The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable

September 29, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. DEMUTH:  Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin.  My name is Chris DeMuth.  I am President of AEI, and I will be moderating this seminar.  My colleague, Michael Novak, who holds the Jewitt Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at AEI, has just published a new book.  I can say that almost every month.

[Laughter.]

MR. DEMUTH:  But this is a particularly big and serious and important book.  The title is The Universal Hunger For Liberty, Why the Clash of Civilizations is Not Inevitable, just published by Basic Books.  Books  are available in the reception room--where there will be a reception afterwards--for sale, and I'm sure the author would be happy to sign books for you.

It is a deep exploration of what President Bush calls the forward strategy of freedom, in which the western world is currently engaged, at times philosophic, at times practical and concerned with immediate political issues, with essays ranging from a exploration of the traditional conceptions of liberty, truth and God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to a discussion of contemporary economic and even environmental issues, and culminating in a discussion of the relation of religious belief to democracy.

Mr. Novak is going to begin with a presentation of the core of his book, which I believe will focus on his hopes laid out in the book for the engagement of a global discussion of the future of freedom.

Following his discussion we have four other people at AEI, each of whom has been concerned in his or her writings and research and public engagements in the past several years with the issue of democracy and its potential and growth in the Muslim world, especially in the Arab Middle East.  These include Senior Fellow Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Ledeen and Joshua Muravchik.

We're particularly grateful to Laith Kubba of the National Endowment for Democracy, that he would come over and join us this afternoon.  He is NED's Senior Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa.  I think it must be a typo in the biography that is passed out.  It says that he is also a known contributor, a known contributor to the debates on Iraq, Islam and democratization in the Muslim world.  He had a long and distinguished career before joining NED, including in the 1980s, Director of Al Aalam in London and Africa events, a London-based magazine.

We will begin with Michael Novak, and then I will, unless there are objections, I'm going to start with Reuel and work their way around.

Michael, I should be sitting between you to protect you from all of these vigorous commentators, but you're going to have to fend for yourself once we get going.

Michael Novak, please.

MR. NOVAK:  Thank you very much, Chris, and thanks to all of you for coming.  It's very heartening and it will be very heartening to my editor to know how many of you there are here.  I'm very honored and touched by your presence.

The book is a very ambitious one, and I'm going to have to speak telegraphically now even to try to set if off.  I wanted to look ahead in the 21st century to look at the three main lines of development that are necessary for free societies to develop:  political, economic and cultural, and try to look ahead at each one of those, answering questions and objections as I went through, and trying to reach for a level deep enough to talk across traditions if I can say that.

Our traditions are very separate in the world.  They're really not identical.  They're not all branches from the same root or anything like that, but there are certain analogies having to do with the conditions of human life.  We're all born of a woman.  We live and we suffer some pain and some setbacks, and knowledge of our own faults and so forth, and we die.  And we're succeeded, that we have children and grandchildren and we take part in a long story.  So it's possible to have dialogue based on these analogies even across very different lines, but it's very difficult.

My model in this--we always, if we're pygmies, take giants as our model, and mine in this is St. Augustine, who in a very bad period for the west with the sacking of Rome by the barbarians--Rome had been accustomed to going out and bringing the booty home, and this time the barbarians came to Rome and took the booty back, and it demoralized, quite demoralized Rome and Roman writers and thinkers because it had never happened.

Naturally, there being few Jews around, they blamed the Christians.  And Christianity, the rise of christianity in the preceding 90 years had sapped the morale and ethics of Rome and led to the decadence and so forth.

St. Augustine set out to rebut that charge, but in addition he set out to think about the meaning of events such as the fall of Rome and the building, as he saw it, of a new civilization coming, for the story he was really interested in is the story of what God intended for creation.

Now, in doing that he made four contributions to a viewpoint that I find very instructive, and would be one of many people who would be willing to pitch their life around, namely as Bob Nesbitt [ph], AEI fellow of a few years back, wonderful, wonderful thinker, used to say, it's with St. Augustine in particular that you see the birth of the idea of progress in the west, breaking with the image of return, the myth of eternal return which was so beloved of the ancients, the constant cycles of history.

And Augustine pictured history as an unfolding story, that God has his purposes in it, inscrutable to us often, but moving somewhere.  The first thing I want to establish, there is a notion of momentum, but always with lots of downturns, awful events that happen like the sacking of the center of the civilization at the time.

Second, therefore, there's meaning in time.  We're living out part of a story, and we should constantly be looking for that in the darkest of times.

Third, that the individual--this is in the inheritance of Judaism and Christianity, Christianity learned it from Judaism, that the creator before time was imagined each of us, and each human individual was significant to the Almighty.  Therefore, there's meaning in the story of the individual.  It's not an accident that he's the first to write an autobiography, The Confession of St. Augustine, that that story might be meaningful to others.

And finally, he was preeminent, over all the Christian eras he's preeminent in this.  He's the one who had the biggest effect on the Protestant Reformers, for example, of all the preceding fathers, in his sense of sin and evil in the world.  These are never abolished by the Resurrection of Christ.  These are never wiped out from human life.  They are always present.  For example, Augustine is the one who's the canonical writer on just war, because he said wars issue out of the spirit of human beings, and as long as that contest of good and evil is in our hearts, it's going to be present in human life.

So Christians have to figure out how to conduct themselves in war.  They're not going to be able to get rid of it.  But even in war you're going to have to show you're different.  And so he's the first great realist I think.

I know more secular writers like to attribute it to Machiavelli, but I think you get a bleaker picture in St. Augustine, and at the same time, a more demanding one because he asks better of you than what we're doing.

Finally, he has an idea that the ultimate intent--and this is a Jewish and Christian idea--that God created the whole cosmos.  It's out of the Book of Genesis really.  Why?  So somewhere in it there would be at least one creature conscious and free to appreciate what he had done, and through a build up of a world of friendship.  Friendship is the leading idea, which itself is an image of God.

That puts a demand on people, and in the light of that demand the judgment is always pretty harsh at any one age in history.  There's a lot that falls short of that, torture, slavery, very vivid in Augustine's time, which he thought--he was not a believer in progress in the sense of--but these--but these would likely not be abolished.  They're wrong, shouldn't be, but they're everywhere.

Now, the second point I want to make.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often talked about as the family of Abrahamic religions, coming from Abraham, and there's truth in that, but they are not one religion in three branches.  They're really very different, one from the other, and it's important to understand those differences.  And Muslims typically do not regard Judaism and Christianity as the foundation from which they build, but really as mistakes, as serious--and the idea of God in Islam is very different.

First I want to say something very powerful and positive about Islam and its idea of God because I think--I think, I'm not Islamic--but I think it's the root of the tremendous attraction of Islam for more than a billion people.  It wins tremendous love and tremendous esteem, and I believe that comes from, as near as I can feel and tell, it comes from the tremendously pure and high idea of God that Islam has won, that God is so sovereign and so supreme that from a Muslim point of view it would be wrong to speak of human beings made in the image of God.  That would be demeaning of God, to think that he could be imaged by such as we, and Islam does not like images of any sort for that matter.  But it has a very sharp break between God and all finite life, and none of the steps of God acting through secondary causes, God achieving his will through creative things, that Jews and Christians philosophically developed.

