Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is in many ways the epitome of an integrated American Muslim. He has lived in the United States since the 1960s, moving there as a teenager with his father, and is a graduate of Columbia University. For more than 25 years he has been leading prayers at a mosque based in a store in Lower Manhattan. But reactions to his plans to expand his work with the building of an Islamic cultural centre in New York, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, must have made him wonder about the country of which he has been a part for so long.

It has unleashed a storm of protests, fuelled by emotions about 9/11; developed into a row over freedom of religion; and become a tale of contemporary America, where PR, celebrity politicians, shock-jock radio and ignorance about the wider world all play their part. So huge is the row over Rauf's Islamic centre that even President Barack Obama weighed in last week, and it could become a key issue in the mid-term US elections in November.

Rauf, who now holds three Friday prayer sessions each week to accommodate all the faithful at his existing mosque in New York, is one of America's leading thinkers on Sufism, the mystical, pluralistic and moderate arm of Islam. For several years he and his wife, Daisy Khan, had been keen to set up a community-centre-cum-prayer room in New York along the lines of the YMCA. Indeed, they took as their template the 92nd Street "Y", a Jewish adaptation of the YMCA concept that is a leading New York centre for people of all religions or none to visit for lectures, debate and educational courses.

When Imam Rauf found his site and developed his ambitious proposal for a 13-storey building with a large prayer room, auditorium, meeting rooms, a swimming pool and a food court, he and his supporters sought backing from some Jewish and Christian groups. For them, the centre would be a symbol of a moderate Islam opposed to the hijacking of the faith by extremists and open to the non-Muslim community.

But a combination of naivety and events combined to turn their proposal into an explosive plan. While certain religious groups, willing to engage in dialogue, supported them, other New Yorkers still raw from 9/11 were outraged when they discovered that the ground bought for it is only two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center destroyed by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001.

But not only has that fact not gotten through to many Americans, the percentage of adults who believe he is a Muslim has now risen sharply after holding steady for two years, according to a new Pew poll out today. For my money, though, the real headline--and the news that should be causing heartburn over at the White House right now--is that the percentage of Americans who can correctly identify Obama's religious faith as Christian has dropped by 14 points in the past year and a half. A plurality of Americans (43%) have no idea what religion he practices.

I'm going to repeat that because this is very unusual: a year and half after Obama moved into the White House, Americans are far less certain about who he is than they were during the campaign. That isn't a good trend line for any political figure, but especially not the president. It may be appealing for an offbeat Hollywood actor or a reclusive writer to be seen as an enigma. But politics is a personal arena--voters like to feel that they can relate to a president or at the very least understand who he is. More dangerous for Obama is the fact that if a politician doesn't define himself, his enemies are more than happy to do it for him. The Pew poll is evidence that the endless conservative media cycle of misinformation about Obama is working: of those respondents who identified Obama's faith as Islam, 60% said they learned the "fact" from the media. (Note that the poll was conducted before Obama waded into the so-called Ground Zero mosque controversy.)

Barely one-third (34%) of Americans can correctly identify Obama as a Christian, compared to more than half (51%) who could do so during the 2008 campaign. But that huge drop isn't driven primarily by Fox News true believers. (Let me pause for a moment here to say that it is of course not a smear to call someone a Muslim. It is, however, obnoxious to say someone is a member of a religious faith when he's not--and to insist that he is not a member of the tradition he does claim. It would also be foolish and naive to pretend that conservatives who call Obama a Muslim are doing it in a neutral way and that their intention is not to raise questions about his "otherness.")

Consider this: Less than half of Democrats (41%) know Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009. Barely four-in-ten African-Americans say he's a Christian, down from 56% last year. The percentage of moderate and liberal Republicans who say Obama is a Christian has dropped by 27 points, but it's not because they're all now convinced he's a Muslim. Instead, the percentage who just don't know his religion has risen 19 points. "What the numbers say," says Alan Cooperman of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "is that there's a lot of uncertainty and confusion about the president's religion."

We live in a plural age. But do we have an adequate philosophy for living together in our diversity? Tariq Ramadan, in his new book, The Quest for Meaning, thinks not.

We have roughly three options. First, is the pluralist philosophy that underpins what might be called "forbearing empires". The dominant power says, accept our rule, and in return, you will gain our peace – and a relative freedom to maintain your way of life. It's the pluralism of the ancient pax Romana, or the Muslim empires of the medieval period, or perhaps the British Raj. But it's a colonial philosophy too, and so not much championed today.

Second, is the pluralist philosophy that underpins the secular settlement. The watchword here is toleration, and the key policy is to separate civil government from the practice of religion – government being concerned with a citizen's welfare in this life, religion in the next. But this philosophy runs into the paradox of toleration, namely who should not be tolerated. For example, John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, infamously argued that Roman Catholics and atheists could not be endured.

Further, if you seek a thriving democracy, merely to tolerate others is too passive a political philosophy. And it's patronising, because diverse groups in an equal society want to be respected, an altogether different proposal. As Ramadan remarked during a talk on his book, "I don't want a peaceful coexistence. I want a living together that is constructive and active."

This leads to the third possibility, the one he champions. It's a pluralism prepared to recognise that the individual gains from engaging with the diversity that surrounds them. It's not syncretistic, as if the goal were a perennial philosophy – truths distilled from what is agreed in common. Such a project tends to evacuate religions and philosophies of their particularity and, in turn, nurtures human individuals drained of their colour. Rather, this form of pluralism recognises that what we have in common is not the answers, though there will be overlap, but the need to ask the questions. As Immanuel Kant expressed them: what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope?

Two things this week have made the hellishness of military violence painfully clear. The first, WikiLeaks' Afghanistan war logs, describes in detail the horror of civilian casualties and "friendly fire" incidents. The second, from the same theatre, is Sean Smith's chilling video of American marines in southern Helmand. Faced with these portraits of war, empathy for the people caught up in it has been unavoidable.

But empathy alone is not enough. If you're not a pacifist, you accept that war is vile, but at times an inevitable part of life on Earth. The question is when and how it can be morally justified. Hence the importance of the just war tradition. Thinkers like the theologian Thomas Aquinas sought a way of containing war, by thinking through the desperate feelings that combat does and should evoke. The aim is to keep a steady view on the demands of natural justice, even when the fog of war threatens to blur everything.

The war logs in particular afford us a steady view on this current conflict, and what's as unsettling as the tragedy they reveal is the possibility that we lost sight of those demands, at least on occasion. The crucial issue is whether that's happened. An answer can be found by thinking about the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello – the justification for the war itself, and the principles that should operate during the conduct of war. Both matter.

Let's assume the war in Afghanistan is justified, and focus on the jus in bello. One of Aquinas's major contributions was the notion of proportionality: how to assess the bad consequences of otherwise well-intended military action. Michael Walzer, a leading modern just war theorist, notes that simply not to intend the death of civilians is not enough. That's "too easy". Instead, there must be a positive commitment to saving civilian lives, rather than just killing no more than is militarily necessary. "Civilians have a right to something more," he concludes. "And if saving civilian lives means risking soldiers' lives, the risk must be accepted."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf decided to build a Muslim cultural centre in lower Manhattan, the model he chose couldn't have been more mainstream American -- the Young Men's Christian Association chapters found in cities across the United States.

The institution he had in mind was the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish adaptation of the YMCA concept that is one of New York's leading addresses for residents of all religions or none to visit for public lectures, debates, concerts or educational courses.

