Welcome back to Sept. 10.

The "America Strikes Back" optimism that surged after Sept. 11 has now been stricken by the multitude of ways we're losing the war at home. The F.B.I. has proved more effective in waging turf battles against Rudy Giuliani than waging war on terrorism. Of the more than 900 suspects arrested, exactly zero have been criminally charged in the World Trade Center attack (though one has died of natural causes, we're told, in a New Jersey jail cell). The Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second attack on America had begun until more than a week after the first casualty. The most highly trumpeted breakthrough in the hunt for anthrax terrorists - Tom Ridge's announcement that "the site where the letters were mailed" had been found in New Jersey - proved a dead end. And now the president is posing with elementary-school children again.

Given that this is the administration that was touted as being run with C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should be added to the growing list of Things That Have Changed Forever since Sept. 11. But let's not be so hasty. Not everything changes that fast - least of all Washington. The White House's home-front failures are not sudden, unpredictable products of wartime confusion but direct products of an ethos that has been in place since Jan. 20.

This is an administration that will let its special interests - particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right - have veto power over public safety, public health and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime. When anthrax struck, the administration's first impulse was not to secure as much Cipro as speedily as possible to protect Americans, but to protect the right of pharmaceutical companies to profiteer. The White House's faith in tax cuts as a panacea for all national ills has led to such absurdities as this week's House "stimulus" package showering $254 million on Enron, the reeling Houston energy company (now under S.E.C. investigation) that has served as a Bush campaign cash machine.

Airport security, which has been enhanced by at best cosmetic tweaks since Sept. 11, is also held hostage by campaign cash: As Salon has reported, ServiceMaster, a supplier of the low-wage employees who ineptly man the gates, is another G.O.P. donor. Not that Republicans stand alone in putting fat cats first. In a display of bipartisanship, Democrats - lobbied by Linda Hall Daschle, the Senate majority leader's wife - joined the administration in handing the airlines a $15 billion bailout that enforces no reduction in the salaries of the industry's C.E.O.'s even as they lay off tens of thousands of their employees.

To see how the religious right has exerted its own distortions on homeland security, you also have to consider an administration pattern that goes back to its creation - and one that explains the recent trials of poor Tom Ridge.

Mr. Ridge is by all accounts a capable leader - a successful governor of a large state (Pennsylvania) who won the Bronze Star for heroism in Vietnam. A close friend of George W. Bush, he should have been in the administration from the get-go, and was widely rumored to be a candidate for various jobs, including the vice presidency. But after being pilloried by the right because he supports abortion rights, he got zilch. Instead of Mr. Ridge, the administration signed on the pro-life John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson - who have brought us where we are today.

The farcical failures of these two cabinet secretaries are not merely those of public relations - though Mr. Thompson often comes across as a Chamber of Commerce glad- hander who doesn't know his pants are on fire, and Mr. Ashcroft often shakes as if he's not just seen great Caesar's ghost but perhaps John Mitchell's as well. Both have a history of letting politics override public policy that dates to the start of the administration. They've seen no reason to reverse their partisan priorities even at a time when the patriotic duty of effectively fighting terror should be their No. 1 concern.

Pre-Sept. 11, Mr. Thompson, in defiance of science, heartily lent his credibility to the Bush administration's stem cell "compromise" by going along with its overstatement of the viability and diversity of the stem cell lines it would deliver to researchers. Post-Sept. 11, he destroyed his credibility by understating the severity of the anthrax threat, also in defiance of science. Now he maintains that the $1.5 billion the administration is requesting to plug the many holes in our public health system - almost all of it earmarked for stockpiling pharmaceuticals, not shoring up local hospitals - is adequate for fighting bioterrorism. This, too, is in defiance of all expert estimates, including that of the one physician in the Senate, the Republican Bill Frist.