You can see this argument very clearly in the 9th century through the 13th century in the great conversation that was taking place in Spain, around Cordoba, and in particularly Cordoba, and in Sicily and in other places between and among Islamic scholars, Jewish scholars and Christian scholars, particularly in the discovery of the documents, many of the lost documents of Aristotle, which had been burned at the Library of Alexandria and perished, lost.

But some of them were recovered in the period of the crusades, brought back the Greek text and begun to be translated.  They had existed in Arabic languages chiefly through Syrian writers very early on, but they had perished in the west.  So as both, as all three groups tried to contemplate this very secular, scientific, rational view of the world, and compare it with their own revelations, and try to mediate there between them, they found themselves in dialogue one with another and in disagreement.  I don't have time to go into all that now, but it's an extraordinary period in human history.

And there was a break, I would like to argue, at that time, in which Maimonides is leading the Jewish writers, and Aquinas, the--I don't know, the symbol of the Christian writers writing on this, the one you point to, but there were others in both groups, focused on the idea of freedom and responsibility, the moral implications of Judaism and Christianity.

Islam didn't go that way, although it didn't deny those things.  It focused on the absoluteness of God and the purity of God.  I find it very touching to see a  picture of Muslims at prayer with row upon row of men down upon their knees and their foreheads resting on the ground in total submission and silence before the Almighty.  And their very powerful idea of the omnipotence of God, I think is, as I say, a very high and very pure idea.  But it does leave out human agency, and there is not very much, by comparison, very much thought and development of how there's room for contingency in the world, how there's room for liberty in the world and the centrality of personal responsibility in the world.

But it is implicit nonetheless, this view, this same view is implicit in the Islamic writings about reward and punishment.  There is a powerful implicit theory of liberty in Islamic thought, and many contemporary Muslim writers are drawing this out and talking about it in a fuller way then it was done in medieval times or in previous times, about the extent to which Islam depends upon an idea of liberty, and I think that's the hope for a universal dialogue about the meaning of liberty and human life, which is becoming a task in our own time.  We can't just fight those who threaten both communities, as I think the terrorists do, both genuine Islam and Christianity and Judaism.  But that it has to be a subject we can discuss and think about and talk about as civilized human beings, and go on a lot of different ways toward this project.

Now, let me rush on.  In the 13th century the cities of Islam were much more wealthy, ornamented, developed than the cities of the west, by and large.  Paris was hardly moving out of poverty, the universities just being built, the cathedrals just being built and so forth.  And they were pretty much cow towns physically to look at.  And Rome had been largely destroyed or overgrown with grass, depopulated, was just coming back to vitality, the Vatican Library soon to be redone and so forth.

And it's been a puzzle for Islamic peoples in the years since, how was that glory lost and how did the west go increasingly on to wealth, fame, power, learning and so forth?

And again, I'm skipping very quickly, but I interpret--there are only two long essays in the book, and some in the epilogue and some in the introduction about this particular problem, but I think it embraces--it's the big issue which embraces everything else I talk about, politics and economics and culture in the middle sections of the book.

There has been a relatively small group of Islamic thinkers who depend on and feed off the Islamic tradition, that's true, but whose motives, purposes and motives of action are willing to discard Islamic religion whenever it's useful.  In other words, they instrumentalize their religion.  I think it's hard to argue that they act out of the deep sources of the religion or are even interested in deepening those.  They are interested in enforcing their own political ideas of what an Islamic state would look like, at any cost, at any price, by any method, and they are willing to kill Muslims as well as Christians and Jews or anybody else to get there.

I find it impossible to treat them as serious religious people, except I understand that they trade off some religious ideas and motivations, and they need those, but I think they're willing to betray at any time they need to, and instrumentalize them.

I think that the proper model of what we're calling today, we tend to call, "the terrorists" is as well called--and this is a bit harsh--but I think it's as well called "Islamofascism" for this reason.  Many of the leaders were deeply influenced by--when they tried to modernize their cultures were deeply influenced by the ideas of Stalin and Lenin and communism on the one hand and Hitler and Mussolini on the other, and they had a period between the 1930s and the 1950s of intense interaction with these regimes, in the '30s and '40s through the German and Italian presence in Northern Africa and in large parts of the Middle East, and then through the impact of socialist and communist thinkers and activists.

And they learned how to organize in cells.  They learned the importance of secrecy.  They learned the importance of terror.  They learned the utility of assassination, and shocking terror, spectacular actions, theater, the theater of politics, very much from fascism.  And they are much less popular than the early reports after September 11th suggested, and I think we're seeing more and more the split in the Islamic world between the bulk of the people and the bulk of the leaders and thinkers and the terrorists, partly because the terrorists have been so cruel to Muslim populations too, and heedless of them.

I want to close with just one little anecdote.  Two years ago, in September of 2002, I was asked by the State Department to give a week of lectures to the guerilla leaders of the Sudanese resistance in the southern part of the Sudan.  I was asked to speak about religion and democracy, and then a couple lectures on religion and economics.  And I want to tell you, I was deeply touched.  There were about 40 men there, sometimes with their wives, a couple of women in the leadership, the commanders from all the representative factions.  We met in Eritrea, next door in safety.

I was surprised that about half of them were Muslim because I had thought the rebellion was very largely of Christian populations and of native Africans religions populations against the Muslim government in the north.  Quite the opposite.  About half of them were Muslims who did not want to live under the kind of regime being propounded by the government of Sudan in Khartoum.  It was, let me say in my view--this is too rough and too inaccurate, but it was roughly like the Taliban.  It was an imposition of a kind of sharia law from the 11th century or something, politically motivated, politically activated, and just as willing to chop off the leadership of the Muslim resistance as anybody else.

And one of the leaders was a professor from McGill, and he and others made to me--they came early to these lectures, they stayed late.  They just couldn't get enough talking about religion and politics of religion.  They had very little change to do this.  And they showed me that there's a tremendous turmoil in the Islamics' soul in this sense, as the professor from McGill, and there was another professor from the Sorbonne leading that resistance group:  We want to be devout Muslims.  We are devout Muslims.  But we don't want to go back to the 11th century, don't believe in cutting off hands, don't believe in cutting off feet, can understand how that could be useful in the 11th century, but not now.  And why can't we, if we modernize Islam, look to the universal declaration of human rights and to democracy, rather than to Stalinist and Nazi and fascist methods of operation?  Why couldn't we take the best of the 20th century rather than the worst?  And why could that not be compatible with human rights, with the notion of liberty?  We think in our own lives that liberty functions.  It's all right to be prosperous.  It's all right to be learned.  It's all right to be free as Muslim.  We experienced that.  Why can't that be integrated within Islam?

Now, I'm not Islamic.  I don't know how successful that can be, but you see many more groups around the world engage.  I think Laith can speak to this, how many democratic and other groups there are in the different parts of the Islamic world.  And I think it's our task, while we fight the terrorists--and it's a fight to the death on that front--that we operate also on this other dimension, that there has to be a foundation of ideas on which we can conduct a conversation together, because civilization, I think there is--we're in the throes of building a world civilization which respects pluralism and difference.  It's not all the same.  But the foundation of this civilization is conversation.  There has to be an argument about certain themes, and it seems to me the most likely alternative for all of us are the themes of liberty.  I think that's what people are struggling for in the Muslim as well as in the rest of the world.