But Rauf's project is better known here now as the "Ground Zero mosque," after the term for the World Trade Centre site. Families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and conservative politicians have mounted an emotional campaign to block it, claiming that locating it only two blocks north of the site was a provocation.

"We repeatedly say we are neither a mosque nor within Ground Zero, but they just shout back 'Ground Zero mosque,' 'Ground Zero mosque,'" Rauf, 61, told Reuters in an interview. The planned building will have a prayer room for Muslims, he said, but it would only be a small part of the 13-story complex.

Rauf said the YMCA, which began in London in 1844 as Christian centre for young working men and quickly spread to the United States and other countries, had long worked to promote understanding across religious, ethnic and social dividing lines in modern societies. Now called simply "the Y," its facilities across the United States offer exercise classes, education and community activities.

"We are trying to establish something that follows the YMCA concept but is not a church or a synagogue or, in this case, a mosque," he said by telephone from Kuala Lumpur, where he is visiting. "We are taking that concept and adapting it to our time and the fact that we're Muslims. It's basically a Muslim Y."

SUPPORTED AND SLAMMED

The plan won overwhelming support at two community board meetings in May after they heard the $100 million complex would include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, meeting rooms, art exhibition spaces, bookstore and a food court featuring dishes from around the Muslim world.

But critics promptly branded the prayer space a mosque, as if the building would feature domes and minarets rather than the sleek modern lines its architects have designed for it.

Well over 100 academics and individuals from think tanks gathered at the British Library to discuss how faith fits with government policy in the UK today. What they found was change, contradiction, and even chaos. Faith communities almost disappeared from public view during the 1990s, and yet now they're rarely out of the headlines. You might put the re-emergence down to any number of things – 9/11 and 7/7; the self-styled champions of science and secularism; a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God. But whilst no-one doubts that religion and politics is a subject with a future once more, few in the field have much idea about what that future will hold.

If anything, we must learn to live with contradictions, as events steal headlines and pressure groups wage cultural war. This is a world in which, say, Christian nurses are prosecuted for wearing crosses, even as NHS employees worry about a lack of spiritual care. It's one in which establishment bishops complain of persecution, even as the "big society" agenda, in new government departments, is supplied with ministers and advisers who have explicitly Christian agendas.

Alternatively, ours is a country in which Muslims are told that their religion is good when private and bad when political, at the same time as government Prevent programmes infiltrate Muslim communities, drawing Islam into the public sphere whether they like it or not. Or again, we must get used to situations in which issues that are relatively small in terms of the numbers of people they affect, carry totemic significance – such as when Catholic adoption agencies are forced in principle to place children with the tiny handful of gay couples who come to them for help.

And when the Pope pays a visit, one thing's for sure. It won't be Northern Irish protestants complaining most vocally, as it was in the 1980s. That's a sign of how dramatically the world has changed.

A number of speakers had warnings for faith communities themselves, particularly when tempted by funding to cooperate with government in the delivery of services. Beware that you don't demoralise your volunteers with the weight of bureaucracy that will descend when you're "mainstreamed", advised Margaret Harris of Aston university. Beware when you're asked to deal with social problems that government feels it can't touch, like poor parenting, said Luke Bretherton of King's College, London.

The French National Assembly begins debating a complete ban on Muslim full face veils in public next week and could outlaw them by the autumn. Belgium’s lower house of parliament has passed a draft ban and could banish them from its streets in the coming months if its Senate agrees. The Spanish Senate has passed a motion to ban them after a few towns introduced their own prohibitions.

Calls to ban “burqas” — the word most widely in Europe used for full veils, even if most full veils seen are niqabs — have also been heard in the Netherlands and Denmark. According to a Financial Times poll, the ban proposal also “wins enthusiastic backing in the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany”.

Only a tiny minority of Muslim women in these countries actually cover their faces, but that doesn’t seem to matter. That Switzerland has only four minarets didn’t stop Swiss voters from banning them in a referendum last November (and maybe banning veils next). There seems to be a movement to ban religious symbols that Europeans either reject or fear.

Is this the best way for Europe to deal with the veil? Should governments just introduce ever tougher policies and Muslims counter with increasing opposition? Is there another approach that could offer a more harmonious outcome?

Cardinal Angelo Scola, the Roman Catholic Patriarch of Venice, thinks there is. His beautiful city of canals and gondolas might not be the first one would think of when discussing Muslim integration in Europe, but his Oasis Foundation there has been working with Christians and Muslims in the Middle East since 2004. His extensive contacts in the region have led to some ideas he thinks could be relevant for Europe.

Against the backdrop of leafy quadrangles, to the sounds of British birdsong in a rainy English Spring, I have been thinking about religion, belief and morality. Over the past two weeks here in Cambridge, I have enjoyed the company of some of the most animated minds focusing on the nexus of science and religion today. Along with nine others, I am part of the 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship, a program conceived by the late Sir John Templeton to help journalists engage in public discourse on the most challenging interfaces of our time while fostering inter-faith dialogue.

One of the most dazzling speakers to address us was Professor Noah Efron of Bar Ilan University who flew in from Tel Aviv to speak to us about Science and Judaism. In a pivotal moment, he made a critically important observation, one that stayed with me long after his electrifying talk had ended.

Later that week, at the end of long days of class, as I watched the reports of the Flotilla approaching Gaza, I remembered his astute observation about the tropism, the intense and heated near-animosity often found at the interface between science and religion, an energy by which one often defines the other. The intensity of attachment to either pole is surprisingly powerful and, as so often is the case, the dialogue which results, isn't (as Professor Efron teaches) really 'dialogue' , rather it is the noise made when two crashing conflicts meet. Professor Efron showed how such dynamics are rarely truly about ideas in their pure form, but rather about tangled emotions we tie up in the process. This got me thinking. The same qualities of an innate, reflexive and Pavlovian tropism exist between much of the Muslim experience and any manifestation of Judaism, most acutely the rift between 'the Muslim' and 'the Israeli'. This 'tropism' has been classically exhibited in the events surrounding the recent and intensely upsetting Flotilla incidents. Much of the news coverage here in Britain has focused on the reality that Gaza has indeed remained under naval blockade and effectively under siege, deprived of many critical resources which would otherwise facilitate its rebuilding. Indeed while Israel permits the entry of significant amounts of aid, food, medicines, the details remain unclear in countless press reports, a deliberate oversight, in my opinion.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Harun Yahya is one of the most widely distributed authors in the Muslim world. He may also be among the most widely criticized Muslim authors in the Western world.

His glossy books and DVDs on religion and science sell in Islamic bookshops around the globe. He gives away thousands of expensive volumes and lets readers download much of his work from his websites for free.

The Council of Europe accuses him of trying to infiltrate schools with religious extremism and French teachers are told to keep his work from their students.

Unknown outside Muslim circles two years ago, Adnan Oktar -- the 52-year-old Turk behind the pseudonym Harun Yahya -- caught the attention of scientists and teachers in Europe and North America by mass-mailing them his 768-page "Atlas of Creation".

His lavishly illustrated book preaches a Muslim version of creationism, the view scientists usually hear from Christian fundamentalists who say God created all life on earth just as it is today and oppose the teaching of Darwin's evolution theory.

"Every academic I know says they've got one of those," retired University of Edinburgh natural history professor Aubrey Manning told the Glasgow Herald when "The Atlas" turned up in Scotland early this year. "And it's peddling an absolute, downright lie."

But Oktar, whose reclusive ways and opaque business have prompted many rumors about why and how he gives away so many books, brushed off all criticism in a rare interview with Reuters.

