BY JAY TOLSON

Who speaks for Islam? In the wake of September 11, the West is learning that the answer to that question is anything but clear. Reassuring to many Americans was the chorus of moderate Muslim voices–leaders of predominantly Muslim nations, heads of Islamic organizations around the world–denouncing terror, violence, and intolerance as incompatible with the faith. But at the same time, from the long Muslim "street" stretching from Rabat to Jakarta, there came a contrary and deeply disturbing message. It said that the terrorists were righteous warriors engaged in a holy war against the Great Satan. It said, too, that Islam–true Islam–was locked in a struggle with the forces of Western modernism and secularism.

Mixed signals abound. Shortly after Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf condemned the skyjackers' murderous assaults, a group of some 250 businessmen in Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border, drove through their streets denouncing the terrorists for "trying in effect to hijack Islam." But the prompt response of a group of religious scholars there was to issue a religious verdict, or fatwa, enjoining Muslims to engage American infidels in a holy war if they attacked Afghanistan.

Even more confusing, Americans now learn, some of the seemingly moderate voices heard in the immediate aftermath of the attacks–including heads of Muslim organizations and mosques in this country–have on other occasions voiced their approval of Muslim-inspired terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Some have also shown themselves to be less tolerant of that portion of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims who understand and practice their faith in ways that differ from their own.

And if tolerance is the litmus test in differentiating extreme and moderate Islam, what are Americans to make of the fact that Saudi Arabia, one of America's strongest allies, actively supports the spread of its own homegrown brand of puritanical and intolerant Islam? From the madrasahs (religious schools) of Pakistan to the mosques of Indonesia to Islamic centers in Europe and the United States, that brand of Wahhabi Islam has challenged traditional, locally inflected, and usually broad-minded versions of the faith, spreading an intolerant religiosity that can spawn violence in the name of holy war.

Murky picture. At the core of the West's puzzlement lies the most urgent question: How do the terrorists responsible for the September 11 carnage fit into this murky picture? What has become clear, of course, is that their actions cannot be justified according to the main currents of Islamic teaching and practice. Indeed, the beliefs that guide their actions are as much a corruption of the spirit and law of their faith as those of radical Christian fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics or those of Hindu fundamentalists who raze an ancient Muslim mosque. And while such beliefs do not necessarily lead to acts of violence and terror, it has become chillingly apparent that they can.

The question of Islam's character is being contested nowhere more urgently than on Muslim soil, where moderates and extremists compete for the hearts and minds of the faithful. Consider the case of Mohammad Shahrour, 62, a Syrian civil engineer and author. Educated in Syria, the former Soviet Union, and Ireland, Shahrour is a devout Muslim who has written four books arguing that the sacred texts of Islam must be read and understood in relation to ever changing social realities. A radically modern or secular notion? Hardly. Shahrour–like many other moderates–insists that that is what most traditional Muslims have been doing throughout their 1,400-year history, whether in the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphates or the Ottoman or Mughal empires. And they have done so in defiance of a narrow legalistic literalism promoted by such medieval jurists as Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328) and successive generations of Islamic fundamentalists who have claimed to purify the faith.

Shahrour's books have sold tens of thousands of copies, even circulating in countries where they are officially banned. But in the process they have earned him the enmity of a very large and vocal extremist opposition. Self-styled defenders of the faith–descendants of the narrow legalists–have denounced Shahrour's ideas as sinful "innovations" and characterized him and other moderates as "apostates." Such strong language has real consequences. It exposes Shahrour and other moderates, both within and beyond the Islamic world, to harassment, censorship, and violence. Yet neither Shahrour nor other moderate voices–from Abdokarim Soroush, a moderate cleric in Iran, to Nazir Ahmad, a former military officer in Pakistan, to Khaled Abou el Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA–have been silenced. Last year, for instance, in a debate aired on satellite television, Shahrour took on the dean of the religion faculty of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, and he will soon go on a speaking tour in Kuwait. "More and more people are listening," Shahrour says from his office in Damascus. And, he adds, "The recent events will help me make my case stronger."