It should also be on Mr. Thompson's conscience that for the first two weeks of the anthrax crisis he kept the federal government's house physician - David Satcher, the surgeon general and a much-needed honest broker of public health - locked away, presumably because Dr. Satcher, a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the Bush administration for issuing a June report on teenage sexuality that angered the religious right. Only after Mr. Ridge arrived on the scene was the surgeon general liberated from the gulag.

As for Mr. Ashcroft, he has gone so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons. Planned Parenthood, which has been on the front lines of anthrax scares for years and has by grim necessity marshaled the medical and security expertise to combat them, has sought a meeting with the attorney general since he took office but has never been granted one. This was true not only before Sept. 11 but, says Ann Glazier, Planned Parenthood's director of security, remains true - even though her organization, long targeted by such home-grown Talibans as the Army of God, has a decade's worth of leads on "the convergence of international and domestic terrorism."

Ms. Glazier found the sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for anthrax terrorists a laughable indication of how little grasp they have of the enemy. "Religious extremists don't respond to money," she points out. Such is the state of the F.B.I., she adds, that one agent told a clinic to hold onto a suspect letter for a couple of days "because we have so many here we're afraid we're going to lose it" (perhaps among the Timothy McVeigh documents).

If either the attorney general or the secretary of health and human services inspired anything like the confidence that, say, Mayor Giuliani does, there wouldn't have been a need to draft Mr. Ridge. Even so, he's mainly a P.R. gimmick - a man who should have been in the administration in the first place reduced to serving as a fig leaf for lightweights. As director of homeland security, he's allegedly charged with supervising nearly 50 government agencies - so far with roughly a dozen staff members. When asked to define Mr. Ridge's responsibilities, Ari Fleischer said on Wednesday that it was "a very busy coordination job," but so far Mr. Ridge is mainly sowing still more confusion.

The one specific duty that he has claimed - in an interview with Tom Brokaw - was that he'd be the one "making the phone call" to the president to shoot down any commercial airliner turned into a flying bomb by hijackers. That presumably comes as news to Donald Rumsfeld, who made no provision for any homeland security czar in the Air Force chain of command he publicly codified days after Mr. Ridge's appointment.

Since the administration tightly metes out the news from Afghanistan, we can only hope that the war there is being executed more effectively than the war here - even as Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals now tell us that the Taliban, once expected to implode in days, are proving Viet- Cong-like in their intractability. The Wall Street Journal also reported this week that "instead of a thankful Afghan population, popular support for the Taliban appears to be solidifying and anger with the U.S. growing."

Maybe we're losing that battle for Afghan hearts and minds in part because the Bush State Department appointee in charge of the propaganda effort is a C.E.O. (from Madison Avenue) chosen not for her expertise in policy or politics but for her salesmanship on behalf of domestic products like Head & Shoulders shampoo. If we can't effectively fight anthrax, I guess it's reassuring to know we can always win the war on dandruff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/opinion/27RICH.html?ex=1005301894&ei=1&en=5005559bdc4a8c0b

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

In quoting Churchill during this time, let us remember another time of crisis when he said: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." --Winston Churchill, 10 Nov. 1942 (Of the Battle of Egypt)

There is a sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.

Hermann Melville

(Tom Friedman's extensive experience in foreign affairs reporting includes many years in Beirut, Lebanon as The NY Times Mid-East correspondent.)

A month into the war in Afghanistan, the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last. Let's all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance. This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Check the map. It's far away.

I have no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war. I do worry, though, whether it has a public relations strategy for sustaining a long war. Over time, Arab and Muslim public opinion will matter. The silent majority in Pakistan, which for now is supporting President Pervez Musharraf's new-found alliance with the U.S. - something that is strategically critical for us - will be influenced by the broad trends in Arab-Muslim public opinion. So too will the next generation in the region. It is critical that generation see bin Laden as a rogue, not a role model. So how do we fight this P.R. war?