"This huge impact shows the influence of the book," the author, stylishly turned out in a white suit, red tie and clipped beard, said through an interpreter.

PR STRATEGY

The controversy stirred up by "The Atlas" has turned the spotlight on a publishing empire that boasts about 260 books in 52 languages, over 80 DVDs and dozens of websites.

Well-illustrated and free of theological jargon, they preach that Islam is the one true faith and Darwinism, by undermining religious belief, has led to the discord, atheism, terrorism and extreme political ideologies plaguing the world.

Like attacking the Catholic Church during its heyday of killing heretics and infidels, criticizing Islamism today is not for those who jump at the sound of bubble wrap cracking.

Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Defending the West, operates under a pseudonym, a wise move considering that goons called for his murder on a British Muslim Web site in 2008. Bassam Tibi, a Muslim liberal who deems Islamism totalitarian, needed 24-hour police protection in Germany for two years. Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian journalist of similar bent (who further outraged some Muslim peers by converting to Catholicism) travels at times with multiple bodyguards, an entourage also necessary for the Somali-Dutch author Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel, Nomad), who fled to the United States when the Dutch scotched (so to speak) her protection.

The list of critics of Islamism who've paid a high price in loss of personal freedom goes on: Italian journalist Fiamma Nirenstein, French critic and gay-rights activist Caroline Fourest, French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, and the most famous example of all, the novelist Salman Rushdie, forced into underground life for years after the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded his murder.

The examples come courtesy of Paul Berman, the shrewd, engagé New York intellectual and former MacArthur Foundation fellow who has become, after the death of Susan Sontag, our paramount lifeline to the trenches of French intellectual battle. Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003), among other important books, doesn't mention whether he's got his own beefy contingent laying low. But his provocative new The Flight of the Intellectuals (Melville House)—a tough-minded examination of Muslim reformist thinker Tariq Ramadan, at various times dubbed the "best-known Muslim in all of Europe," a "Muslim Martin Luther," and "the prophet of a new Euro-Islam"—gets high marks for bravery at the same time that it highlights another modern truth all public intellectuals should acknowledge.

If it's dangerous to zap Islamism these days, it's not easy being a Muslim reformist thinker, either.

The past week has seen a flurry of controversy centered on the speculated implied depiction of at least one Messenger of God as a cartoon disguised in a bear suit. Dissertations on the issues of formal and informal fatwas have followed in serious newspapers and on animated literary sites. It strikes me, in an age of illusion, cartoons evoke more impassioned responses than real world atrocities. We are desensitized to the presence of violence. As self described ex-Muslims debate the freedom of speech, as network executives evaluate the potential seditious capacities of Comedy Central and, as the irrevocable death of common sense, as Mr. Wajahat Ali so aptly captured it, comes to pass, I am reminded of a recent invitation...

Stirring from his siesta, the somnolent guard waved me into the building, declining my signature in the book. I took an empty elevator up. Hurrying back from a glittering party in Glen Head, I was already quite late. Normally punctual, I noted my own ambivalence, for the date had been in place for some weeks now.

Hesitant, I walked along a desolate hallway. Fluorescent lights failed to scatter the Sunday afternoon desertion. Under carefully applied lipstick, I suddenly noticed my dry mouth. For a moment, I was seized with a unexpected urge to turn around and run, unsure exactly what or whom I wished to flee.

As I approached the room, I thought about the chain of events which had led me to this strange moment, wondering how the next hours would transform me. It was 5-30 pm on a recent weekend - time to view a decapitation.

An Indonesian Muslim uses magnifying glass to read Koran verses printed on lamb parchment, Jakarta, July 27, 2005/Beawiharta

Prominent Muslim scholars have recast a famous medieval fatwa on jihad, arguing the religious edict radical Islamists often cite to justify killing cannot be used in a globalized world that respects faith and civil rights. A conference in Mardin in southeastern Turkey declared the fatwa by 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya rules out militant violence and the medieval Muslim division of the world into a “house of Islam” and “house of unbelief” no longer applies.

Osama bin Laden has quoted Ibn Taymiyya’s “Mardin fatwa” repeatedly in his calls for Muslims to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and wage jihad against the United States.

Referring to that historic document, the weekend conference said: “Anyone who seeks support from this fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation. “It is not for a Muslim individual or a Muslim group to announce and declare war or engage in combative jihad … on their own,” said the declaration.

The declaration is the latest bid by mainstream scholars to use age-old Muslim texts to refute current-day religious arguments by Islamist groups. A leading Pakistani scholar issued a 600-page fatwa against terrorism in London early this month. Another declaration in Dubai this month challenged the religious justification for violence used by Islamist rebels in Somalia and calling for peace and reconciliation there ( more on that here).

Fatwas may not convince militants, but they can help keep undecided Muslims from supporting them, the scholars say. Because Islam has no central authority to define the faith in all its details, militants who hijack it by twisting texts for their own purposes need to be confronted by moderates who cite chapter and verse to refute them.

Hissa Hillal is the voice for countless 'Invisible Women." She is the Saudi woman who has captured the Arab world's attention through her poetry on Abu Dhabi's televised poetry competition broadcast by Emirati. Watched by millions, analogies to American Idol readily follow. Her poetry focuses on the abuse of Islam as it is wielded by extremist clerics. Her public challenge to established theocracy has garnered breathtaking attention in the region where women like Hissa, Saudi Arabian stay-at-home moms, are usually neither seen nor heard.

There is however a far more arresting aspect to Hissa's accomplishment. By thrusting her powerful verses into orbit through satellite television, she has thrown dawn a gauntlet in a way that newspapers, bloggers or network media segments cannot begin to compete. Her public poetry contains the latent power that will ignite a new dimension of dialogue in the Arab and wider Muslim world, a power derived of an ancient cultural currency.

Poetry, which speaks to the Arabian Peninsula's heritage of oral poetry as a means of cultural dialogue, invites much more attention than news commentary or opinion editorials. Traditionally, the true forebears of the modern day Saudi Arabia recorded their history and tradition through the medium of poetry, largely unwritten, but instead committed to memory and recited with elaborate, ceremonial oratory. This was the medium through which they preserved feats of arms and celebrated events in their history. Similar oral poetic history is also evident elsewhere in the Middle East including Israel, where fears for the preservation of this fading culture are growing.

Considering the geographic environment and the sparse population comprising pre-Twentieth Century Arabia, preserving cultural memory through transmitted and treasured poetry makes perfect sense. Ornate poetry traveled across the sandstorm-swept nascent Saudi steppe, immortalizing cultural yearnings, history and opinion in a pulsing ebb and flow across barely inhabited land. Vital to the survival of this art across generations, over desiccated Wadis and desolate escarpments was the role of the poet: his dedication, his imagination and his willingness to dialogue with other poets.

As the hijackers boarded the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, they had a lot on their minds. And if they were following instructions, one of those things was the Quran.

In preparation for the suicide attack, their handlers had told them to meditate on two chapters of the Quran in which God tells Muslims to "cast terror into the hearts of unbelievers."

"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them," Allah instructs the Prophet Muhammad (Quran, 9:5). He continues: "Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites! ... Hell shall be their home, an evil fate."

When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran's command to "strike off" the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or "holy war," and the Quran's exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year. Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

Defense Vs. Total Annihilation

"Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible," Jenkins says. Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

"By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane," he says. "Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide."