Perhaps. But the other side sounds just as confident about winning the struggle within Islam–a struggle so fraught with implications that scholars have begun to call it the "Islamic Reformation." Like the conflict that divided Christendom in the 16th century, this upheaval is as much political, economic, and cultural as it is religious. It has as much to do with the spread (albeit spotty) of literacy and TV sets, the failures of corrupt and repressive political regimes, and a growing, generalized resentment of the West as it does with the application of religious law to modern Muslim states. Dale Eickelman, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College, has been at the forefront of scholars studying the effects of mass education and communication on this reformation. Both, he says, have made it possible for unprecedented numbers of the faithful to examine and debate "the fundamentals of Muslim belief and practice in ways that their . . . predecessors would never have imagined." Having observed village life in locales as far-flung as Morocco and Oman for close to three decades, Eickelman has seen the young in recent years take the unprecedented step of challenging the faith of their elders.

This new generation of Muslims, urban and rural, is troubling not only because it is armed with a little knowledge and too many certainties. It is also troubling because it is large, restless, underemployed–and so deeply susceptible to the ideas put forth by radical Islamic groups. Called Islamists by scholars because of their subordination of spiritual concerns to political-legal ones, these groups have been on the rise throughout the 20th century and include among their founding ideologues the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, hanged in 1966 for allegedly planning the assassination of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Driven by hostility to the Western institutions and ideals of their former European colonizers, they are equally contemptuous of the autocratic regimes that arose after the colonial era, whether monarchical, military, or nominally socialistic. And with the drying up of secular, often Marxist-inspired liberation movements after the collapse of Soviet communism, the Islamists have become the main voices of political opposition in the Muslim world.

To be sure, important differences distinguish such groups as Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front and the Egypt-spawned (but now global) Muslim Brotherhood. Some are more militant and violent than others. Some envision absolute theocracies, while others propose parliamentary Islamic republics (under strict religious guidance). But what unites them all, says British journalist Mark Huband in Warriors of the Prophet: The Struggle for Islam, is their commitment to "the introduction of the sharia as the sole source of law" for the states they propose.

Unsullied law. And that raises another crucial question: What is sharia? Literally translated as "the way," the religious law of sharia has been in formation, and often under dispute, ever since the earliest caliphates that followed the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632. To Sunni traditionalists (some 85 percent of practicing Muslims), Islamic jurisprudence can be practiced in accordance with any one of four legal schools whose commentaries were completed by the end of the 10th century. To the Shiite minority (who broke with the Sunni after their candidate for caliph, Ali, was killed in 661), the process of creative interpretation remains open; in fact, it comes under the responsibility of a hierarchical religious leadership that is absent in the Sunni tradition. (Sunni jurists, or muftis, are said only to apply the law, not to interpret it, though application can be a creative process.) And the small but widely influential Sufi movement, a mystical and philosophical tradition that emerged within Islam in the eighth century, takes a far more relaxed view of sharia.

But the salient feature of the Islamists is their proposal, reminiscent of such puritan extremists as Ibn Taymiya and the more recent 18th-century firebrand Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), to restore pure religious law as formulated by the Prophet and enforced by him and the first three "Rightfully Guided" caliphs. That unsullied law is contained, they say, in the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings and doings of the Prophet). In fact, says UCLA's Abou el Fadl, what they do is blur the distinction between the "branches" of the law (practices such as the veiling of women, which are historically contingent and subject to debate) and the foundations of the law (which, like the first pillar of faith's belief in Allah as the only one true God, are beyond debate). They insist, says Abou el Fadl, "that if we go back to the original Koran and Hadith, 95 percent of all issues will be decided." And believing that, he adds, the Islamists "wave away all that rich dialectical tradition of law."

Even more threatening to traditionalist Muslims, the puritan fundamentalists say that those who cling to what they deem unacceptable traditions or practices (such as the veneration of Muslim saints) are guilty of "innovation," an error which, if not renounced, will lead to apostasy. And just as they insist that they are the only true way of Islam–a determination that both the Koran and the Hadith say only Allah can make–these extremists ignore the lessons of Islamic history (and even the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran) in their insistence that secular laws and institutions cannot coexist with sharia.