The most important way we win the public relations war is by first winning the real war - by uprooting the Taliban regime and the bin Laden network, and sending the message that this is the fate of anyone who kills 5,000 innocent Americans. Quite simply, if we win the war and are seen to be winning, we will have friends and allies in the Arab-Muslim world. If we are seen as losing the war or wavering, our allies will disappear in a flash.

Indeed, to read some of the commentaries in the Arab press is to understand that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein still have a great deal of popular support. It is no easy trick to lose a P.R. war to two mass murderers - but we've been doing just that lately. It is not enough for the White House just to label them "evildoers." We have to take the P.R. war right to them, just like the real one.

When the president or his spokesmen are asked about civilian casualties from our bombing in Afghanistan, they should answer: "Yes, for the 30th straight day Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer, has cloaked himself in a human blanket of Afghan civilians. Unfortunately, this has led to some civilian deaths." Or "Yes, for the fourth straight week Osama bin Laden, the man who sends other Muslims to their death but never risks his own life, is now sending Afghans to die for him."

Ditto with Saddam. Whenever U.S. officials speak about Saddam they should always say: "Saddam Hussein, the man who has killed more Muslims in the 20th century than any other human being . . ." (He's killed a million Iranians, Iraqi Kurds and Kuwaitis.) Or they should point out that Saddam and bin Laden are "the world's two biggest hijackers - they have each hijacked a country and are holding its civilians hostage, and we're trying to liberate them."

Besides playing better defense, we also need to play offense. Yes, it's time for the Bush administration to do more to get the poisonous Palestinian-Israeli conflict off TV. It doesn't have to solve it, but it should send a serious, high-level U.S. envoy to work on a real cease-fire or interim deal. Israelis and Palestinians on their own are not going to find a way out of this dead end. Negotiations won't end all the violence, but they might at least create a competing story line and dynamic.

But we can't play offense by ourselves. It is not enough for our allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait to issue one formal statement in support of the U.S. and then duck for cover. Not a single Arab-Muslim leader has yet answered bin Laden's taped message, which was heard all over the world. Our Arab-Muslim allies have to give their people a vision of why they are with us - not just secretly let us use their bases while their newspapers fuel anti-American rage.

Bin Laden told the Arabs that the Arab modernizing strategy had failed and all that was left was Islam - particularly his angry, retrograde version. Egypt, the leading Arab country, needs to take on that bin Laden message and insist that there is an Arab vision that can blend modernism with respect for Arab culture and tradition. And Saudi Arabia, the leading Muslim state, has to take on that bin Laden message and insist that there is a Muslim ideal that can blend faith, tolerance and modernity.

But to sell that vision they first have to have that vision.

Bottom line: We can't win the P.R. war with polite arguments, passive diplomacy or allies that are afraid to claim the future from a man who wants to bury it with the past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02FRIE.html?ex=1005712258&ei=1&en=2260b0bc379f88ee

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

LONDON -- "This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.

The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?

Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the talk about American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents?

Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn't very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Koranic analysts. For a vast number of "believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God - the fear more than the love, one suspects - but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of "their" women; the sermons delivered by their mullahs of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over - "Westoxicated" - by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief." These Islamists - we must get used to this word, "Islamists," meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral "Muslim" - include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists' project is turned not only against the West and "the Jews," but also against their fellow Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United States. Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room here to rehearse the geopolitics of the cold war and America's frequently damaging foreign policy "tilts," to use the Kissinger term, toward (or away from) this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved-of) nation-state, or America's role in the installation and deposition of sundry unsavory leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to ask a question that is no less important now: Suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America's fault, that we are to blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to solve them for ourselves?

Many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the Muslim world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist hijacking of their religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a k a Cat Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today's pussycats.

An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is in us, is from us." A British Muslim writes, "Islam has become its own enemy." A Lebanese friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that in the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, public criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world.

I'm reminded of the way noncommunist socialists used to distance themselves from the tyrannical socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless, the first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar. Many of them speak of another Islam, their personal, private faith.