Over the past decade—as we know too well—the Internet has revolutionized journalism by allowing almost anyone to set up his own virtual news outlet from the comfort of his home-based laptop. But as Daniele Mastrogiacomo reminds us in "Days of Fear," there are still stories that require a willingness to brave fraught circumstances and, at times, to endure unimaginable hardship.

Mr. Mastrogiacomo, a veteran correspondent for the Rome daily La Repubblica, traveled to Afghanistan in 2007 for a promised interview with a Taliban military commander. He ended up spending two weeks in captivity, enduring repeated floggings, witnessing the decapitation of his Afghan driver and more than once coming close to being murdered himself.

Of course this ordeal— shorter yet evidently no less harrowing than the Taliban's later kidnapping of the New York Times's David Rohde— gave Mr. Mastrogiacomo deeper access to his subject than he had ever expected. As Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander, told him sardonically when they finally did meet: "You have obtained much more than an interview. You have seen how we live and how we think." The value of "Days of Fear," beyond its tense narrative, is precisely this close look at a far-off tribal society.

As he is taken to a series of squalid hiding places near the Pakistan border, Mr. Mastrogiacomo finds his captors eager to talk about the West, which they see as depraved, selfish and hopelessly anarchic. "Where you're from, the rules are unclear," one tells him. "That's why you are surrounded by murderers, thieves, betrayers." Mr. Mastrogiacomo argues with them, to no avail, in favor of sexual freedom and secular justice. Unable to join in a game of soccer because of his shackles, he ends up in the role of referee. The abductors "follow my instructions and abide by every one of my calls."

PARIS (Reuters) - France's National Assembly should pass a resolution denouncing full Muslim face veils and then vote the strictest law possible to ban women from wearing them, a parliamentary commission proposed on Tuesday.

Presenting conclusions after six months of hearings, the panel also suggested barring foreign women from obtaining French visas or citizenship if they insisted on veiling their faces.

But it could not agree whether to opt for an absolute ban on the veils, called burqas or niqabs, or one restricted to public buildings because some members thought a total ban would be unconstitutional.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who last year declared full veils unwelcome in France, said on a visit to a cemetery for Muslim soldiers that he would not allow Muslims to be stigmatized by any measures taken to ensure equality between men and women.

"The full veil represents in an extraordinary way everything that France spontaneously rejects," National Assembly President Bernard Accoyer said as the commission delivered its report.

"It's a symbol of the subjugation of women and the banner of extremist fundamentalism."

While not defending the all-enclosing veils, leaders of the five-million-strong Muslim minority say a legal ban would be excessive since only 1,900 women are said to wear them.

Jamel Debbouze, a highly popular Parisian-born comedian of Moroccan background, condemned the plan as xenophobic. "People who go down that path are racists," he told French radio.

The veil issue has become linked with another controversial debate about national identity that the government launched only months before regional elections in March. "This debate is sterile and dangerous electioneering," Debbouze said.

Supporters of a ban say civil servants need a law to allow them to turn away fully veiled women who cannot be identified when they seek municipal services such as medical care, child support or public transport.

Being an English-speaking religion editor in Paris these days means being invited to try to explain the story to foreign audiences. Here are videos from BBC World Television today, after a parliamentary report on face veils was issued, and from a France24 television debate broadcast last Thursday but only just posted on its website yesterday. Apart from explaining my analysis of the issue, both show why I didn’t go into television!

Two years after the twin towers fell, a small and disparate movement began that wanted to show the English-speaking world that "Muslim" does not automatically mean terrorist.

I was among those who wanted to balance the relentless images of news footage on our TV screens in which men, women and children from Islamic communities are regularly portrayed next to shots of war, violence and terrorism. Some Muslims are in prison for plotting to blow up airliners, and more will follow them. But many more will never see the inside of a police cell and, like all communities, they live both ordinary and extraordinary lives.

Recent initiatives from the arts and sciences have attempted to document some of those lives. The Festival of Muslim Cultures, a year-long extravaganza of events across the UK, was aimed at showing how creative innovation is central to the British Islamic landscape. In 2006 the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester opened its doors to 1001 Inventions, an exhibition showcasing leading-edge scientific discoveries from the Middle Ages. This exhibition has since toured the world and will open at the Science Museum in London next week. The BBC created a landmark TV and radio series called Science and Islam, written and presented by Professor Jim Al-Khalili

When a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees operating from a secret base in Afghanistan, the news gave Americans a rare look into the spy agency's expanded role on the front lines against al-Qaida and its allies. It also prompted fresh debate over the military use of an agency that operates in shadows and secrecy.

Afsheen John Radsan was assistant general counsel for the CIA during the tense years after Sept. 11, 2001. Now he directs the National Security Forum at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. He took time to talk to MinnPost about the aftermath of the Dec. 30 bombing in Afghanistan.

MP: Is this expanded use of the CIA sustainable? In other words, can that agency ramp up to face new terrorist fronts as they emerge in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere?

AJR: The CIA's role is crucial in countering terrorist groups, in going after al-Qaida. We would not be able to do this without a strong and effective CIA. . . . I agree that the CIA can't do everything. And it can't be everywhere. But what other agency would be able to carry out these functions?

This is not the first time that we've ramped up the CIA's activities during a war. During the Vietnam War, we had many CIA officers in Indochina.

MP: Maybe a better question is whether it should ramp up. The incident triggered fresh debate about empowering the CIA to play a larger role in military operations.

AJR: More and more, some people will say that what the CIA is doing in Afghanistan and other places is closer to military activity. And then they conclude it should be folded into the Pentagon. That's a fair debate. . . . When you don't want to send in the Marines but you think the diplomats are insufficient, you need something in between. That's been the CIA.

The America public should understand that the CIA as a collective, did not want to do all of these things after 9/11. There were people who said we should stick to our traditional intelligence-gathering function. . . . But after 9/11, the president looked around the room in his cabinet meetings at Camp David. He wanted people inside Afghanistan. And of all of the agencies, it was the CIA that could put people into place far sooner.

In a little-noticed article of its Lisbon Treaty, which went into effect on December 1, the European Union agreed to hold an "open, transparent and regular dialogue" with churches, religious associations and secular groups.

What this dialogue will look like is not yet clear, but the fact the European Union has agreed to it reflects the evolving role of religion in a region where it is often overlooked.

"Something has happened in the religious culture of Europe," said Joseph Maila, a French political scientist whose new job -- head of the religious affairs section of the French Foreign Ministry's Policy Planning Office -- is another sign of change.

"Countries that were heading for a stricter separation of church and state, as in France, are now more open to religion while countries where the state was not completely separate from religion are introducing more separation," he told Reuters.

To illustrate this change, Maila recalled how in 1999 France opposed any mention of Europe's Christian roots in an EU Charter of Fundamental Rights agreed the next year. The final text spoke of Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist inheritance."

The issue returned in negotiations for the EU's ill-fated constitution, when then Pope John Paul and several traditionally Catholic states tried again to get a reference to Christianity.

"France took a very strong position at the time against countries such as Italy, Poland and Ireland," said Maila. "They succeeded in blocking this, but now it's 10 years later and look how things have changed."

BEFORE AND AFTER 9/11

The change stems from a specific date -- Sept 11, 2001 -- but it took a while before Europe grasped that those attacks in New York and Washington shattered a widespread belief that faith was a private matter due to wither away in modern societies.

I appreciate (and share) John Judis's concern that calling the Fort Hood shootings terrorism, "arouses fears of a Jihadist conspiracy in our midst that may not exist, or that may be containable by the same means we are presently using."

