I think there's a fair amount of truth in this.
During my time studying comparative religion at uni, I always found the Islamic faith the most difficult in which to talk about contemporary issues.
The problem resides in the nature of Islam itself, or more accurately, the nature of the Qu'aan.
The idea is that the Qu'aan is the word of God, from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
As far as I am aware, no other religion makes this claim.
The Bible, for instance, was taken down by scribes many years after the events supposidly took place, and often by disciples- its the word of falliable men, not gods.
The Qu'aan is said to be the word of God, therefore it cannot be wrong.
God can't be falliable, so the Qu'aan can't be falliable.
Also, therefore, it can't be updated, which is a problem.

Unfortunately, organised religion doesn't like its authority challenged.
Why would it? Those who have power seek to hold it.
But change happens because the world is a changing place.
The nature of the Qu'aan makes it difficult for Muslims to challenge the organisations which run Islam without fear of excommunication or, in the more fundementalist states, death.
There isn't really an answer to this, except to realise that religious organisations are not religions.
To say so is like saying Esso is petrol. It isn't. It just sells it, generally using pretty unscrupulous means.
The directors of Esso probably know little about petrol, they just know about holding the reigns of power.
The same is true of those who run religious organisations.
Take a look at fundementalists. I mean what the fuck are they on?
Having said that, I know a few Muslims who were once quite 'fundementalist' in terms of growing beards, dressing tradionally and praying five times a day who have since challenged the insitutions which ran the mosques they attended to update, especially on issues such as women's rights.
The result saw them leaving the mosques, living more open lifestyles and actually feeling 'more Muslim' than previously.

Institutions are often run by men, and this is the only reason women are given second hand status- they are a huge threat to this power.
It will change through politics becoming more moderate in Islamic countries and those people being able to challenge the authority of the mosques.
The same has happened countless times over countless issues in many religions.
Once people start to leave the mosques over these issues, the mosques will either update or die. Its called 'survival of the fittest' and its as true in religon as it is in science.
All women is quite a large demeographic for the mosques to lose.
The mosques wouldn't survive if women left them en masse.
This will lead to a much more personal, organic and balanced breed of Islam.
Many people follow it already. I imagine the Muslims on this site, for example, practice it.

Fuck I'm glad I'm Zen and can say, do and think whatever the bugger I want.
I'm shutting up now.

Fantastic - what guts that woman must have. Did you see that cleric? She really got to him.

I've also got to say kudos to the network for having her on the program. I don't think she'll be invited back in a hurry though.

Yeah I think I'd have punched that cleric once he started waving his arms like a gibbon.
But this is generally all these people can do to make people listen to them, afterall what they are actually saying is just garbled rhetorical bullshit.
I really do think women are the future of Islam.
They have the power base in Islamic culture to bring it to an absolute standstill if they all do what that lady did and refuse to play ball.

It's always the fundamentalists that are the crazy ones. There are many Muslims living amongst us who do not believe the rhetoric. Just the same, there are wacko fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. who think it's ok to kill abortion doctors because the doctors are commiting murder in "God's eyes".

Spooky, why not black anymore?

Yeah, she makes some good points. But then again, I know Muslims who literally wouldn't hurt a fly, and self-described "Christians" who believe we should nuke the twenty largest Arab and Persian cities and turn the whole Middle East into an American colony. I don't think it's so much a clash between civilization and barbarism as much as a clash between two barbarisms, one of which is partially constrained by a civilization. Jews and Christians do, in fact, go shoot up and bomb mosques, and murder defenseless Muslim women and children, and I'm not sure it's even entirely fair to say Muslims started it, when you consider the legacy of colonialism.

That being said, of course, she's totally right that protesting by murder is barbaric is not going to gain anything for Islam. Shit, just down the street from me the other day there was that "Muslim American [who was] upset at Israel" and decided to show it by shooting a half-dozen unarmed women at the Jewish Center. That's no way to make your point, and a guy who'd do something like that deserves only to be strangled with his own severed testicles.

Oh well.

That's testosterone irony: live by the balls, die by the balls.

Oh, and as much as her words can be debated and dissected (as everyone's can), I really did enjoy the chance to listen to a calm, rational, well-ordered and lucid point of view for a change. Thanks for that!

There are Christian sects which take that position. Isn't it universally held, within churches, that the Bible was compiled by people who were divinely inspired? The issue has come up recently with the De Vinci code, church heads stating their position very plainly that Bible is not open review. It's not like Qu'aan comes with a stamp, straight from God, that it's all good. It wasn't even written down for a long time. So they're in much the same position of putting their faith in the idea of divinely inspired writers.

Perhaps the scope of the Qu'aan is the key difference. But I'm not convinced that it's best described as a religious problem. The people bombing and shooting are ignoring such huge swaths of text. Tribalism, with a religious component, seems a better model.

I love the fact that she stood up for herself in front of a cleric, although I think once the cleric started asking her if she was a heretic, he quit listening, because there was nothing he could do for her. Nothing in the world will make people more close minded than religion and politics.

It is, but only by the people who needed to claim the compilers were such in order to maintain their own powebase.
I certainly agree this is not a religious problem- its an organisational one.
Anyone who actually studied the Qu'aan in and of itself would see it actually carries a peaceful ideology (and, like the Bible, is largely metaphorical) but people don't study, they just listen to clerics.
The Qu'aan is not actually the word of God, even if you believe in God, but again, its the claim that it is that makes it more difficult for Muslims to believe something alternative than it does for other traditions.
Moderation is the key, which makes it a shame that Lebanon is in such a mess right now, because given time the environment there would be pretty forward thinking.

Im currently depolyed in the baghdad area, and you can even the big changes here. along with increased pressure being put on the muslim community by its leaders.

The shiites still maintain the strict rules, wearing clothing that covers the whole body, being subserveant, etc. the sunni women are more lacks about it all. they were jeans shirts, skirts. it is still conservitive. we now have women that are translators when we first came here there was only men because it was against the Qu'aan for women to talk or work with men.

the leaders just recently put out a commercial showing a woman that had been turned into a dog. she had a snout, 6 breasts, and tail. the reason this happend was because she " was watching american tv, and then because of the subliminal messages lying in the show she then tore up her mother Qu'aan. so Ala turned her into a dog.

I think what has brought muslim women to realize there is more out there is TV and internet. which were banned in Iraq under Saddams rule. I shit you not everyone here has satallite tv, including the people living in mud huts.

and this increase in civil war here is partly due to the fact that the two groups are growing farther apart. one is still holding onto the old ways and others are moving away from that.

I think that in a lot of ways, variations on that theme have been the defining conflicts of the last 70 years or so. There isn't any place for zealots (of any stripe) in a liberal, pluralistic world. Nobody has a monopoly on the 'market place of ideas' anymore and that scares the shit out of a lot of people.

"You can believe in stones, but don't throw them at me," just became my new motto. Amazing woman.

Very inspiring to hear from a smart, informed & peceptive grunt who's out there in the shit as I write this. You've got a good head on your shoulders, man, so keep it there. And by that I mean get your ass back home to the States safe & in one piece ASAP.

Spot on. I think that's the entire rationale behind the 11 September attacks; to generate a backlash. bin Laden and his like want to drive liberal pluralism out. And guess what? So do GWB and his backers. A marriage made in hell.