Some relief from assassination is the method of regime change because a lot of regimes in that area have changed by assassination.  Some sense of self-government, some relief from secret police all the time in politics, and some relief from the kinds of government that oppress, prevent freedom of opportunity and freedom of initiative and so forth in the economics here.

So I don't think mine is a hopeful book.  There's an Eastern European saying that I like very much.  The difference between optimism and pessimism--some of you have heard me say this--the pessimistic is the fellow who says things are so bad they can't get any worse, and the optimist says, oh, yes they can.

[Laughter.]

MR. NOVAK:  I think that's a sort of key to realism, that there's often a very bleak picture and things look rather hopeless, and yet that's no reason to give up, and as long as you have some probability of making some progress, you simply must--you have an obligation to do that.  So that's where I came out.

I don't know if our great project to advance liberty and in particular in the Muslim world--that is, to help people do that, we can't do it but to help people do that, and to talk about it and organize around it, I don't know if it can succeed.  But I know people in Iraq, by a 40 or 50 percent percentage a year ago and by a greater percentage now, think we have a chance of success at that, and I think that's too big a chance to overlook.  So that's where I end up.

MR. DEMUTH:  Michael, thank you very much.

We're going to begin now with Reuel Gerecht.  Reuel?

MR. GERECHT:  I'll try to be quite brief and leave some of the questions perhaps for our following discussion.  Michael had asked me to be devil's advocate, to try to take issue with him.  So I will try to do that, even though on the broad themes I think we're probably more or less in agreement, but I'll try to nip around the edges.

Now, when I read Michael's book my overriding impression was is that Michael believes that religion actually fortifies the democratic spirit and that the public square in the west has become somewhat naked without--as religion has withdrawn, and it would be better if in fact you had more of a religious experience, more of a religious ethic in the western conversation.  I mean I would tend to agree with that, even though I would say quite quickly that I can't get past Vickenstein [ph] when it comes to communicating the divine spirit in any form of language, but I'll admit immediately that I think that Tocqueville is right, that the religion and the American experience certainly fortified democracy, and I would say in the big scheme of things in Europe, perhaps not to much in the details, that religious experience certainly would have made Europe, at least in the modern age, more humane.  I think if more Frenchmen had acted like the fundamentalist Protestants and pavants [ph], fewer Jews would have died.

Yet, and I would agree also in the Islamic world, I mean I think if democracy is going to succeed in the Muslim world, the individuals who must be drawn in to the experience, who must give it its approval, are in fact amongst the most religious in the Islamic world.  The fundamentalists must partake in this.  The religious classes must partake in this.  The religious schools must partake in this.

I think this is actually happening in Iran.  It is happening in Iraq.  You can find clerics, for example, in the shiite, the holy town of Najaf and elsewhere, who if you ask them the question:  Is democracy in Iraq marouf [ph]?  That's a very important word in Islamic history because it touches upon what you might call the Islamic categorical imperative.  That's [Arabic phrase], which is command the good, forbid the evil, or forbid the wrong.  Marouf is that which is good.  Now in the holy law, that has had a notion that is--I mean that's the most that you go for.  And let's be frank.  When the west and the Muslim world collided after the French Revolution, the initial Muslim reaction, the traditional Muslim reaction to democracy was:  you must be kidding.

I mean you cannot suggest that men can't have a higher place in the overall ethical structure than God can.  I mean Michael is absolutely right.  I mean Islam puts enormous emphasis upon the supremeness of God.  It's sort of St. Anselam's ontological proof on speed.  And that idea certainly to introduce the democratic equation doesn't really make any sense at all.  It's the same reaction that Muslims after 1807 when the British banned the slave trade.  The initial reaction in the Muslim world, as the British envoys went out to see the Ottoman Empire, suggesting to them that slave trade wasn't a good idea, the initial Muslim reaction was absolute horror because of course God had vouchsafed you the right to have slaves.

Now, over time that changed, and over time I think the same reaction in the Muslim world to democracy and to the western idea of individual liberty has changed.  It's changed profoundly.  It has primarily changed because the Muslim world has devoured, since 1798, so many bad western--[blank spot on tape]--and of triumph in the Middle East, and guess what?  Muslims discovered that in fact the world could get very, very dark and ugly.  Now, in Iraq they had particularly discovered that, and that is one of the reasons why they have moved I think so much farther down the road.

Now, they've also discovered something--and this is where also perhaps, there might be some disagreement between Michael and myself--that the democratic experiment, I mean they know this, I mean when you talk to Shiite and Sunni clerics, they are aware of this.  The democracy has within it, without a doubt, a secularizing impulse.  It has to because you are going to open up to public debate many sacrosanct questions.  You are going to open up to public debate basic questions about the holy law.  Now I think more and more Muslims are willing to do that because the experience in the 20th century has been so bloody ugly.  And as you had an evolution, for example, in the attitudes towards slavery, where now outside of certain Saudis, Sudanese and Mauritanians, I think most Muslims would say to you that slavery is unacceptable institution even though it is clearly permitted by God.

Now they would argue what they would do is they'd sort of take a modernist interpretation of that, which is fine because modernist interpretations are as legitimate as ancient ones, that we are going to emphasize what is known as sort of the principle of freedom inside the Koran, that it is better for people to be free than to be slaves, which is fine.  I mean I think that actually gained traction and has become a dominant view in the Muslim world, as I also think that increasingly it is becoming understood that political legitimacy can only come from the ballot box.  I mean there is no doubt, for example, in Iran, that the leaders of the clerical regime there know very well that when Khatami won 69 percent of the vote in his first presidential election in 1997, that in fact that he would have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, had more political legitimacy than did Hashemi Rafsanjani, the two major clerics in that system.

Now, I also have a little bit of problem when Michael says that liberty is at the core of the Muslim experience.  You know, I can twist that and look at it and say yes.  One is that there's a linguistic problem here.  I mean the word just simply doesn't exist, as we understand it, going back that far.  You can't see it.  It's [foreign word], and you will not find it.  As an adjectival or as a noun it expressed--and Bernard Lewis talks about this in great detail--that it expressed the idea simply as a free man as opposed to a slave, but it doesn't actually incorporate all those ideas that we have come to cherish in the west.

What you do have--and I think you can bend this a bit and I think it is being bent in the Islamic world to underscore the western idea of liberty and to import it into the Muslim bloodstream--is that you have at the basis of the Muslim experience the idea that all Muslims are rational free men when it comes to their observation of what you might call the faith.  That is, at the very core of the Muslim confession, the shahada, is the notion of voluntary recognition that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, and that you can see as a Muslim that Islam, as a logical rational choice, is superior to other faiths.  It is that rationalism, which is very, very rigorous in Islam--I mean never ever forget that.  I mean Shiite clerics, Sunni clerics, more Shiite clerics, because I think they're more accomplished in disputation--rationalism is really what makes them tick, which is why you also find individuals who have devoted themselves to holy law, who have devoted themselves to the disputation of ethics, also tend to be clandestine or closet sufis.  I mean it's one of those great things.  And that's another little thing I almost got in Michael's book, that his use of the term "spiritual" is very Christian, and I'm not sure you can translate it into the Islamic world, but if you can translate it into the Islamic world, it is probably some variation of sufiism.