Utopian aim. What all this amounts to, says Abdul Hadi Palazzi, secretary-general of the Italian Muslim Association, is a utopian and totalitarian movement–and in that sense, very much a modern "-ism." The goal of Islamism, Palazzi notes, is total power for a centralized religious authority, a goal that contradicts decentralized Sunni traditions. And the Islamists' utopian claim to purity implies what Palazzi calls "a wholesale denial of history."

Utopian it is. But like other dangerous utopian ideologies of this century, this one has found followers and wealthy sponsors–none more wealthy than the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia. The royal family of Saudi Arabia has, in fact, found itself involved in a delicate and dangerous dance. It funds that establishment with a generous portion of its huge oil revenues. Saud-family ties to Wahhabism date from the late 18th century, when the Wahhabi critique of the Ottoman sultanate comported well with the Sauds' struggle against their Ottoman overlords. But since the formation of the kingdom in 1932, that relationship has grown problematic: Simply put, many true believers within the Wahhabi fold threaten to turn against the oil-rich regime that supports them. Or supports them to a point.

Osama bin Laden, whose family has close ties to the royal family, is not the only Saudi to be banished from the homeland for carrying his beliefs too far. "They hate religion," Khaled al-Fauwaz, London representative of the Saudi Islamist Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC), told journalist Huband, expressing the view of many Wahhabi Islamists who consider the royal family impious, in great measure because it allows American bases to remain in the same country as Islam's sacred sites. Though he broke with bin Laden, a founder of the ARC, in 1996, al-Fauwaz hopes to achieve similar ends through different means, including charitable work. "Our aim is to break the international support for the al-Saud," he said. "But I am not very optimistic. And Americans can only leave after bloodshed."

But many Wahhabi purists remain within Saudi Arabia, working in organizations such as the Muslim World League that aggressively spread the puritan creed throughout the world. Not only do the league and other organizations support religious institutions, schools, and mosques abroad; one of their objectives is to oppose diversity within Islam by repelling what the league on its own Web site calls "inimical trends and dogma which the enemies of Islam seek to exploit in order to destroy the unity of Muslims. . . ." The Saudi role in funding the Pakistani madrasahs that spawned the Taliban is now widely recognized. Each year, these schools–some 10,000 of them–return thousands of their graduates not only to Pakistan and Afghanistan but to the former Soviet states of Central Asia as well as to Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Saudis also bring young foreign Muslims to the kingdom, giving them fellowships to learn Arabic and the true ways of the faith. Returned to their homelands, all of these beneficiaries of Saudi largess promote Wahhabi-style Islam in mosques, schools, and charitable organizations. Less well known, some Muslim leaders claim, Wahhabi money and influence permeate many Muslim organizations and mosques in Western Europe and North America, even though studies have shown that most American mosques eschew radical or literalist Islam.

Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, a professor of political science at the University of San Diego, made an even blunter charge in a speech delivered in Washington last year: "The rogue states [such as Iraq and Libya] are," he said, "less important in the radicalization of Islam than Saudi Arabia." Asked recently by U.S. News to elaborate, he explained, "Until now, Saudi Arabia has said to the United States that what it does for the Muslim world is none of its business. But the unintended consequences [of Saudi actions] are now being visited upon the United States. We now know where the ideological fervor is coming from."

But what can America do in this struggle within Islam, beyond urging the Saud family to beware of what it sows? Quite clearly, America needs to combat Islamist propaganda about its role in the Middle East, particularly its caricature of U.S. dealings with Israel and the Palestinians. Additionally, America can and should encourage Saudi Arabia and other allies in the Islamic world to truly liberalize their regimes–even at the risk of alienating some of the major suppliers of U.S. oil by doing so. And certainly, it is in America's interests to support the voices of moderation engaged in Islam's momentous culture war. What will it take to accomplish all of this? To begin with, a broader knowledge of the languages and traditions of a great civilization than we have previously attempted to acquire.