But that's ultimately why I think it's not a good idea to shy away from using the word terrorism. I agree that the definitive piece of evidence that Nidal Hassan was, in fact, committing a terrorist act would be his own admission that he was doing so (and that may yet be forthcoming now that he's reportedly awake and able to talk). But, with so much other evidence out there about Hassan's increasingly radical political and religious views, I think it's looking increasingly unlikely that his actions weren't motivated, at least in part, by those beliefs. After all, he didn't shoot up a 7-11; he went on a shooting rampage on an Army base. The symbolic statement made by killing soldiers on an American millitary base is certainly consistent with other statements (both oral and written) Hassan had made in recent months about the injustice of America's wars and the justice of suicide bombings and what not. Given that consistency, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to conclude these things are related. Just like it wasn't a leap for the press to immediately (and correctly) conclude that Scott Hoeder killed George Tiller because Hoeder, based on his previous oral and written statements, held extremist views on abortion.

John thinks "we need to know a little more than we do." And that's a sentiment I would usually share. But this time, the debate over Fort Hood is moving so quickly and some of the loudest voices involved in that debate are saying such hyperbolic and vile things that I think to deny what common sense suggests is to give these voices the upper hand in the debate.

I, for one, don't think Fort Hood suggests there's Jihadist conspiracy in our midst or that, short of maybe getting the Army to do a better job of evaluating the mental health of its soldiers, there's much that should--or even can--be done to prevent other incidents like this. (That is, assuming Hassan acted alone in the belief he was acting on behalf of some larger movement or ideology, which is what, barring any evidence of links to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, appears to be the most likely case.) And I think it's important that people start making these points, in order to push back against the unfair, irresponsible, and ultimately counterproductive things some people are saying should be done in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings. But if, in making these points, you continue to deny what, to most fair-minded people, would seem to be an increasingly likely fact, then those fair-minded people are going to discount everything else you say; and Malkin et al will sound more convincing than they are, if only because they're acknowledging what's becoming fairly apparent.

Tariq Ramadan's audiences are famously diverse. Those who hang on the Swiss Islamic reformer's every word include college-going Muslim men and women; policymakers and think-tankers in cities such as London and Washington, even the very authoritarian governments in the middle east from where Ramadan is mostly banned.

Each of these constituencies will be delving into Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation,a long awaited volume and Ramadan's first scholarly-focused book since his move to St Antony's College, Oxford University. It is ambitious and broad in what it wants to achieve. At times it is highly accessible and at other times technical.

Ramadan's tone is much the same as in his previous work. He takes the role of teacher and critic; the reader is cast in the role of student and learner.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part takes the reader through the history of reform in Islam's first few centuries. Reform is often seen as a post-colonial project. But the early chapters in his book demonstrate that calls for change within Islam have a much older history. In the later chapters Ramadan sets out his own thinking on how an Islamic ethics could apply to modern innovation.

He recognises that the majority of Islamic scholars have little or no training in science or in areas such as bioethics or environmental affairs. He wants them to brush up on advances in modern biology. And he wants them to knock on the doors of ethics committees and make their voices heard alongside other faiths in public debates on science and the environment. He is particularly angry that the states and citizens of Islamic countries have done so little on climate change. Until relatively recently, for example, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were solidly behind the United States in questioning a human fingerprint in global warming.

More surprisingly, however, Ramadan comes down hard on the global Islamic finance industry. This is unexpected because Islamic finance is widely regarded as a rare successful example of the application of Islamic innovation to modern life. Ramadan, however, thinks the industry is not radical enough: he challenges its architects to be bolder and think about whether Islamic ethics in finance has a role, not just to provide interest-free home loans, but in shaping the world's financial architecture.

There has been no dearth of advice, solicited and unsolicited, to U.S. President Barack Obama in the run-up to his eagerly anticipated address to the Muslim world in Cairo this week.

Pundits have second-guessed and advised, suggesting what he could or should say, and even where he should say it. Not surprisingly, many would-be counselors focus on either the Palestinian question or Iran and its nuclear ambitions. Others harp on authoritarian leaders and the continuing democracy deficit in most states with predominantly Muslim populations.

These are all important questions, of course. Obama has already indicated that he will address them, even while cautioning that no instant solutions are possible.

But to say that these immediate political issues -- and America's policy responses to them -- are the topics of greatest importance to the wide and various Muslim world is ultimately to slight that world and the challenges it faces. Worse, it inadvertently endorses the view of those Muslim extremists who would like to reduce the Muslim world to a monolithic bloc of thought, culture, and sensibility, a global community obsessed with the same small set of grievances.

’Civilizational Richness'

Fortunately, Obama, whose father was a Muslim and who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, knows that Muslim realities are far more complex. With more than 1 billion adherents and scores of internal divisions, the House of Islam is not just a religion but the core component of a civilization -- of many civilizations, to be precise.

Whether Persian, Turkish, South Asian, or other, these civilizations have sustained and helped to shape varieties of Islam, each strongly inflected by ethnic, national, and regional traditions. While such civilizational diversity has often led to conflicts within the wider Islamic world -- think of the ongoing tensions between Persians and Arabs -- it is also a crucial factor behind Islam's intellectual, artistic, and even theological richness.

In western minds, the blue burqa stands as an icon for the oppression of Afghanistan's women because the Taliban forced women to wear the full body and face cover while they were in public.

But the misery of millions of Afghan women goes far beyond the confines of the burqa, and it predates the Taliban rule a decade ago.

Women and their supporters worldwide took heart after the Taliban were toppled in 2001 and the new government in Kabul declared a high priority on improving women's lives and rights. Girls went to school; their mothers, to work — most of them trading the burqa for the more traditional scarf draped loosely around their faces.

Now comes news that Afghanistan's Parliament has passed a law forcing Taliban-style restrictions on women in Afghanistan's Shiite minority.

The law reportedly would restrict when and how women could leave their homes. In the case of a divorce, it would grant child custody to the father. And it would force healthy women to have regular sex with their husbands — a provision denounced around the world as a sanction of marital rape.

When I heard the news, I couldn't help but personalize it, remembering faces I had seen while reporting stories in that country in 2004.

There were the tiny faces of baby girls in a hospital ward for malnourished children. Flies swarmed on the listless body of one six-month old girl who weighed just eight and a half pounds. The mother at her bedside was as gaunt as she was. Doctors explained why: When food was scarce it went first to the men and boys in a family, and the women all too often were too malnourished to produce milk for their babies.

A news crew from Dubai arrived at the Abubakar As-Saddique Mosque as I was leaving on Tuesday. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, has booked an interview for next week, coming on the heels of reporters from dozens of other news organizations.

The reporters were welcomed, but not the sudden notoriety that drew them to the Minneapolis mosque.

Some Somalis say the mosque invited scrutiny and suspicion by helping to radicalize young Somali men for jihad in their homeland. Others say the mosque is a wrongly accused victim of the politics of war in East Africa.

FBI investigators are saying nothing publicly about the accusations that have flown from the streets of Minneapolis to Capitol Hill and around the world.

After listening to the arguments all week, I don't know what to say. So I'll simply tell you what I heard.

On this much, everyone seems to agree: As many as 20 young Somali men have gone missing from Twin Cities homes during the past few months, some have called relatives to say they are in Somalia, one blew himself up in an apparent suicide bombing and the FBI is investigating alleged connections with Al-Shabaab, which the United States calls a terrorist organization.