Now, I actually think--again, once this rationalism is I think more of--it is aiding actually the advance of the democratic ethic inside of the Muslim world.  It is what you might call one of the great forces of compare and contrast.  And you do see Muslim clerics, who really still are the heart and soul of the Muslim community in the Sunni world and the Shiite world, arguing about these things, arguing about looking at their pasts, looking at contemporary life, and understanding that the individual, actually the individual Muslim, as an individual, and more importantly as part of the Muslim community, is ultimately responsible for the political choices of the community.  I mean there is a agreed tradition in Islam that my community will not agree upon an error.

Now, implied in that, and certainly modernists move in that direction, is that Muslims as a community have the right to vote.  And you see that, for example, in the Islamic republic, which is by no means a democracy, but it has the superstructure of a democracy, and that even Khomeini, who really could care less about democracy, understood quite clearly that the Islamic republic to be born, for the clerical regime to be born, there had to be a vote.  He could not impose it.

Now, I would just say that--and I think that's the key here.  I mean I want democracy in the Muslim world for a variety of reasons, but one of the things that's important for it to come is that in fact it will be a secularizing process.  It will inevitably be a secularizing process, that the public square in Islam, if in fact democracy moves forward, will become, in a western sense, more naked.

I think in the Islamic world that's probably for the better even though it would say immediately the greatest tragedies in modern history in the Islamic world have certainly been perpetrated by individuals who lost contact with God.  If you compare, for example, what went on in Nasser's Egypt or in Syria or in Iraq, I mean it pales in comparison, for example, to the darkest days of the Islamic revolution, which by western revolutionary standards, even though I would say it's pretty dark, isn't really all that bloody.  Relatively few people lost their lives.  One of the reasons I actually think that's true is the Islamic tradition, the Iranian Islamic traditions held, and though they did shoot women, they didn't shoot that many women.

So there is in fact a force out there, and I think that force is moving forward, and I think the President of the United States, who I think it's fair to say probably doesn't know all that much about the Islamic world, does in fact understand, as Michael does in his book, that there is a basic desire out there, maybe not for what we would understand as individual liberty, but there is a basic idea out there not to be pummeled, and that people want to avoid really the darkness that they have seen in the 20th century, which is causing them to actually reinterpret how they see the holy law, and it's in that reinterpretation of the holy law, of making the disputation, the lines of argument on ethics, that's where the future is, and that's where we will see I think the democratic ethic triumph in the Islamic world out there.

MR. DEMUTH:  Reuel, thank you very much.

Jeane Kirkpatrick?

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK:  Very interesting, very, very interesting.

I think Michael has raised many questions.  I've been reading Michael's books and essays for as long as I've known Michael, which is quite a long time.  And I have never read a book of Michael's that raised as many questions for me as this book actually, and I'll be raising those questions with Michael for quite some time, privately as well as publicly, because I think there are serious--I have serious doubts about some of the propositions that Michael advances in this book.  I'll just mention a few.

In a word, there are four universal liberties which are also Muslim liberties.  First the liberty of Muslims to worship the Almighty, Allah, without terror or coercion, according to conscience and tradition.  So that the praises of Allah may be sung freely in every part of the world with the same freedom that others enjoy in praising God as conscience directs.  Now, that's probably what you were implying.  Second, the liberty to study, learn and inquire, and the liberty to write and speak from the honesty and purity of one's own heart, docile to the light that almighty Allah sheds in all.  Third, liberty from poverty and freedom from want for Muslims everywhere in the world.  Fourth, liberty from torture, tyranny, and arbitrary autocratic government so that all the human, civil and political rights of Muslims are respected everywhere in the world.  Liberty of worship, liberty of speech, liberty from poverty and liberty from tyranny, basic human liberties, simple things, basic things, fundamentals.

We Americans claim no rights that are American rights only.  All our rights are also Muslim rights at the same time.  That's all very well, and we all hope that's the case.  I hope it's the case, that these are Muslim liberties as well as western liberties, Christian liberties, Jewish liberties, American liberties.  But I don't usually understand them as such.  I certainly don't understand them as such when there are ritual beheadings in Iraq, for example, beheadings of Americans, men mainly, but also from time to time, women.

Michael also raises an interesting question about Muslims too.  He says:  "Who today is going to speak for the rights of women in Islam, and poor within the Islamic countries?  Who is going to speak for the opportunity for economic prosperity, for the dignity of individuals, for human rights?  We need to give voice to the rights of all humans, including the rights of Muslims.  We would be unfaithful to ourselves unless we did."  I think we could probably all agree on that.

The problem is that until now, you know, Muslims have not themselves given voice to liberties for all in any country, in any Muslim country I think, that I'm aware of in the world.  Nor have they, in any country that I'm aware of, Muslim countries that is, have they provided rights for all their citizens, least of all women.  I don't want to be narrowly chauvinist in my concern about women in the Muslim world, but it's reasonable for a woman to have special concern about women in the Muslim world, because women are especially deprived of rights in the Muslim world, in virtually every Muslim country that I'm aware of, including some that I have, you know, visited harems, for example, and considered a ruler a friend.  The [inaudible], he permitted me to visit his harem, of course.

[Laughter.]

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK:  Where I met his mother, by the way.  I had no notion I would meet his mother in a harem, you know?  That's how little I know about the Muslim world, frankly, but I know just enough about the Muslim world to know that generally speaking, not only are most women deprived of rights in most Muslim countries, but that most people are deprived of rights, men as well as women, in most Muslim countries.

So I really am skeptical about Michael's sort of sweeping assertions that these four universal liberties are also Muslim liberties which are shared and enjoyed by Muslims.  I hope I'm wrong.  I believe, moreover, that these, some of these liberties that I believe are not shared by Muslims, are essential to modern society, and modern economic life, to capitalism, for example, Michael.  It has been asserted by especially Protestants, but there have many other Christians and Jews as well, that business is a noble vocation.  Protestants sometimes say it's a noble Christian vocation, but it's a noble vocation we can all agree.

And that Protestants and Catholics and Jews assert that individuals should be respected, that liberty is an individual right, that this business of the individual I think is exceedingly important.  There may be greater room for respecting individuals in the Muslim world than I'm aware of, but I'm not aware of it.  I mean I believe that there is ample room for respecting individuals among Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but I'm just not aware of room for respecting individuals.  I think the individual is an essential element of the modern world.  I think that the modern age is grounded in the idea of the individual, which was of course a revolutionary idea, as we all know, that the idea of the individual as a person with a separate social identity and a separate destiny was a revolutionary idea.  And it remains I think today an essential element of modern society, and modern life.  It appeared alongside the modern world.  The notion of the individual as an achieving person, for example, the notion of the individual as a person with individual goals and free to pursue them, to make some individual choices, for example.  Adam Smith, of course, has sensitized us to the importance of the individual in society, to the notion that individuals work hardest when they have the process of individual gain--

[Tape change.]

-- Christianity and Judaism in the modern world.

Thank you.

MR. DeMUTH:  Jeane, thank you very much.

Laith Kubba, please.

MR. KUBBA:  Well, it's a long way to go, actually, in eight minutes trying to cover many of the profound themes that were raised by the book, and I think I'll follow the encouragement I had that I need to be critical and speak my mind on some of the issues raised.

