Saudi Arabia moderates struggle to understand. (A Study of Islam).

Editor's Note: From June 15 through June 30, two dozen editorial writers toured three Islamic nations -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uzbekistan. Saudi Arabia was chosen because it is a nation in which the Qur'an is the law of the land. Egypt is a state where church and state are related but there is an official separation. Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, is an ex-Soviet state and an historical link with the spread of Islam. Following are three views of what the NCEW group encountered.

Islam, the unswervingly monotheistic religion that swept out of the Arabian peninsula nearly 14 centuries ago and now counts more than one billion followers around the world, is struggling to reclaim its true heart and soul.

In Saudi Arabia, Islam's Ground Zero, even non-Muslim foreign visitors like the 25 people on the June 2002 NCEW trip can sense how profoundly most Muslims have been shaken by the September 11 terrorist attacks on America.

But the battle for Islam's center is internal. In the best sense of a widely misused word, it is a jihad that the rest of us can do little more than watch, although we can and should encourage a political atmosphere that will help ensure moderate Islam's victory.

The al-Qaida terrorists of Osama bin Laden, pariah of a wealthy and prominent Saudi family, claim to act in Islam's name. They have, thus, put the religion on the defensive, even though their hate, murderous zeal, felonious hearts, and misguided utopianism violate long-accepted Islamic teachings.

Now Islam's silent majority is trying to understand what went wrong and why so much of the Judeo-Christian world and secular West blame not just Islam but also specifically Arabs, who make up no more than 20% of the world's Muslims.

"Saudi Arabia has changed since September 11," says Sultana Rashid, a former teacher in Jeddah. "Saudi Arabia has become very introspective since September 11. You find it all over. There's a lot of debate within the Muslim world between people who supported Osama bin Laden and mainstream Islam."

Rashid, an educated, articulate woman, lives in the most restrictive Islamic country, a title that belonged to Afghanistan before American and other troops evicted the appalling Taliban rulers there.

Saudi Arabia is quite unlike Afghanistan under the Taliban (whom the Saudis once supported), but it was here that bin Laden learned the puritanical Wahhabi version of Islam. Once he finally got serious about his religion, bin Laden found he could "play the religion card," as one Saudi intellectual put it, and use deformed religion to achieve political and personal ends.

Bin Laden's abuse of religion -- and the violence of extremists like him -- angers the Saudi religious establishment.

"I do not believe that Osama bin Laden represents Saudis or Muslims," says the country's minister of Islamic affairs, Sheikh Saleh bin Abdul Aziz Al Ashaikh. Other Islamic leaders in Egypt and Uzbekistan issued similar denunciations of extremism.

How and why, then, did people like bin Laden corrupt Islam and -- beyond that -- convince followers to kill themselves and others in the faith's name?

There is, in fact, no single, easy explanation for the corruption of Islam by extremists. But there are clues. And Muslims and non-Muslims alike need to understand how these factors contribute to extremism. It's also vital that the West gain a better understanding of Islam so people know the enemy is not the religion itself but, rather, the toxic militants who claim to operate in its name.

Nearly all Saudis would deny it, but the rigidity of Wahhabism itself may provide soil in which extremism can grow.

This is especially true when political grievances provide excuses for exploiting the power and appeal of religion. And at the center of nearly every issue here in the Middle East is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. There is an almost universal Arab belief that the United States has adopted an unjust, pro-Israel position.

Indeed, what helped move bin Laden toward extremism was the war Afghan rebels fought against Soviet invaders in the 1980s. Many fighters who went to Afghanistan to protect -- as they saw it -- their Islamic brothers came from Saudi Arabia and became part of bin Laden's sphere of influence. The war was seen as a great cause -- not only in Saudi Arabia but also in the United States, which supported those fighting for and with bin Laden against the Soviets. So discovering that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia should have been no surprise.

Many Saudis and other Arabs couldn't believe that "15" figure. But as Saudi information minister Foad al Farsy now says, "The average people are beginning to realize that these people were Saudis."

As for the Palestinian/Israeli issue, it's essential to understand that this festering sore continues to give religious fanatics a cause to exploit. And even moderate Muslims are deeply distressed by what they call America's unbalanced policies in the Middle East.

"America is fair in all things but that," says Saudi education minister Mohammed Ahmed Rasheed.

Whatever view one has of the Palestinian question, the reality is that the longer a just two-state solution is put off, the more likely terrorists are to act. But outrage over the Palestinians (often in the past Arab leaders have given mere lip service to them) doesn't fully explain why some Muslims have come to view terrorism as a legitimate tool.

It is, of course, possible to comb through sacred writings of Christianity and Judaism and find violent stories, even bloodshed, that God seems to ordain.

Just as Christianity and Judaism have a connection to zealots who misuse those religions, so also does Islam have extremists growing in its shade. For in the Qur'an, too, one can find verses that seem to authorize the use of force to spread the faith.

Zealots sometimes pick and choose their scriptural justifications. It's possible -- as bin Laden has demonstrated -- to create a violent version of what is claimed to be Islam.

Another aspect of Islam must be considered when trying to understand young men who kill themselves by flying planes into office buildings or by strapping bombs around their waists.

In Islam, one must earn heaven. In most cases, that means living a good, peaceful, prayerful, generous life. But one way to achieve heaven, the Qur'an says, is to die while fighting in the cause of Allah. This struggle on behalf of Allah -- called jihad (which does not have to involve violence) -- is done thus not merely to spread the faith or for political reasons but for personal salvation. And history shows what a powerful motivator that can be.

Islam envisions no separation between church and state, though several Islamic countries, such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhastan, have secular governments. Some Muslims have looked at what has happened under church/state separation in the West and have seen the growth of cultural decadence and two shocking world wars in which, as Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis writes, "Western civilization tore itself apart." This helped to create a hostility toward Western ways, which has given extremists one more arrow in their quiver. All the while, political leaders in many Arab countries have either ignored or, worse, supported the radicals in a bid to keep power.

As Fareed Zakaria, foreign editor of Newsweek, has written, "... as the moderate majority looks the other way, Islam is being taken over by a small poisonous element, people who advocate cruel attitudes toward women, education, the economy, and modern life in general." That overstates the case, but dear[y moderate Muslims must reassert control.

In the end, there's no exhaustive explanation for how and why Islamic extremism has grown. The dynamics are complex, and simple answers -- such as Samuel P. Hunington's "clash of civilizations" -- hide more than they reveal.

"Cultures and civilizations for wise people are not in conflict at all," says Egypt's grand imam Mohamed Sayed Tantawy. And though it seems an almost naively optimistic view of things, he is mining the right vein when he adds: "If justice spreads amid all people, there will be peace." That will require commitments to literacy, education, economic development, political freedom, and other aspects of democratic society.

That is the goal for Islam now as it seeks to understand how some of its followers have gone so far astray.

Bill Tammeus is a columnist for the editorial page of the Kansas City Star. E-mail him at [e-mail]