THE ACCUSATIONS

Osman Ahmed turned rumor into sworn testimony (PDF) at a U.S. Senate hearing this month when he accused Abubakar's leaders of brainwashing the men and trying to scare their families from talking about their disappearance. Ahmed's nephew, Burhan Hassan, is one of the missing. The uncle was testifying on behalf of several families before the U. S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

Muslim women dressed in flowing headscarves have become a familiar image in Minnesota's human landscape even while debate flared elsewhere over head garb worn for the sake of Islam.

Now a bill before the Minnesota Legislature shows that this state isn't immune to the global controversy.

The bill makes no mention of any religion. Instead, it would require that the full head and face be shown on driver's license photos and state ID cards except for headwear needed in connection with medical treatments or deformities.

It's a simple matter of public safety, the bill's chief author Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, told the St. Cloud Times. Law enforcement officials need unobstructed images in order to identify people, and it isn't safe or fair to allow some people to partially cover their heads.

But many Minnesota Muslims feel threatened.

"I'm shocked," said Fartun Ahmed, a student at Century College in White Bear Lake. "I respect the government and its rules and regulations . . . But I am not willing to take off my headscarf."

The safety argument makes no sense to leaders of the United Somali Movement, a group of graduate students and young professionals in the Twin Cities. If anything, photos of bareheaded women could confuse authorities because their images wouldn't look like the same women we see on the streets every day, they said.

"There is no need to see the hair or the head because the face is enough to recognize somebody," said Suban Khalif, 23, a Somalia-born student at the University of Minnesota's College of Design.

"You recognize the nose, the eyes, the mouth and that's enough," said Khalif who wears her hijab every day while away from home.

Whether or not it was intended, the real effect of the bill would be to curb religious freedom, she said, and to marginalize tens of thousands of minorities in Minnesota.

"This legislation will impact the lives of thousands of Muslim women in Minnesota from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds who cover their hair as an expression of faith," she said.

A headwear ban potentially would reach beyond Muslims to affect Catholics, Jews and also Sikhs who consider their turbans to be mandatory, said Taneeza Islam, civil rights director for the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN).

"We don't want this to turn into a Muslim issue," she said. "We are saying this is an issue that touches all faiths in which believers wear something on their heads."

As for the safety concerns, she noted that the State Department allows religious head coverings to be worn in U.S. passport photos and the Transportation Security Administration allows them to stay in place at airport checkpoints.

Minnesota Muslims plan to air their arguments against the bill on March 10, when they are scheduled to meet at the State Capitol as part of a national movement called "Muslim Day on the Hill."

STARTED WITH POLICE

On June 24, 2007, Douglas Johnson from Minneapolis sat at a dinner in Washington, D.C.'s, historic Tabard Inn, brainstorming strategies for stopping coercive interrogation tactics the White House had authorized in the name of fighting terror.

No point in mincing words. They were talking about torture.

On Jan. 22 this year, President Obama sat a few blocks from the scene of that dinner and signed an executive order banning the interrogation tactics at issue.

Many Americans know the arc of the events leading up to Obama's order. But few know the behind-the-scenes work it took to build support that would help the new president end a practice which had bitterly divided the nation.

The idea of an executive order on torture first surfaced in the upstairs dining room of the Tabard Inn where Johnson and some 15 others had gathered amid antique furnishings that called to mind America's traditions.

Eventually, the idea was to win support from Republicans and Democrats, former defense secretaries, CIA officers and secretaries of state as well as human rights advocates, legal scholars and clergy members from many denominations and faiths.

Looking back at the beginning Johnson — who is the executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture — doesn't take credit for the idea. It started, he said, with Marc Grossman who had been Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs during the first term of former President George W. Bush.

Revelations of abuse

Bush had declared in 2002 that fighters for al-Qaeda and the Taliban were not protected under the Geneva conventions' prohibitions against torturing prisoners of war and treating them in cruel, humiliating and degrading ways. Even so, Bush said, detainees would be treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva conventions.

But evidence to the contrary mounted through revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Then, in 2007, Bush acknowledged that the CIA had maintained secret prisons overseas. Reports surfaced that detainees in those lockups had been subjected to waterboarding (a near-drowning experience) and other tactics that shocked many Americans.

When nearly 200 people in India were killed in terrorist attacks late last month, the carnage received saturation media coverage around the globe. When nearly 600 people in Zimbabwe died in a cholera outbreak a week ago, the international response was far more muted.

The Mumbai attacks have raised talk of war between India and Pakistan and triggered a flurry of diplomatic responses. Nothing remotely on the same scale has occurred over the Zimbabwe cholera outbreak, even though many more people have died as a result of the disease compared with the toll in the Mumbai rampage.

Comparing tragedies is problematic, because human lives cannot be reduced to arithmetic. Yet it is unquestionably true that nations tend to focus far more time, money and attention on tragedies caused by human actions than on the tragedies that cause the greatest amount of human suffering or take the greatest toll in terms of lives.

Is this because terrorism poses a greater threat to us than epidemics? Not likely. If you were to make a list of the world's top 10 killers, suicide bombers would be nowhere on the list. In recent years, a large number of psychological experiments have found that when confronted by tragedy, people fall back on certain mental rules of thumb, or heuristics, to guide their moral reasoning. When a tragedy occurs, we instantly ask who or what caused it. When we find a human hand behind the tragedy -- such as terrorists, in the case of the Mumbai attacks -- something clicks in our minds that makes the tragedy seem worse than if it had been caused by an act of nature, disease or even human apathy.

"When a bad event occurs, this automatically triggers us to seek out whoever is causally responsible," said Fiery Cushman, a cognitive psychologist with Harvard University's interdisciplinary Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative. "When we assign causal responsibility, it is like, 'Case closed, the detectives can go home.' "

Tragedies, in other words, cause individuals and nations to behave a little like the detectives who populate television murder mystery shows: We spend nearly all our time on the victims of killers and rapists and very little on the victims of car accidents and smoking-related lung cancer. "We think harms of actions are much worse than harms of omission," said Jonathan Baron, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "We want to punish those who act and cause harm much more than those who do nothing and cause harm. We have more sympathy for the victims of acts rather than the victims of omission. If you ask how much should victims be compensated, [we feel] victims harmed through actions deserve higher compensation."

The point of this research is not to play down one tragedy or inflate another. Rather, the psychologists said, studying how we reach moral conclusions can help us understand how we respond to human suffering and alert us to pitfalls in our thinking.

ays before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden left his compound in Kandahar in Afghanistan and headed into the mountains. His driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, traveled with him. As U.S. and Northern Alliance forces stood poised to capture Kandahar a few months later, bin Laden told Hamdan to evacuate his family. Hamdan's wife was eight months pregnant at the time, and Hamdan drove her and his infant daughter to the Pakistani border.

It was on his way back that Hamdan was captured by Northern Alliance warlords, said Jonathan Mahler, an author who has pieced together the events in his upcoming book, "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power." Hamdan's captors found two surface-to-air missiles in the trunk of his car. They turned him over to the Americans and pocketed a bounty of $5,000.

Hamdan recently became the first detainee at Guantanamo Bay to face trial. Government and defense lawyers are arguing about Hamdan's significance in al-Qaeda and the extent of his knowledge of the group's activities, but it is the facts the lawyers agree on that raise an interesting question for anyone who studies terrorist groups.

