bret Stephens

The Wall Street Journal
IsraPundit, Canada
June 20 2006

Picture a map of Muslim lands, circa 1993. In the Balkans,
Orthodox Serbs were at war with Bosnian Muslims. In Sudan, the
Islamist government in Khartoum was waging a campaign of murder
and enslavement against the Christian south. Israel was fighting
Hezbollah in southern Lebanon even as it signed a peace agreement
with the Palestinians – one that would, in time, literally explode
in its face. In the Caucasus, Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians
were battling over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while 200 miles north
Muslim Chechnya had declared independence and was about to be invaded
by Russia. Further east, India and Pakistan were lobbing artillery
shells across the Line of Control in Kashmir.

Picture that map today. The violence at the periphery of Islam has, for
various reasons, faded. But the antagonisms at its center have grown.

Look at Palestine, where the ostensibly secular Fatah party of
President Mahmoud Abbas and the fundamentalist Hamas of Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh may be in the early stages of civil
war. Look at Darfur, where Arab Muslims are slaughtering African
Muslims. The dynasts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia are being forced to
confront the terrorism of al Qaeda. In Egypt, liberals oppose the
Muslim Brotherhood, the Brotherhood opposes the government, and
the government suppresses them both. In Iran, the youth confront
the clerical establishment. Pro-independence factions in Lebanon
are struggling to survive a campaign of assassination and terror by
Syria. The bloody heart of it all, of course, is Iraq.

Amid routine slaughter in Baghdad and Darfur, nobody would call the
present state of affairs good. But it is an improvement over the
previous state, not only because a clash within one civilization is
better than a clash among several, but because Islamic civilization
has long been in need of a reformation. That’s what’s happening today
in one Muslim state after another: The struggle for power has become
a contest of ideas (and vice versa), with fateful consequences and,
sometimes, good results.

Take Saudi Arabia. Before Sept. 11, says Hawazen Nassief, a Saudi
journalist at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, "the Saudi
government lived in denial and refused to acknowledge that its blind
support for strict Wahhabi religious institutions and preachers was
breeding extremism, intolerance and violence." The denial persisted
even after the disclosure that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.

What changed? Ms. Nassief points to the succession of al Qaeda attacks,
beginning in May 2003, on residential complexes, government offices,
oil facilities and foreigners. "It was a slap on the face," she
says. "There was no international player to blame for this deviancy
except the political, social, economic and religious climate of
the kingdom. The shattering of the viable image of the kingdom led
the government to allow critical voices that were previously pushed
underground. . . . The minute the government loosened its restrictions,
people flooded the media with criticism of the status quo."

A similar dynamic took hold elsewhere in the Arab world as the
phenomenon of suicide bombing – widely admired when the victims were
Israeli or American – boomeranged on Muslims. After Sept. 11, Jordanian
newspapers were filled with speculation that the deed could not have
been the work of Muslims and must have been orchestrated by Zionists,
Christian evangelicals, the Bush administration or some combination
thereof. But the delusion and the pretense came abruptly to an end
after suicide bombers murdered 63 Muslims at three hotels in Amman,
Jordan, on Nov. 9, 2005. The Amman bombings, Salafist cleric Abu
Basir al-Tartusi wrote in a Web posting translated by Memri, "cannot
be considered Islamic," adding that "he who approves of a sin is like
he who committed it."

At an off-the-record session last month of young Arab leaders at
the World Economic Forum in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the sense of
exhaustion with the way things are was palpable. A young Saudi
on his social life: "I can’t go anywhere. Malls are strictly for
families. It’s horrible." A Gulf State participant on her upbringing:
"Teachers don’t encourage disagreement. We are not raised to choose. We
don’t have a culture of accepting the other."

An Egyptian on Arab political life: "’Deviant’ ideas are
dangerous. Young people are suspect. Leaders are inaccessible."

Not that the participants there – upper class, fluent in English,
many of them educated in the West – were especially representative of
their societies. But what struck an outsider was the extent to which
the nature of elite conversation had changed. The Arab intelligentsia’s
stale litany of complaint against imperial America, perfidious Zion,
the legacy of colonialism and so on – what Bernard Lewis described
as the habit of asking, "who did this to us?" – is giving way to a
new mentality. Now the question is: "What did we do wrong?"

It’s in this context that an event such as January’s protests over
the Danish cartoons is best understood. The (mostly orchestrated)
demonstrations were, above all, an attempt by Islamists and autocrats
to remind Muslims that their principal grievances were external,
not domestic. They sought to impress Western audiences with the
intensity of Muslim rage while silencing domestic critics who didn’t
share that passion. Burning down Scandinavian embassies, however,
does not contented Muslims make. Six months after l’affaire Muhammad,
the offending cartoons have faded from memory, whereas the reality
of domestic misrule remains.

There is a perception in the West – general in Europe but strong also
in the U.S. – that the Reformation of Islam awaits the resolution
of a centuries-long Hegelian dialectic. The world moves faster
than that. Through wireless connections and satellite dishes, the
outside world is filtering into the Middle East, mostly uncensored
by regimes or imams. Not everyone likes it, but many do, and the
difference between them not only bloodies the Middle East, but also,
increasingly, offers it hope.

ABOUT BRET STEPHENS

Bret Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
board. He joined the Journal in New York in 1998 as a features editor
and moved to Brussels the following year to work as an editorial
writer for the paper’s European edition. In 2002, Mr. Stephens,
then 28, became editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, where he was
responsible for its news, editorial, electronic and international
divisions, and where he also wrote a weekly column. He returned to
his present position in late 2004 and was named a Young Global Leader
by the World Economic Forum the following year.

Mr. Stephens was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University
of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He lives with his
family in New York City. He invites comments to bstephens@wsj.com.