My, I guess, brief bio here does not--it does say that I work for the al-Khoei Foundation, which is for the late Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, and I established Islam 21 as a project.  But it does not say that while I was in my high school--in a Jesuit Catholic school in Iraq, American Catholic school, I actually became an Islamist, and the reason being, I understand now clearly--

MR.           :  Yeah, the Jesuits will do that.

[Laughter.]

MR. KUBBA:  I think I'll move to that, the reason being, having read Novak's book, I understand exactly why it has such an appeal.  And I think a piece of advice to the publisher, Michael, is that if you were to translate and publish the book where you describe not only the role of religion but the core, the essence of those values into Arabic, you will become most popular, especially amongst the Islamic movements and trends.  And it will be a bestseller and you'll be quoted everywhere.  But I assure you, if you were to publish the other chapters where you apply these theories on the Muslim world, it will have exactly the opposite effect.

Now, the reason being, I think while the paradigms you define are fully compatible--and I will give a solid concrete example why they are, and as a Muslim, I'm not moved by--at all by any of the questions or the challenges or the doubts others have because of the clarity that I have in my thought and the clear reference I have on it.  Muslims do have a very serious problem, and I think the book does highlight that problem.  I will try to come to it in a minute.

But let me first--also, I cannot resist the temptation of commenting about why is the issue so confusing and why sometimes with our good will we contribute to the confusion.  I think a good deal has to do with the language we use, and this is something I would highly recommend that we need to revisit a little bit.

There is one story that you tell in the book, which is quite touching, about a Sudanese socialist, a government official who went to build a dam on a place that had some shrine on it, and it nearly caused a riot because the dam was supposed to benefit the people, but they refused it because it was on a shrine.  And it took a wise man to say, look, just move it a few meters away, everything will be okay.  And, in fact, it did.  By moving the location of that dam, people are happy the project was done.  And I think by fine-tuning the language that is used in this discourse we really can avoid huge, huge conflicts that are built in and how we use the adjective "Islamic" in describing a good deal of issues that are to do with people.

I can start maybe by challenging the key theme or the questionable theme, I wouldn't say--because I think you underlined the fact that your senses tell you that the values of Islam are compatible with this, but you also put the question, and you just raised it, why Muslims who see the divinity of God so high that they undermine the human role as an agent.

There is some truth in that, but I am sure if you were to assign an intern to enshrine your book with what verses of the Koran would relate to what values and concepts, you will be surprised by the clarity of the text on this.  As far as people being created in the image of God, it's true, Muslims reject that notion.  But Muslims accept another notion in the Koran, which, again, I am surprised it didn't get your attention, and that is, it says clearly when God created the human beings, Adam, and breathed in him his spirit.  So it's not that God simply created the physical image, but God breathed his spirit in us.  And that certainly elevates the human soul to a high level of divinity.

The other notion where it specifically talks about God breathing his spirit into humans is when it refers to Jesus, and that's the reason the reference in the Koran is Ruhullah, which is the spirit of God.  This is the name of Jesus in the Koran.

But let me quote also--part of the problem, again, other than the adjective, is why we need conceptually to make the clear distinction between the faith which is a revelation and its echoes throughout societies, cultures, and histories, implementations, and how it interacts, and often we from a distance call this whole world Islamic world, and it's actually world of Muslims, people who follow that faith, with all their diversities.  Certainly those who follow the Christian faith spread from Latin America to the Philippines, and I need not focus my attention on simply the Europeans when I talk about the Christian faith, for example.

When it comes to the Muslim world, I think some of the remarks that are raised are problematic about the cultures in different countries, including the Muslims, but in particular in the Middle East and the Arab culture.

Let me give you two or three also in clear violation of clear Islamic--Koranic statement, yet it is done up until today.  Revenge killing.  It is absolutely explicitly said in the Koran there is no way you can get into revenge killing, yet it is up until today widely practiced, in Yemen, in areas that have tribes, some tribal culture.  Another one is honor killing for women.  There is absolutely--the maximum reference--the maximum punishment is lashing that is like Koranically mentioned.  But killing a soul?  This is not a Koranic practice.

I can quote many other examples that are in culture, but they are in clear contradiction to what are clearly stated in the Koran.  And this is not unusual.  The natural question that comes, well, if the Koran is so clear about all these values, then what is it that is missing in the Muslim culture?  And this is a valid question.  I think Muslims have within the framework you've described, have to--can learn and have to learn a great deal from the lessons from Christians and Jews in a number of fields, including how they dealt with their religious text.  I think the essays that you referred to in the past about the derivation of social and political agendas that has a moral, religious element in them is something in particular Muslims have to go to because nearly all Islamic movements start with the moral dimension, with the core, with the belief that there is a dimension that simply socialism secularism, other ideologies that try to push it away in a corner and take it away from public life shouldn't do, and that Islam calls them to add that moral dimension to their life.

Where it goes wrong is in the derivation, and I think the concepts of development of doctrines that you refer to are, in particular, one area where Muslim scholars and others need to look at.

If I were to--as I said, I think the book takes some very serious steps into trying to frame a debate with Muslim scholars and institutions, and I think despite the long way and, as I said, maybe according to your definition I'm an optimist now, I'm no longer a pessimist.  But I believe it's a good start.  In order for that debate to be successful, we, again, my assessment is, need not define the whole issues there within the Judeo/Christian/Islamic or Muslim issue.  I do believe that the moral faith of the nation is real, but there are two other dimensions that need to be integrated in the analysis and in the discourse.

One, apart from the moral, religious dimension, we need to look at people's cultures as they stand as people's cultures.  When you want to apply simply the model paradigm on what's happening in the Muslim countries or with the Muslim countries, there are many, many limitations, and I see the paradigm failing.

To what extent, for example, would you attribute civil wars that take place, whether it's in Bosnia, whether it's in Lebanon or others, to religion or to conditions there?  The seeds, I think, that religion--that the revelation, the Abrahamic revelations bring, all of them in essence, I believe clearly, and as the Koran states, are the same.  I think the challenge is they're nurtured in different conditions.

Should we argue that in the last century 200 million people died in wars in Europe with genocide, et cetera?  Should we attribute this to political, cultural issues?  Or should we say this has been driven by religion?  I don't think it's been driven by religion.  I think we might have religion being utilized and integrated into this, but I genuinely do not believe it's driven by religion.

I think for this debate to be useful, we need to engage Muslims on the other side, not Muslims who reject their faith, not Muslims who are more or less self-hating or basically self-bashing.  I think we need to engage Muslims who clearly acknowledge the core values that you refer to and are prepared to work within those core values within their faith and belief in Islam, and take that debate further.  And it's a long, long way to go.

MR. DeMUTH:  Thank you very much, Laith.

Michael Ledeen, please.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.  As you've figured out by now, Michael asked us all to be brief and all of us to be critical.  And I'm not going to be all that critical, I don't think, because, I mean, I find this book amazing that in the middle of this huge war that we are in right now, that it occurred to Michael Novak to write a book on what are we going to do after this war, how do we fix it once this war is fought, and so forth.  And I am not smart enough to know whether what Michael says is right or wrong about how to fix it in the future.

But I am struck as a practicing historian by various things.  I think that if there's one great fundamental mistake, not only here but in the way a lot of debate is going on about the world, it is to take the post-World War II period as normal.  And when I was in graduate school, we all had to read a book whose central thesis was that the 19th century was the century of total peace and that this needed explanation, because there was nothing like it, all this peace.  And, of course, there were plenty of wars in the 19th century.  But there was no huge war.  There was no world war.  Whereas, there had been world wars in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and then again in the 20th century, there were world wars.  So the 19th century was odd because there were so few wars.

