After the war: caution, hope; can Muslim world respect rights? (Commentary).

LEAVING aside the "blood for oil" slander made by its severest critics, the Bush administration has been clear about its ultimate aspiration for the Middle East: a Muslim world that is open, progressive, capitalist and democratic.

The goal has met with some skepticism in the West, and President Bush has been equally emphatic in rebutting the doubters, as he did in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

"There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values," Bush said. 'They were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken."

Bush went on: "Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet.., freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror."

Here Bush joins a debate that percolated for a generation before. it reached a roiling boil after Sept. 11, 2001. On one side are the idealists who see an Islamic world eager to embrace democracy and prepared to nurture it; on the other side are the skeptics who say that democratic values are a uniquely Western creation to which the culture of the Muslim Middle East will be forever inhospitable.

"Both sides, the skeptics and the idealists, are half wrong and half right," says Ronald Inglehart, program director at the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

In a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, Inglehart and his co-author, Pippa Norris of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, examined political and cultural attitudes in the Islamic world and were surprised at what they found.

"President Bush is right," Inglehart says. 'There is a widespread desire for and approval of democracy throughout Islamic societies."

Indeed, in several Muslim countries--Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey, for example-- democracy is endorsed by a higher percentage of the population than in the U.S.

Among measurements of public opinion, Inglehart says, two indicators tower over all others as predictors of democratic viability.

The first is tolerance for "out groups," such as racial or ethnic minorities; the second is support for sexual equality. Countries in which both developments are encouraged are almost certain to be democracies - and, conversely, all democracies encourage both.

The legal protection of women's rights is a particularly crucial indicator, Inglehart says. Which presents a problem for islamic societies. He and Norris write: "On the matter of equal rights for women, measured by such questions as whether men make better political leaders than women ... Western and Muslim countries score 82 percent and 55 percent respectively."

Inglehart's analysis closely follows that of Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam and professor emeritus at Princeton.

He contends the greatest historical reason why Islam has resisted democracy is the subjugation of women--institutional restraints that deny them access to education, commercial enterprise and the accumulation of property.

Lewis quotes a 19th century Turkish writer, Namik Kemal, who compared Islamic society to a "human body that is paralyzed on one side."

So, should we be idealistic or skeptical about the prospects for democracy in the Muslim world? Resistance to sexual eqality holds steady among Muslim societies, regardless of age. 'The cultural gap between the democratic West and Islam, in other words, is getting wider," Inglehart says. Whether, or how soon, the gap closes will determine the prospects for Islamic democracy.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloornberg News.