The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

Salman Rushdie is the author, most recently, of "Fury: A Novel."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

News services are reporting that Osama bin Laden has been captured by U.S. Special Forces.

In a covert operation, the entire country of Afghanistan was sprayed with Viagra and the little prick just popped right up.

As Osama bin Laden calls for a jihad, and militants rally, where are the moderate Muslims?

LONDON - In the warm autumn sunshine, worshippers stream out of London Central Mosque, their Muslim duty of attending Friday noon prayers fulfilled.

They are greeted at the gates by young bearded men with megaphones, bellowing their rage at the way America is waging the war on terrorism.

The two images frame a battle for the soul of Islam that is taking on new urgency in the wake of Sept. 11.

Inside Britain's best-known mosque, a pillar of moderate respectability, the faithful have just heard Sheikh Saeed Radhwan give a calm, erudite discourse on the nature of worship in Islam.

Outside, the message is simple, direct, and aggressive: "Who is the terrorist? Bush is the terrorist!" shouts one protester, flanked by posters of Afghans killed or injured in recent bombing raids.

A few hours earlier, on the other side of the world, Irfan Shah had also attended noon prayers - in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. He had heard a more political sermon, urging Muslims to defend their brothers in Afghanistan against aggression.

"There has always been politics in the sermons," said Mr. Shah, a clean-shaven computer specialist dressed in Western clothes. "Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't agree. But in Islam we can all think what we like."

The Friday prayers in mosques from London to Cairo to Islamabad are one way to take the global pulse of Islam. What's clear from these, and from interviews with Islamic scholars and leaders, is that the level of tension within the one-billion-member Muslim community is growing. The drama and scale of the tragedy of Sept. 11 have inspired some moderate Muslim leaders to gird their loins for fresh combat with their extremist co-religionists.

Yet, it's also apparent that, for the moment, the voices of moderation are few - and often conflicted. They condemn the terrorist attacks on the US as a violation of Islam. But many have long been critics of US foreign policy, and the current military retaliation in Afghanistan - a Muslim nation - is a hard sell to their followers.

"The images of children being killed - they are drowning out the people who talk about what happened on Sept. 11," said Ahmed Khan as he left the London mosque Friday, like most others paying only passing attention to the protesters. "Even the moderates are growing more angry about what is happening in Afghanistan."

That view is widely echoed across the Islamic world, where an instinctive closing of Muslim ranks makes it hard for moderates to criticize other members of the faith, however wrongheaded and dangerous they think they are.

In Egypt, says Fahmi Howeidi, a columnist at the semi-official Al Ahram newspaper and a prominent spokesman for nonviolent Islamists in Cairo, "I'm afraid that people have mostly forgotten Sept. 11, and now they are talking about Oct. 7," the day when the United States and Britain began bombing Taliban targets in Afghanistan.

That was clear enough at Friday prayers in Cairo three weeks ago, just after the bombing began. From the pulpit at Al Azhar mosque - the most respected seat of Islamic learning in the world - Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi told his audience that "it is the right of the country that has been attacked to retaliate, but it shouldn't kill innocent people."

But as soon as he had finished his sermon, worshippers took the microphone to call for a holy war against America, which they accused of launching a war against their religion.

Despite the best efforts of US leaders from George Bush on down to deny that the war against terrorism is a war against Islam, Muslims everywhere are afraid that this is just what the campaign has become. Poor and powerless, most of them already resent America's sway over large parts of the world, and that resentment feeds a readiness to see Washington as the enemy when bombs start falling on fellow Muslims.

"People sympathized with Americans before, but now there is a feeling they are making the same mistake and killing innocent people," says Mr. Howeidi, the Egyptian columnist. "In certain circumstances you can convince people with moderate arguments, but under different circumstances they won't listen."

Moderate Islamic leaders all over the Middle East "are between a rock and a hard place right now," says John Esposito, who heads the Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "President Bush has given them a polar choice - they are with us or they are against us. Many of them are totally against what happened on Sept. 11, but they are not going to be thrilled if the war against terrorism is broadened to attacks on other countries," such as Iraq.