Hamdan joined bin Laden after his plan to go to join a jihad in Tajikistan hit a snag. For years, he ferried al-Qaeda's leader to camps and news conferences and was often bored, according to the testimony of his interrogators. Mahler, who interviewed Hamdan's family and attorneys, his FBI interrogators, and the man who recruited Hamdan for jihad, said bin Laden's driver was not particularly religious -- for a poor man from Yemen, jihad was a career move as much as a religious quest.

"I am a Jew from Tarsus, a citizen of no ordinary city,” St Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles. Tarsus was an important city in ancient times but, 2,000 years after Paul’s birth there, it is much like many other cities on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

But it could be the scene of an unusual improvement in Turkish Church-State relations if a request by the Roman Catholic Church is accepted. Pope Benedict’s Year of St Paul began on 29 June, the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul. During that time, the Catholic Church in Turkey expects the normal trickle of pilgrims visiting Tarsus to swell to hundreds of thousands.

It launched its Pauline Year commemorations on 21 June in Tarsus and plans to follow up with symposia, pilgrimages and other events there, in Antakya (Antioch) and in other cities in the region during the year.

The only problem is that there is no fulltime church in Tarsus to receive all these pilgrims. There is a former church, a simple

medieval building with whitewashed interior walls and frescos on the ceiling. But the Turkish state, a staunchly secularist enclave in a society that is 99 per cent Muslim, confiscated it in 1943 for use by the army. It was later turned into a museum.

Christians are allowed to hold services in the museum, but they must request permission and pay the entry fee. Priests have to bring a cross and other religious objects and remove them as soon as Mass is over. If more chairs are needed, the priest has to rent them and have them delivered and removed.

“We have asked that the church be entrusted to us, for the use of all Christians,” Bishop Luigi Padovese, the Italian Franciscan who is apostolic vicar of Anatolia and head of the Turkish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, told The Tablet. “We could look after the church, but all Christians could and should celebrate their services there. It couldn’t be any other way.

We’re doing this in the name of St Paul, who is an apostle of dialogue, not separation.”

That sounds simple, but nothing about religion is simple in Turkey. Set on a firmly secularist path by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s, Turkey keeps all faiths – including Islam – under tight control. Minority religions have no real legal status, so the state can confiscate their property or curtail their activities.

The Greek Orthodox Church, for example, saw its only seminary, situated on the Mamara Sea island of Halki, or Heybeliada as it is known in Turkish, closed in 1971. Since then it has been pressing to have it reopened, but undoing earlier decisions would mean weakening the policy of secularism. In the Orthodox case, officials say they cannot give in because that would encourage fundamentalist Muslims to press their demands.

PARIS (Reuters) - A senior Vatican cardinal has thanked Muslims for bringing God back into the public sphere in Europe and said believers of different faiths had no option but to engage in interreligious dialogue.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Catholic Church's department for interfaith contacts, said religion was now talked and written about more than ever before in today's Europe.

"It's thanks to the Muslims," he said in a speech printed in Friday's L'Osservatore Romano, the official daily of the Vatican. "Muslims, having become a significant minority in Europe, were the ones who demanded space for God in society."

Vatican officials have long bemoaned the secularisation of Europe, where church attendance has dwindled dramatically in recent decades, and urged a return to its historically Christian roots. But Tauran said no society had only one faith.

"We live in multicultural and multireligious societies, that's obvious," he told a meeting of Catholic theologians in Naples. "There is no civilisation that is religiously pure."

Tauran's positive speech on interfaith dialogue came after a remark by Pope Benedict prompted media speculation that the Vatican was losing interest in it. Some Jewish leaders reacted with expressions of concern and the Vatican denied any change.

The "return of God" is clearly seen in Tauran's native France, where Europe's largest Muslim minority has brought faith questions such as women's headscarves into the political debate after decades when they were considered strictly private issues.

”GOD IS AT WORK IN ALL"

Tauran said religions were "condemned to dialogue," a practice he called "the search for understanding between two subjects, with the help of reason, in view of a common interpretation of their agreement and disagreement."

What if Ahcene Zemiri truly is a terrorist?

The question is chilling. But it hasn't deterred a team of Minneapolis attorneys from donating hundreds of hours and making four trips at their own expense to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to represent the Algerian detainee.

They are riveted on a different question: Does the U.S. Constitution call for Zemiri and more than 300 other detainees at the U.S. facility on Guantanamo to get their day in a proper court? The Minneapolis attorneys say it does.

"Vent the charges then let the chips fall where they may," said John Lundquist, one of Zemiri's attorneys.

While the world watches, intense debate over the detainees' rights has thrust the United States into a constitutional showdown where courts, Congress and the White House are vying to shape new legal ground for the age of terrorism.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on the debate for the third time. It is scheduled to hear arguments Dec. 5 in cases testing whether foreigners locked up at Guantanamo have a right to challenge their detention in U.S. federal courts. A decision in the two combined cases — Boumediene vs. Bush and Al-Odah vs. United States — would come before the end of June.

"This is the defining struggle of our time internationally," said James Dorsey, another Minneapolis attorney working on Zemiri's case. "We've got to determine how we are going to fight this war on terror and what we do when we pick up these suspicious people. There's got to be a way other than deciding on our own that we can keep them forever."

Telephone death threat

The drive to find that other way started in Minneapolis after President Bush assumed in 2001 that federal court jurisdiction would not reach offshore to Guantanamo. Detainees held there would not be prisoners of war, the administration said. But they also would not be ordinary criminals who would have routine access to the full measure of due process provided by the Constitution.

Two-lane Gardena Avenue and a stand of oak trees are all that physically separate the Al-Amal Muslim School and Totino–Grace Catholic School in Fridley. But in the science classrooms, the schools are divided by deep tenets of faith and centuries of East–West tradition.

Totino–Grace’s biology teacher, Marcia Wiger, opens a lesson on evolution by reading from Genesis and then explaining Charles Darwin’s landmark theory. She sees no conflict between the two: “We look at religion as religion and science as science.”

Across Gardena, though, evolution stops before it reaches humans. “We cannot believe that man came from apes,” said Al-Amal’s science teacher, Hala Bazzi. “Allah gave man full conscience and intelligence and knowledge that made him superior.”

Still, science has served as a bridge for Wiger and Bazzi, who started out as collaborators and along the way became friends.

At a time when tension between the Muslim world and the West is dangerously high and news is dominated by violence and body counts, the rarely told story is the quiet diplomacy conducted close to home as Muslims and Christians seek to understand one another.

The day is sunny and hot, the hamburgers are on the grill, the kids are jumping on the moon bounce and about 400 people are milling around the brand new Dar Al Noor mosque in Manassas, Va.

Neighbors and members of the congregation are here — even Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is coming. James Dade, a non-Muslim who lives nearby, is manning the grill. As he hands a burger to a Muslim friend, he turns and gives this assessment of his new neighbors. "They're very friendly, very helpful, very community-oriented," he says, noting that his best friend attends Dar Al Noor. "If there were more Christians like my friend, we wouldn't have any problems in this world."

It is a happy appraisal on this happy Sunday afternoon in July — the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new mosque. Sheikh Rashid Lamptey, the new imam, can barely contain his excitement as he waits for the governor to arrive. Lamptey is serving a growing mosque in one of America's fastest-rising religions — with more than 2 million faithful to date. The imam plays a dual role: He's the face of Islam to his congregation and to Americans who might be wary of Muslims.

"Look!" says Lamptey, who is slim with dark skin, in contrast to his white robes and a perpetual grin on his face. "Everyone is here: the politicians, the security men, the people who protect us. We have their trust, they have our trust. This is what we want to establish — the trust, so we can work together towards a more peaceful community."