And then, of course, after World War II, there was a period when it didn't seem as if there were so many wars, although if you look back on it now, there were lots of them.  And one of my favorite current factoids is that at this moment there are fewer wars going on than at any time in the last hundred years, and there are fewer people being killed per year in war today than at any moment in the last century.  It's sort of curious as to how little--how bad a perspective we have on what's going on.

Anyway, my point is, at least as we think of it, we think of, you know, a lot of bad things happened.  Then World War II ended.  Then we got on with the business of civil society and tolerance and civilization and so forth.  Well, you know, I had to live with Machiavelli for four years, and he relentlessly reminds us man is more inclined to do evil than to do good.  War is normal, peace is rare.  Man spends most of his time preparing for the next war or fighting it.  And I believe that.  So I think a lot of this business about dialogue is admirable and wonderful and inspirational and so forth, but in a way beside the point.  And it's driven home by the fact--you have a terrific section in here about how Christianity came to accept democracy, which is a big theme.  It's a fascinating issue, because Christianity--all religion, I mean, religion is by its essence dogmatic.  It's not tolerant.  Toleration is a rare idea.

The first tolerant person in Europe, I was once taught, was Pierre Bayle.  Now, that's 17th century.  That's pretty late in the idea.

The idea of toleration, not that we let them live, we let them exist, but, no, I mean, we give them equal standing and we'll have--that was brought in by a radical skeptic in France at a time of terrible religious warfare between various religious groups.

And if you look at how the Catholic Church evolved, it occurred to me--and that's basically what you're saying, isn't it?  That the real embrace of democracy on the part of the Catholic Church happened after the Second World War, after an evolution, after a period of many centuries in which the church, not as a religious institution, not as a set of ideas, not as a set of beliefs, but as a thing, as a state, as a nation state, complete with treasuries, armies, and all the rest of it, was beaten over and over and over and over again and finally they gave it up.

It was much easier for the Jews because, I mean, the Jews lost it a couple of thousand years ago, and then from then on they were minority.  It's much easier for a minority to embrace democracy than it is for the majority to accept it, because the majority wants to impose itself, wants to dominate.  It's human nature.  I don't care whether it's Islam or Christianity or Judaism, whatever it is.  It's the nature of man.  Whatever you've got, you want more, always.  You have power, you want more power.  You dominate, you want to dominate more, you want to extend your domination.  That's history.  I'm sorry about all this, you know, but, I mean--

[Laughter.]

MR. LEDEEN:  I don't celebrate it, but it's the way it is.  I mean, we don't teach history anymore, and we now have this sort of cult of multiculturalism where everything is fine, everything's as good as everything else, and, you know, we just have to understand one another, everything will be cool.  But it won't.

Now, you talk a lot about Toqueville, which is terribly important, and Jeane talked a lot about individualism.  And as you know, they intersect because the word "individualism" was invented by Toqueville.  It didn't exist before.  Even though I have to think that somehow Pericles, if you'd asked him, you know, he would have understood it in some way.  He had a sense of it.  But the word as a word comes from America in the 19th century, in the 1830s.  And it had never occurred to European culture before that.  There was no such word.  And so we, all believers in the   (?)  hypothesis and  (?) -instein and so forth, we think that the concept wasn't there.  Anyway, the word wasn't there.  It came from us.

And what's unique about American religion is its respect for minorities, is that religion is torn away from the state, and it becomes a free thing.  It's private.  And so religion rises and falls, succeeds or fails on the basis of the market, as it were.  People like it, they go to that church, that church flourishes.  They don't like it, they don't go there, then the priest has to find a different job.

Now, Toqueville said, you know, people--and he said it's amazing that in this environment, a free religious environment, religion flourishes in a way that it doesn't flourish in Europe.  Right?  Which made me think, paradoxically, about Iran.  I mean, there are now huge demonstrations in the streets of Iran right now, and the people who are opposed to this regime, a theocratic regime, some of them are very religious, grand ayatollahs, they've denounced it, they've called it a heresy because they think that when it comes down, Islam is going to come down with it.  And some of them are secular, people who will never vote for a person with a turban and don't want them at all in religious life.  And Reuel has taught me that one of the most hopeful elements in Islam--and he referred to it--is Shi'ite Islam because Shi'ite Islam is the one part of it that insists on some kind of separation between mosque and state.  It's one of the great things about Iraq is you have a man like Sistani who says people in turbans stay in the mosque, people in double-breasted suits stay in the parliament.  And that's what we're looking for.

So what I'm trying to say is that these issues are enormously more complex, I think, and I love the idea of dialogue.  You know, who's not for dialogue?  But I think history is very discouraging about all of this.  Human history is not encouraging.  However, if you take it seriously, I think it explains to you what has to happen for this kind of transformation of a great religion to take place, and that is, it must be defeated in its present form.  It must be defeated.  And if it's not defeated, there's no reason from within because these things don't happen from within.  They come out of conflict.  They come out of where they are tested against other people being tested.  When they lose, then they say maybe the whole idea was wrong.  And then you can get at it.  But I don't think you can get at it until it's over, and that's why I've been saying all along that these issues, terribly important, brilliantly exposed by you and marvelously argued, I think the time for them is not now.  I think we have to win the war first before we can get at them.

Thanks.

MR. DeMUTH:  Michael, thank you very much.

And, finally, we will hear from Josh Muravchik.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Well, everything that needs to be said has already been said, but not everyone has yet said it.

[Laughter.]

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Let me start by congratulating Michael on a really stimulating and, although he denied it, a hopeful book.  And I'm happy to salute him in the launching of this book.

As you heard, Michael asked us all to be contrarian at this discussion, and so I want to get in my few contrarian words on a less philosophical plane than a lot of the discussion has been, but more on the sort of concrete political reality of the Islamic world.  As those who are acquainted with my work will know, I'm a very insistent and long-standing democratic universalist.  But I thought for the sake of the discussion this evening that I would make some points to the contrary; that is that although the argument that Michael brings about the universal hunger for liberty is very eloquent and elegant, I think that it also--especially for those of us who embrace the idea of trying to encourage the spread liberty and democracy in the Islamic world, to come to grips with what we are up against.  And I think that in the run-up to the war in Iraq, I sometimes I heard discourse on this from my friends that was glib, was slow to take account of what it is that we're up against.  And that is the very great resistance to liberal and democratic ideas that we have experienced thus far in the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world in general.

And we can see this if, for example, we look at the Freedom House data, which is really quite dramatic and powerful; that is, if you look at countries in the world that are free and unfree, of the countries with Muslim majorities, 60 percent are unfree and 4 percent are free.  A Muslim majority country is 15 times more likely to be unfree than it is to be free.  If you look at all the rest of the societies in the world, including advanced and the non-advanced, but you lump them together, 60 percent of those are free and 15 percent are unfree; that is, a non-Muslim country is four times as likely to be free as unfree.  If you go and look at the measures of democracy and so on, you see something similar, a very, very dramatic contrast.