A one-page flyer, stacked in a pile on a shoe rack at the London mosque, made the same point. "Bin Laden and Bush have both called on the world to be 'either with us or against us' " read the anonymous protest, titled "Bombing and killing and assassination do not win hearts and minds."

"The free-thinking citizens of the world reject both these simplistic calls," it continued. "We condemn the loss of innocent lives, wherever it occurs. We appeal to our leaders to stop this mad war immediately and instead make a stand for diplomacy, justice, and the rule of law."

Even in Paris, where the mood is calmer than in many Middle Eastern capitals, the director of the Great Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, has judged it wiser to instruct his imams not to speak out too bluntly against the radicals just yet. "The train is still going at 120 miles an hour," he says. "We have to wait for things to cool down. For the time being, our sermons are calling on people to reflect and to be vigilant."

That is not a terribly dramatic or appealing message when set against the stirring calls for jihad that Dr. Boubakeur says "are ravaging our young people." The devil, he says, has all the best tunes.

And they are especially catchy among disaffected, frustrated and disillusioned people, who can be found by the tens of millions in poor and struggling Muslim countries. It is their despair that makes the radicals' interpretation of jihad so appealing, although orthodox Muslim scholars universally have repeated time and again in recent weeks that, properly understood, jihad is acceptable only as a defensive war against aggression.

But that hasn't stopped Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden from calling for Muslim support. The latest video-taped recording was broadcast Saturday by the al-Jazeera television channel. "It is fundamentally a question of a religious war ... the peoples of the East being Muslims, and those of the West being Christians," said renegade Saudi millionaire Mr. bin Laden. He called on Muslims to "defend their religion and their brothers in Afghanistan" against the "crusade" being led by the US.

In the West, the destruction of the World Trade Center has galvanized some Muslim leaders to raise their voices publicly against the vitriolic strain of Islam that bin Laden has espoused.

And yesterday, Amr Mussa, the head of the Arab League, resoundingly rejected bin Laden's call to join in a "religious" war against the Christian West. "Bin Laden does not speak in the name of the Arabs and Muslims," Mr. Mussa told journalists in Damascus.

"I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad [holy war] against extremism ... and to urge other religious leaders" to do the same, says Siraj Wahaj, the imam of the Tawqa mosque in Brooklyn, New York, and a prominent voice in American Islam.

"Up to now, people would speak frankly about Muslim governments or movements within the [American Muslim] community, yet were reluctant to criticize publicly," adds Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America. "But that's all changed."

Outside America and Europe, however, Muslim condemnations of the Sept. 11 events have often been muted or hedged.

In many Islamic countries, in fact, significant numbers of people refuse to accept that bin Laden, or any other Muslim, was responsible for the attacks, preferring to believe conspiracy theories blaming them on Israel or on other culprits.

Rare are the authoritative voices from mosque pulpits or TV studios prepared to confront Muslim audiences with the thought that "there are people in Islam who are ready to do this sort of thing, and this is where we have to start with our self-criticism," as Tariq Ramadan - a leading advocate of Islamic reform in Europe - puts it.

Mr. Ramadan, based in Geneva, argues in his books and lectures that Muslims must condemn the use of force, and embark on theological reforms to encourage a less literal reading of the Koran than fundamentalist Muslims advocate.

Only that kind of "Islamic Reformation," he says, can modernize his religion so that it embraces the scientific and social changes that have transformed the world since Islam's holy texts were written, but which extremists reject as haram, or forbidden.

In a religion that has no papacy or other central authority to lay down the law, Islamic scholars, writers, and imams in many Muslim countries have argued on and off for decades in favor of such changes, hoping they would open up their religion to broader influences.