A few moments later, the imam introduces Kaine. The governor greets the crowd in Arabic, eliciting applause from his Muslim onlookers, then speaks about America as the bastion of religious

Mukhtar Thakur was not surprised Tuesday by a major new poll finding that American Muslims are more likely than their European counterparts to reject Islamic extremism and express satisfaction with their lives.

"The United States is truly much more of a melting pot than Europe can ever be," said Thakur, a civil engineer who has lived in London and now works for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

In one of the most comprehensive surveys of Muslim Americans, the Pew Research Center concluded that they are "largely assimilated, happy with their lives and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world."

About half of the Muslims surveyed had attended college, for example, and their annual incomes were fairly comparable with those of the overall American public, Pew reported.

That is not to say Muslim Americans are blissful. They overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq, and they were far more disapproving than other Americans of President Bush's job performance. More than half of those polled said anti-terrorism efforts single out Muslims for scrutiny.

A quarter of Muslim adults younger than 30 and 13 percent overall said suicide bombing could be justified at least in rare circumstances. On that score and other contentious issues, American Muslims took more moderate views than their counterparts around the world. For example, nearly 80 percent in the United States said suicide bombing of civilian targets never can be justified as a tactic to defend Islam. In a Pew poll last year, 64 percent of Muslims in France said "never" to the bombing. In Egypt it was 45 percent.

Minnesotans are reflected

In Minnesota, despite flareups over Muslims refusing to scan pork at supermarket checkouts and haul alcohol in taxis, Thakur and other Muslims reflect the poll's findings.

"In Islam during the time of the prophet there was no suicide bombing ... it can never be justified," said Hared Mah, a 25-year-old from Somalia now studying economics at the University of Minnesota.

American Muslims have grown more cautious since Mah arrived in Minnesota in 2001, he said. There's more fear of warrantless wiretaps and being accused of participating in terrorist plots. But that tended not to be reflected in sympathy with violence. Five percent of American Muslims in the poll expressed favorable views of Al-Qaida.

"Al Qaida is a bunch of crazy people. ... It does not serve the interests of Muslims," Mah said.

Even in these times of tension between the West and some parts of the Muslim world, two-thirds of the American Muslims polled said there is no conflict between devout faith and modern life.

Co-existence is 'an option'

"There is a misconception that it's hard to be cool and Muslim," said Ayman Balshe, 25, a Palestinian-American dentist who is doing post-graduate studies at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. "My generation feels it takes a spiritual push in order to thrive ... and we are free to be spiritual in our daily activities."

While Balshe's family was displaced by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he agreed with 61 percent of the American Muslims polled that "a way can be found for Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of the Palestinian people can be taken care of." By stark contrast, 90 percent of the Muslims in Morocco and 85 percent in Jordan disagreed with the statement in a separate Pew poll.

The lesson of the immigrant experience in the United States is that "co-existence is definitely an option," Balshe said.

Muslim Americans have integrated into society far better than European Muslims, but there appear to be significant pockets of disaffection — especially among the young and religious. That is the conclusion of an exhaustive survey of Muslim Americans released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

More than 1,000 Muslims spoke at length about their American experience, and the results were mostly "good news," says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

"The Muslim American population is largely middle class, mostly mainstream, assimilated, happy with their lives and moderate on many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world," Kohut says.

But the study found some surprising signs of discontent. More than half of Muslim Americans believe that the U.S. government singles Muslims out for extra surveillance. More than half of Muslims overall hold a very unfavorable view of al-Qaida — but only 36 percent of African-American Muslims do. Only one in four Muslims believes that Arab men conducted the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And most disturbing was what Kohut called "pockets of sympathy for extremism."

"Younger Muslims are both more religiously observant, more self-identifying as Muslims than older Muslims, and they're more likely to say that suicide bombing in defense of Islam can be, at least some times, justified," Kohut says.

One-quarter of Muslims under age 30 said suicide bombing is legitimate on some occasions. That compares with 6 percent of older Muslims.

Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali might be controversial, but a statement she made in a recent Vancouver Sun profile was anything but.

"Judaism and Christianity have gone through a long history of enlightenment and reflection," she said, "but the Islam we see today tends toward the seventh century." Now, this is hardly an original sentiment, as we regularly hear that Islam is an immature, backward religion, desperately in need of reformation or enlightenment.

And there is much evidence to support this contention, from the Muslim Brotherhood's 1981 call to end scientific education, to the proliferation of madrassas that emphasize only one R -- religion -- thereby leaving their students illiterate and innumerate, to the entire Islamic world's rejection of science and loving embrace of creationism and intelligent design.

Despite this evidence, I want to ask some disquieting questions: What if Islam is not 1,000 years behind the West, but 1,000 years ahead? What if it took us until the turn of the third millennium to arrive at the place Islam occupied at the turn of the second?

There is also much evidence for this proposition. From roughly AD 700-1200, while the European world was feeling its way through the Dark Ages, the Islamic world was in the midst of a Golden Age, a period of scientific and cultural innovation not seen since the days of the ancient Greeks.

In fact, the Greek philosophical and scientific texts that would later prove so influential to Christianity and the West were preserved and translated by Muslims. When books were few and far between in the West, the Muslims amassed a library of some 500,000 volumes,

You could be forgiven for thinking the television images in the experiment were from 2006. They were really from 1982: Israeli forces were clashing with Arab militants in Lebanon. The world was watching, charges were flying, and the air was thick with grievance, hurt and outrage.

There was only one thing on which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences agreed. Both were certain that media coverage in the United States was hopelessly biased in favor of the other side.

The endlessly recursive conflict in the Middle East provides any number of instructive morals about human nature, but it also offers a psychological window into the world of partisan behavior. Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon sparked some of the earliest experiments into why people reach dramatically different conclusions about the same events.

The results say a lot about partisan behavior in general -- why Republicans and Democrats love to hate each other, for example, or why Coke and Pepsi fans clash. Sadly, the results also say a lot about the newest conflicts between Israel and its enemies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and why news organizations are being besieged with angry complaints from both sides.

Partisans, it turns out, don't just arrive at different conclusions; they see entirely different worlds . In one especially telling experiment, researchers showed 144 observers six television news segments about Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon.

Pro-Arab viewers heard 42 references that painted Israel in a positive light and 26 references that painted Israel unfavorably.

Pro-Israeli viewers, who watched the very same clips, spotted 16 references that painted Israel positively and 57 references that painted Israel negatively.

Both groups were certain they were right and that the other side didn't know what it was talking about.

The tendency to see bias in the news -- now the raison d'etre of much of the blogosphere -- is such a reliable indicator of partisan thinking that researchers coined a term, "hostile media effect," to describe the sincere belief among partisans that news reports are painting them in the worst possible light.

Were pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers who were especially knowledgeable about the conflict immune from such distortions? Amazingly, it turned out to be exactly the opposite, Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross said. The best-informed partisans were the most likely to see bias against their side.

Three-quarters of all Americans believe the Bible is God’s word, according to a recent Pew poll. Numbers like that make an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris seem either foolhardy or uncommonly brave.

Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book The End of Faith, he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, The End of Faith has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it’s the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational—murderous, even.

The heart of Harris' book is a frontal assault on Islam and Christianity, carrying both pages and pages of quotations from the Quran imploring the faithful to kill infidels, and a chilling history of how Christian leaders have brutally punished heretics. Harris argues that much of the violence in today's world stems directly from people willing to live and die by these sacred texts.