As there are different "versions" of Christianity, so are there different "versions" of Islam. The Islam that is being practiced largely in the Arab heartland is not the same as Indonesia, India, North America, and other countries. This Arab version of Islam is constrictive and oppressive. It is meant to be. All Religions have had to change with the passing of time as our western technologies have threatened them. Throughout history, from the days of Jewish rebels against Rome and Islam’s early and recurrent fractures, through 16th-century Spanish Catholicism alarmed at the advent of alternate paths to salvation, to 19th-century Protestantism startled by Charles Darwin, religions under siege invariably have responded by returning to doctrinal rigor and insisting upon the damnation of nonbelievers. Each major religion has known its share of threats to its philosophical and practical integrity. Our age happens to be a losing era for Islam, when its functionality as a mundane organizing tool has decayed in much of the world—just as European Christianity had done by the beginning of the 16th century. The Middle East's Islamic civilization has stagnated and has been sinking deeper and deeper into their religion. So deep, that human sacrifice is accepted.
Religions change, because men change them. Fundamentalists insist upon an historical stasis, but evolution in the architecture of faith has always been essential to, and reflective of, human progress. Certainty is comforting, but a religion’s capacity for adaptive behavior unleashes the energies necessary to renew both the faith and the society in which it flourishes. On its frontiers, Islam remains capable of the changes necessary to make it, once again, a healthy, luminous faith whose followers can compete globally on its own terms. But the hard men from that religion’s ancient homelands are determined to frustrate every exploratory effort they can. The Muslim extremist from the Middle East has one consistent message: Return to the past, for that is what God wants. Beware, no matter his faith, of the man who presumes to tell you what God wants. It cannot be accomplished, of course, this longed-for return to a golden age of sanctity and success, that is mostly myth, is gone. But the bloody-handed terrorists and their mentors are determined to pay any price to frustrate those Muslims who believe that God is capable of smiling, or that it is possible to change the earth without challenging Heaven.
The complex, exasperating, and frequently inspiring world of Islam faces a historically unique challenge. An entire religious civilization, of remarkable variety, must change if it is to survive economically and culturally. We are foolish if we do not do what lies within our power to enable that change to occur. Success will never be final, but always a matter of degree - which is the difference between a bloody contest of civilizations and the routine ebb and flow of lesser conflicts. For the Middle East, a lesser conflict (Current situation in Iraq) is what our "toleration" and failures to act descisively, have led us.