But they have never succeeded in gathering much popular support. "The voices in favor of authentic pluralism are not nearly sufficient among Muslims," says Farid Esack, a South African Muslim theologian who was Nelson Mandela's minister for gender equality.

"Today I see a debate opening, but only among a few individuals," worries Malek Chebel, a Paris-based French-Algerian scholar whose own eclectic interests are evident from his crowded bookshelves, where a tome on Sufi mysticism sits between a biography of Jimi Hendrix and a book about war in cyberspace.

Dr. Chebel and others like him, who call themselves "moderates" or "modernizers" or "tolerant Muslims," complain that one of their problems is a lack of money and other resources.

Wealthy businessmen from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries - some of them members of ruling royal families - have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into charities that have built mosques and religious schools promoting Wahhabism, a particularly austere version of Islam, all over the world, from Bosnia to Malaysia, from the US to Chechnya.

It was Saudi money, too, that funded the religious schools in Pakistan where the Taliban movement was born.

"We don't have petrodollars to promote liberal Islam," laments Boubakeur, of the Grand Mosque in Paris. "It would help if they just cut off their support to the others," the radical Islamic ideologists, he adds.

Though the vast majority of ordinary Muslims everywhere are as constitutionally pre-disposed to moderation as anyone else, moderate-minded leaders are not anywhere near as active as their radical colleagues when it comes to organizing storefront mosques, setting up neighborhood clinics, or establishing simple schools.

"We express ourselves in books and in universities, but not on the street," acknowledges Chebel. "We have to reform our methods. If we are not heard, it is partly our own fault."

On the other side of the world, Ulil Abshar Abdallah, an official of Nahdlatul Ulamam, Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, agrees. "We've been terrible communicators," he says. While traditional Indonesian Muslim leaders were mulling over religious paradoxes and disputes about the lives of long-dead saints, "radical Muslims have been presenting a simple yet comprehensive ideology that can be grasped by common people."

Mr. Ulil and like-minded religious leaders - both Christian and Muslim - recently created the Indonesian Council on Religion and Peace to counter a tide of intolerance that was rising even before the US war on Afghanistan began. So far the council's work consists of brainstorming sessions in search of effective ways to get that message out. "It's not an easy battle we're fighting," he says.

Mehmet Aydin, a theology professor at the September 9th University in Istanbul in Turkey, says that while the radicals are often visible, "the other [moderate] voices do not have this history ... of rushing out into the street to express your anger, so perhaps they do not come out as strongly as we would like,"

In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia or other Gulf sheikhdoms, it is simply forbidden for anyone to take to the streets to protest the state religion. In others, like Egypt and Algeria, where armed Muslim radicals have battled government forces - and intellectual enemies - for years, many moderates are simply too scared of being killed to stand up and be counted.

That fear has spread far and wide. In Pakistan, says a young man who - tellingly - asked not to be named, "it used to be quite OK to publicly criticize a mullah. It was normal. But now I keep silent. The man sitting next to me - I don't know where he stands. And he could take my name to the [militant] brothers."

In Cairo, Said al-Ashmawi, a former judge who has spent the past 20 years speaking out against Islamists seeking to shape Egypt's political life according to Islamic precepts, has needed a police bodyguard for those 20 years. "People like me are intimidated," he says. "Who dares to put himself in such a critical situation?"

And in Algeria, where the Armed Islamic Group has been blamed for tens of thousands of killings, debate among different schools of Islam "practically stopped 10 years ago, when the violence broke out, because everyone was too frightened to publish," says Boubakeur of the Grand Mosque in Paris. "It is terrible, the inquisition that has gone on in Muslim countries."

In a broad, tasteful sitting room in a wealthy Islamabad neighborhood, Fakher Imam and his guests are fighting against religious extremism in a more genteel fashion, over cups of tea, .

The problem, they agree, is not the extremists' religion, or even their idea of holy war. It is that many of them are so poorly educated that they are not aware of the deeper concepts of the religion they claim to defend.

