THE TWAIN ALWAYS MEET:

Islam's reformers: One year after the 7/7 attacks in London, a challenge to the traditionalist, literal reading of the Koran is gathering strength. A younger generation of Muslims is seeking a less insular and more western faith (Ehsan Masood, July 2006, The Prospect)

It is a scene I won't forget in a hurry: Jean-Marie Lehn, French winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, defending his atheism at a packed public conference at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt. In much of the Muslim world, talking about atheism in public is dangerous.

But the Alexandria Library is run by Ismail Serageldin, a Muslim intellectual who has a bold and ambitious project for Egypt. This is to create a place for dissent in public life. He wants to encourage people to grow thicker skins, help them appreciate that if Muslim societies want to return to the forefront of global intellectual life, they need to be comfortable with public dispute. The library is one place where open debate can take place—although this is partly because it is protected by having as its chair Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak.

Serageldin is not alone. In my travels across the Muslim world, I am finding that what he (and others) are trying to do in Egypt is also happening elsewhere. It is happening in places where you would expect it, such as multicultural Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as places where you wouldn't, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is happening at the level of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (a mini-UN of 57 countries with mainly Muslim populations), which has embarked on a ten-year reform plan to try to turn Muslim states into beacons of human rights and free speech. It is also happening on our doorstep, among Muslim minorities in the west.

In Britain and the US, we have seen the emergence of a number of Islamic "rationalists" who are building a case for Muslim societies to change from within, and for Muslim minorities in western countries to change how they think of themselves in relation to wider society. They include the British-Pakistani writer and thinker Ziauddin Sardar, the philosophers Tariq Ramadan (Swiss-Egyptian) and AbdolKarim Soroush (Iranian). From the US, change is being advocated by the evangelist Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who regards himself as more traditionalist than reformer.

Each has a different vision and a different way of working. But they all want Muslim societies—and minorities—that are vibrant, just, humane, at peace with themselves and with modernity. They also agree that elements of the practice of Islam can be of benefit to the modern west: the importance of family networks; a strong framework for morals; social responsibility. It is significant that each of these scholar-activists is either based in a western country, or has spent substantial time in western research establishments. They did not emerge from within the Islamic world, but the influence of at least two of them now extends deep into it. Sardar is influential in Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa; and Soroush's ideas are so popular in Iran that he is banned from appearing in the media. Ramadan, meanwhile, is listened to by the British government and Hanson has in the past advised President Bush.

So what needs to change? One area on which all are agreed is the need to break with the traditional literal interpretation of the Koran. The majority of Muslims are taught to believe that the Koran is the uncreated word of God as delivered to Muhammad—that human agency did not interfere with the process from revelation to transcription. Islam is also regarded by most believers as fixed and unchanging—unlike Christianity, whose example of change in the centuries since the death of Jesus Christ is one reason why Islam is seen by some Muslims as the last true faith. Indeed, in most schools, Islam's "easternness" and resistance to western modernisation is seen as one of its enduring strengths.