Muslim turnings

MUSLIM TURNINGS: The image of Islam portrayed in the West is often that of the radical fringe; what we hear less about is the struggle for the soul of Islam. The struggle is embedded in the teachings of Muhammad: in the contrast between his more tolerant phase in Mecca and the later period in Medina, which exhibited more coercion and intolerance.

George Packer takes a look at this struggle in Sudan, a country that has come though a number of failed experiments: nationalism, socialism and Islamism. It is out of these failed experiments that reform might occur, Packer concludes. "Great turns in history seldom come because someone writes a manifesto or proposes a theory. Instead, concrete experience, usually in the form of catastrophic failure, forces people to search for new ideas, many of which have been lying around for quite a while." One Sudanese intellectual told Packer that if modernizing change is to happen in the Muslim world, it will more likely come on the periphery--in West Africa or Central and Southeast Asia, rather than in the Arab region, "because it is too self-absorbed in its own sense of superiority and victimhood" (New Yorker, September 11).

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