"In Islam there are two jihads," explains Ahmad Raza Qasuri, a lawyer with a booming voice who argues cases before Pakistan's Supreme Court. "Fighting against a known enemy, someone who's behind that hillock or that tree, is minor jihad. The major jihad is against the demons inside of you."

Only better and more modern religious education can spread that kind of teaching, say opponents of Islamic radicals.

"Give me the media," demands Dr. al-Ashmawi, the Egyptian judge. "Give me a weekly half-hour program on television, interview me in the newspapers. If enough of us are aired enough, we can make a wave of enlightenment."

Imam Esack, the former South African government minister, worries that the problem goes deeper than that. "We have a history of wanting to dodge radical questions," he says of his fellow Muslims, "so we tend to go for simplistic lines," such as the insistence that Islam is a religion of peace.

"The major problem Muslims have is not that there is a single power that has hegemony in the world," such as the US, "but that we are not that single power," Esack argues.

Soheib Bensheikh, the Grand Mufti of Marseille - a French Mediterranean port that is home to many North African Muslims - is also skeptical. "Our religious thinkers lack weight and rigor and daring," he complains. "The modernists have developed nothing in their body of thought to support their affirmations that Islam is a peaceful and fraternal religion."

In the Arab countries of the Middle East, where almost all the governments outlaw free speech, it is perhaps not unsurprising to find a lack of the sort of intellectual vigor that Dr. Bensheikh is looking for.

For example, in Egypt, where the government has clamped down on any signs of political Islam, whether violent or not, moderates have had a hard time developing or spreading their thought, complains Howeidi, the Egyptian columnist.

"Our governments are busy with one thing, fighting extremism," he says. "But they have done nothing to support a moderate way of thinking, and legal restrictions mean moderates can't set up parties or other organizations."

"We are fighting on two fronts," he adds. "Against the extremists, and against undemocratic political pressure from our governments."

It is that sort of difficulty, says Dr. Ramadan in Paris, that puts such a heavy responsibility on Muslims in Western countries, where they enjoy the political freedoms they need to open up a debate with their co-religionists elsewhere in the world.

"Over the last 10 years, in Europe and in America, we have developed a completely new understanding of the West, which is not hostile," he says. "If a clash of civilizations is going to be avoided, it is up to us in the West."

That's a view echoed by many American Muslims, who say they can play an important role in portraying America more positively, and more accurately, to their Muslim brothers and sisters abroad. But they say that a more sympathetic mood in America would help them do this.

They also insist that they will only be credible abroad if they express themselves honestly - and that generally means criticizing aspects of US foreign policy. But if they silence their criticisms to avoid charges of treachery from their neighbors, moderates say they will not be taken seriously in the Muslim world.

"Muslim-bashing and profiling are absolutely counterproductive because they force Muslims to put their heads down and deal with harassment," says Mohiaddin Mesbahi, an Iranian-American who teaches security studies at Florida International University. "Only if they feel confident and welcome as Americans can [American Muslims] become important ambassadors of Islamic thinking," he adds.

And there is a lot of Islamic thinking going on in America, trying to mesh traditional Islamic precepts and principles with the realities of today's world.

"American Muslims have shouldered the responsibility to try to formulate an Islamic jurisprudence suitable for the 21st century," says Azizah al-Hibri, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, who has helped draft Qatar's new laws on women's rights and the family. "And this is an era of democracy, free thought, and peaceful conflict resolution."

One result of this work: a 600-page volume of articles on Islamic law, published last month in the Journal of Law and Religion of the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minn., that is aimed at stirring debate throughout the Muslim world. One highlight of the volume: a detailed exploration of Islamic jurisprudence by a Syrian thinker who rejects the use of violence or coercion.

America, perhaps naturally, is one of the countries where Muslims have raised their voices most loudly to condemn those who perpetrated the attacks on Sept. 11.