And then we also see any number of troubling public opinion polls in the Islamic world.  I don't mean troubling just in the sense that they're antagonistic to the United States, but the extent to which, when asked who are your heroes, the names that we find being recorded most often today are Nasser, bin Laden, Sheikh Nasrallah, and also on behalf of the West, Jacques Chirac, for, I think, very special reasons.  And I think we also see things that give us some image of the--some sense of some of the underlying psychological, attitudinal, cognitive issues that feed into this or undergird this illiberalism.  One is the epistemological backwardness, that is, the public opinion polls that show us about 9/11 that by overwhelming majorities it's not believed that Arabs did it, even after the tapes were released of bin Laden boasting about it.  But who did it was the CIA and Mossad or take your pick of that ilk, as well as the widespread fascination with conspiracy theories and the popularity of protocols of the Elders of Zion and other entirely discredited fantasies and the affinity for fantasy that shows itself there.

Another is the inability to differentiate ends from means or procedure from results, which is probably the most fundamental building block of a democratic mentality.  But we see this again and again in discussions of terrorism in the UN and elsewhere in which the Islamic states insist that terrorism is something that they will only define in terms of who is doing it to whom; that is, anything done by good guys to bad guys by definition cannot be terrorism, and anything done by bad guys to good guys by definition is terrorism.  And no matter how others try to make the point, well, let's separate the act from who's doing it, this seems to get no traction whatsoever.

And then there is this strange and sort of overwhelming sense of honor that seems to be so much a part of the discourse in the Islamic world where we hear stories of their life being one of sort of an endless series of unbearable humiliation at the hands of the United States, the West, and Israel.  And this is a sense of honor though it doesn't seem to me to be honor that's based on a concept of morality that I myself should do the right thing in order to be honorable but, rather, honor that's based on a kind of invidious sense of status, that I have certain status and all kinds of other things that other people may do that seem as if it may lower my status as an affront against my honor.  And I think all of these attitudes are very troubling.

In the end, I will join, I will endorse Michael's proclamation that there is a universal hunger for liberty, and I'm steadfast in my goal of trying to encourage the spread of liberty and democracy in this world.  But I think it behooves all of us who are embracing that mission to try to come to grips with a very serious challenge we're up against.

MR. DeMUTH:  Josh, thank you very much.

Michael Novak, having stirred up such strong and intense and diverse, decided to excuse himself.

[Laughter.]

MR. DeMUTH:  He will be back in just a moment, and while we wait, I want to see if there are points that individuals on the panel wish to make to each other.

I have a question, Josh.  My understanding was that the large majority of Muslims, in fact, lived in societies where the government was to some substantial extent democratic, not largely Arab governments but Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, a substantial majority of all Muslims worldwide.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Yes, but that's a tricky figure.  There are 47 predominantly Muslim countries, of which 22 are Arab and 25 non-Arab.  Of the Arab countries, none are free or democratic.  Of the non-Arab Muslim 25 countries, nine have elected governments, of which four are rated free by Freedom House, meaning liberal democracy.  The figure about the majority of the world's Muslims living in free or democratic countries includes a very large number who live in countries in which they are the minority.  So I'm not sure how much light--that includes American Muslims.  And so I'm not sure what that figure tells us when we count it in that way.

MR. DeMUTH:  Michael will be back, but I wondered first if among the panelists there were comments that anybody wished to make on anybody else's.  I'm going to give Michael a chance to respond, and then I'm going to go to the audience as quickly as I can.

[No response.]

MR. DeMUTH:  Let me turn then and see if there are any particular questions that--yes.  If you could wait, we have a microphone that will get to you pronto.  And if people could introduce themselves.

MR. GERSCHMAN:  Carl Gerschman (ph) from the NED.  I want to follow up on your point, Chris, because I think it speaks directly to the point that Laith made and it's sort of been neglected in the discussion, which is to make the distinction between religion and culture, and, you know, to what extent and how is the problem the religion of Islam and to what extent it is a problem of particular political cultures.  And that really has not been adequately addressed.  Is there a problem with Islam per se?  Jeane was saying that there is.  What is the problem?  Mike suggested there might be in terms of, you know, the idea of the omnipotence of the supreme being and, therefore, the impotence of the human being.  But to what extent is that the problem when you just had a terrific election in Indonesia that you've just had, and it seems to be more a problem which is embedded in the culture which I guess produced Islam, namely, the Arab culture?

MR. DeMUTH:  Michael, I'm going to give you an opportunity--I think that there are questions from the audience.  We are formally out of time, but I'm going to run over a little bit.  The presentations have been absolutely engrossing and I think very productive, and I'd like to go on for a few minutes, if we may.

MR. NOVAK:  The responses have been terrific, and I'm really very grateful.  You understand why being here is such a privilege and why we so much love being with our colleagues, who never agree with us and always find points we didn't pick up, and that's the beauty of it.  And I always feel with my colleagues--I feel like a graduate student again with professors and learning about things that they know that I don't.  So I'm very grateful for that.

I do want to say that think tanks, in my view, are meant for exploration.  We're supposed to go into territories where people are not present yet and where there's not settled doctrine in anything and try some explorations.  We may be wrong, but you learn a lot by being wrong, but it's worth going in.  And I would add to that I've always thought especially in difficult times, Mike, that in a war situation--and I think there's a long   (?)  issue behind the war, too, that we have to address.  It's necessary with armies to have certain people who are willing to go up under the barbed wire with bangalore torpedoes and try to get back and then blow them up, and sometimes you don't quite make it back, but somebody's got to go out there and do that work, too.  So I was willing to go into some territory where I don't know everything that I should--need to know, but I don't think we have time to wait for all that.

My brother, my younger brother, wanted to specialize in Islamic, he thought; I thought too in college.  We both had this idea that there aren't enough scholars in the Christian world who understand Islam.  There isn't the kind of dialogue that there really ought to be given the history of the 12th through 13th centuries, 11th through 13th centuries.  There was an unfinished project there left on the table and almost not addressed.  Specialists do it, but not in public very much.  But, anyway, it seemed to me it's important to go into.

My rhetorical strategy is doing the book was to state things from a Christian point of view, a Christian and American point of view, but be as sympathetic as I could to Muslim materials, as much as I could learn about them and learn in conversations with Muslims.  I didn't want to try to pretend to state it from the Muslim point of view because I don't know enough, but to go as far as I could in mine, and that accounts, Jeane, for my statement of the four liberties.  I remember early in the war writing a memo suggesting that the United States could not just go into war to stop terrorism any more than Franklin Roosevelt could go into World War II to stop Nazism.  He issued the four freedoms.  It just helps everybody have a positive view of what you'd like, what you want.  So I wanted to state in there, and can Muslims respond to that?  Is there an Islamic response?

Well, reading some of the materials in the journals of Islam and democracy and reading about some of the liberal movements of the last hundred years or so, I thought, yes, indeed, there are Islamic materials that do that, some secular, some more religious.  And they're small groups, and they're persecuted and under restraints, but there are a lot of them.  So I think there's a possibility of something hopeful.

Second, Michael Ledeen picked up a very important theme.  In the Catholic world, we do a lot with this theory of development, how ideas which were barely seeds in the third century or the fourth sometimes lie hidden and unfertile for a long time and then come to bear fruit.  And it takes a lot of events in the world usually to make them to happen.  It's not merely a matter of ideas.  Things change in the world, and then you find ideas which are there in fragmentary form which you can develop and make something of, texts or whatever.

