MARSHALL PLAN II:

Given the awfulness of post-World War II Arab lands, where even the most benign regimes had sophisticated, torture-happy security services, Islamists who braved the wrath of rulers and trenchantly critiqued the moral breakdown of their societies were going to do well in a postsecular age. What is poorly understood in the West is how critical fundamentalists are to the moral and political rejuvenation of their countries. As counterintuitive as it seems, they are the key to more democratic, liberal politics in the region.

The case for a separation of mosque and state has been harder to make in the Middle East because most Muslims have not been burned by internecine strife. The West has become an unrivaled liberal paragon in part because its past savagery was so intense. Westerners now instinctively compartmentalize their faith and temper its expression because their Christian forefathers killed each other zealously over religious differences.

Islam hasn't seen the sustained barbarism that plagued European Christian and post-Christian--communist and fascist--societies. Reform-minded Muslims have usually critiqued their faith with an eye to the West, to the secrets of European power, without appreciating both the highs and lows of Occidental history.

A hundred years ago, the most consequential Muslim intellectuals were mostly progressive men who tried to work out a synthesis between the West and Islam. The Middle East's post-World War II rulers, however, merely dictated that the Muslim clergy and the faithful change their ways. Against the seductive power of nationalism, socialism and communism, which in the hands of military men ran roughshod over much of the Middle East, Islam stood as a barrier to "progress."

As the imported Western ideologies ended in tyranny, Islam became a haven, a repository of virtue and memories, both real and imagined, of better times, when rulers and the ruled abided by the same religious law. The all-purpose fundamentalist cry, "Islam is the answer," is as much a critique of what had been tried and failed as it is a tendentious reading of history.

Among Shiite Muslims, the mullahs became poles of resistance. Among Sunni Muslims, whose clerics have been closely allied to the state, devout laymen took the lead in opposition. What ought to be obvious now is that Muslims cannot be dragged dictatorially to an embrace of secularism and all the liberal values that spring from it. They have to arrive voluntarily, organically, at this understanding.

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