Standing on the White House lawn with President Bush a few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, one of America's most prominent and influential Muslim scholars, Hamza Yusuf, spoke for all his fellow moderates when he lamented that "Islam was hijacked on that Sept. 11, 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim."

On the website Beliefnet.com , Ingrid Mattson, who teaches Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Conn., wrote recently that she had "not previously spoken about suicide attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam.... This was a gross oversight," she acknowledged.

"I should have asked myself, who has the greatest duty to stop violence committed by Muslims against innocent non-Muslims in the name of Islam?" she wrote. "The answer, obviously is Muslims."

? Reporting by staff writers Scott Baldauf and Robert Marquand in Islamabad, Pakistan, Ilene R. Prusher in Cairo, Jane Lampman in Boston, as well as special correspondents Dan Murphy in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Nicole Itano in Istanbul, Turkey.

Copyright © 2001 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

Scene One: In the White House Situation Room...(And so, in the horrific aftermath of the barbaric World Trade Center bombing, begins the greatest, most extensive manhunt in the history of the planet.)

PRESIDENT: (resolute, drumming fingers) I don't care what it takes. We've got to find this guy.

POWELL: Relax, Mr. President. We've got our best and brightest working on it. There's nowhere he can hide.

Scene Two: (And so, deep in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan...)

FIRST TERRORIST: (hand on bin Laden's knee) Relax, Osama. You have covered your tracks expertly. There is no way the infidels will find you.

BIN LADEN: (slapping the hand away) Yes, it is true. It is true... (Cell phone begins ringing)

FIRST TERRORIST: (surprised) What in the name of... (he answers it) Hello..? (hears a click, then voices, someone gets on the line) What...? Who....? (astonished, hands phone to Bin Laden) It is for you, Great One.

BIN LADEN: (confused) Hello...?

VOICE ON PHONE: Osama, how are you today, sir?

BIN LADEN: (angrily) Who in the name of the Evil One is this?

VOICE ON PHONE: (smoothly) Sir, I represent Sandusky Home Improvement, Inc. Mr. Bin Laden, wouldn't you agree that your bunker would look better and last longer in clean, durable, carefree aluminum siding?

BIN LADEN: Aaaarrgghh! Go away!! (He slams the phone down) (Cell phone rings again)

FIRST TERRORIST: (fearful) Do not answer it, Great One.

BIN LADEN: (grabs the phone angrily) Hello?!!

VOICE ON PHONE: Mr. Bin Laden?

BIN LADEN: (furious) Who in the name of Satan is this?

VOICE ON PHONE: Good evening, Sir. This is Bambi for Quest, formerly US West. We're contacting our best customers to tell them about our new, economical package of communications services, including call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, telemarketing protection...

BIN LADEN: (He slams phone on the ground.) Spawn of a thousand demon camels!

(A second terrorist walks in, shuffling through a pile of letters)

SECOND TERRORIST: (amazed) Look, Great One. Hundreds of VISA card solicitations, many with extensive credit lines and low, low introductory rates!

BIN LADEN: (astonished) Who on earth has delivered these?

SECOND TERRORIST: A man in blue shorts and a white shirt... driving a small red, white and blue truck.

FIRST TERRORIST: (horrified) Ayeeeeeeee!

BIN LADEN: The U.S. Postal Service?? We must HIDE!!!!!!! (They flee)

Scene Three: (Meanwhile, back in the White House Situation Room...)

PRESIDENT: How's our "budget friendly" phase of "Enduring Freedom" going?

POWELL: Everything's proceeding according to plan. The telephone solicitors have his number and are in the process of bugging him to death.

PRESIDENT: What shall we sign him up for next?

POWELL: We've just sent $10.00 donations in to the Sierra Club and Habitat for Humanity. Next we're going to sic Publisher's Clearing House on him,and then sign him up for a subscription to Watchtower.

PRESIDENT: (slapping his thigh) Good! Good! Before long, he'll be begging for mercy....now, where did I put the "add your friends" number for Miss Cleo's Psychic Line?

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