And so I was looking at things from that point of view, too.  What can we say, what questions can we address--and dialogue is also a challenge.  What questions can we address in conversation with Muslim scholars and others like these men in the field that I was talking about that invite them to think about things in a way they haven't thought about them before, but they might be able to figure out an Islamic way of thinking about them, in fact, find lots of precedents for thinking that way.

The various traditions that we're all meeting draw off from one another things nobody expected in the beginning.  New questions are raised.  New possibilities emerge.  You're embarrassed because you haven't thought of that, you haven't developed that as far as you should.  You've got to go back to the drawing board.  And that was one major reason for the long couple chapters on Catholicism and capitalism, Catholicism and democracy.  These were not accepted ideas, and there were good reasons for resisting them.  They weren't stupid.  And they weren't right either, but they had to be overcome little by little, and often by practice.  Practice often proved to the teacher that disputation was not.  People developed answers.  You could give arguments for religious freedom and so forth in theory, and people would answer them in favor of what Michael called the view of majority dominance or majority rule, the practice of Spain for non-Catholics or Italy for non-Catholics rather than the practice of the United States.

But faced with the extreme on the opposite side, a whole series of Catholic thinkers began to recognize it was better to err on the side of liberty if you're going to err at all, better to err in the direction of indifferentism and relativism and multiculturalism and all the other nonsense, but to err on the side of liberty than to err on the side of too much control, too much insistence on a single point of view.

And it seems to me that the very sudden but growing desire in parts of the world which they're seeing for the first time in their lives through television and other things, they see a prosperity they didn't know existed.  They see whole cadres of people who in their country would be very poor who are not poor.  I have in mind the image of American movies.  Sometimes would allow to go by in the Soviet Union or in Poland or elsewhere pictures of a supermarket inside with all the meats lined up, and the censors didn't realize how destructive of morale that would be in countries where there were no meat markets with full things of meat.  And they learned that--I remember when I went to Poland, "Roots" was playing.  The communists put it on because they wanted to show the Poles that also in America there was slavery.

I came the week after it was shown, and everybody was laughing and telling me, My God, in America, even a century ago, your slaves lived better than we do.  So they didn't draw the lesson that the censors wanted them to.

My point is that in the Islamic world, too, people are beginning to see possibilities that even 50 years ago they never saw, and they're beginning to recognize as reality things which they didn't imagine.  And those changes are only going to increase as time goes on.

So we don't know what the public opinion is going to be, Josh, I think, in 20 or 30 years.  I think the fall, the sudden fall of Saddam was already a great lesson in the Islamic world.  The tyranny of the Taliban, we are lucky that the Taliban and Khomeini and the leaders of Sudan, the ones with the most extreme political view in the name of religion--false name of religion, I think, but in the name of religion--have proved to be so ugly, so much torture, so much imprisonment, so much ruthlessness, even against their own people, even against good people that other people know are good people, that they've discredited themselves.  And that is opening up space.

Also, you know, every time we predicted that after 1991 the Soviet Union would fail in this or that way, they came through.  They came through that first winter without starvation.  They had another election, they had another election.  Well, something similar I see--that story is not over and it may not have a happy ending.  That's not my point.  But that constitution which they came up with in Iraq is so much better than anybody predicted, I think, in terms of the liberties and the ideals that Jeane was talking about.

You have to be heartened that that much is there, I think, and just keep--at the beginning--we've been in this--imagine we've been in a conversation with Islam pretty full for a thousand years.  Well, it takes another thousand years.  And the war has to be stopped.  There's no doubt about that.

MR.           :  No, the war has to be won.

MR. NOVAK:  The war has to be won.  That's really what I mean.  I'm entirely for that.  And I agree that in itself is a great teacher, just as Michael said.  I believe that thoroughly.

I also believe, Michael, your argument in your recent piece in National Review online about Iran, that the shift in public opinion in Iran is so dramatic, such great proportions are in favor of a change of regime, that a lot is thinkable that wouldn't have been thinkable 10 years ago or 15 years ago.  So that means, that says to me that in the world of the spirit, if I can use that term, a lot is changing underneath the surface, and we should be--our civilization should be present with a body of ideas that will engage the best of Islamic scholars in good debate, in which they would feel respected, in which they would have points to make about our version of secularism.  They would even start sounding sometimes like neoconservatives in this reaction to some of the nonsense that they see in America and elsewhere.  And they would make some solid points, I think, and they would make some that would not be so good, which we would want to rebut.

But anyway, they will have points to make, we will have points to make, and much better that we have a conversation.  And I think the main thing is to remove, to persuade by argument and example the bulk of the Muslim population to be in favor of plenty and liberty rather than in favor of resentment and destruction.  And I think that basic desire is--people want it for their families.  I think there's something there to work with.  And I'm willing to make a try at that, make a run at it.  If we can't, it's just going to be bloody war.

Let me end on this.  I often have the image of my grandmother, Grandmother Novak.  She was such a doer woman and such a sad and pessimistic woman, and God knows she had reasons for it.  But I was at Stanford when Professor Ehrlich was predicting the end of the world, overpopulation, the oceans turning bracken like open sewers, and we were going to die the worst form of all deaths, you know, up to our armpits in those thundering herds of pattering feet from the population explosion.  And I imagined explaining to my mother, did she know that by--this is 1960, 1968.  Did she know that by 1984 the world was going to die a horrible death through overpopulation and the waters being poisoned and the air being poisoned?  What do you think about that, Grandma?  And I knew exactly--my fantasy was I knew exactly what she would say.  She would say, [inaudible].

[Laughter.]

MR. NOVAK:  She knew.  I mean, I didn't have to tell her.  She knew the world was going to end badly, and it was only a matter of time.  So what was new?  So if it ends terribly badly, [inaudible].  But I think while we have a chance, we've got to move for what I think is the heart of the human adventure, which is a conversation, indifference, we don't have to be the same.  We can really argue.  But you have to lay down evidence and arguments, and if you argue on the side of liberty, I think the record is pretty clear you have a very good chance of winning.  I think the world was made for liberty.  That's what Jews and Christians have believed, and sticking with that belief has a lot of probability on its side.  Liberty comes through a lot of things where you don't expect it to, and I'd rather put my money on that and die putting my money on that than the reverse.

I just suspect there are a lot of Muslims in the world who in practice do that, even though the idea has been buried in Islamic culture and not nearly as much made of it as could be made.  It's not front and center the way it could be.  But I think events in the world are pushing it front and center, also for the Islamic world, and if the Catholic world could do it, the Islamic world could do it.  That's what I -- [tape ends].

MR. DeMUTH:  -- and we are over the time when we promised to put everyone here at liberty that I am tempted to conclude, and I am going to conclude, but I'm going to look around the room very, very quickly to see if there is somebody that needs to say a word.  Otherwise, I'm going to leave the discussions for the reception afterwards, and I think that we should continue these conversations with all of the individuals here and amongst ourselves.

I would like to thank our five panelists for reading the book, thinking about it so deeply, and coming prepared with such a tremendously trenchant commentaries.

Most of all, I would like to thank and congratulate Michael Novak and express my and our admiration for his great achievement.

Thank you very much.  We are adjourned.

[Applause.]