Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, gave a speech this week in which she criticized the Bush administration’s foreign policy — more or less in its entirety. Some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism as a pretext,” she said. A adapted version of the speech was published inThe Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper.

Here’s one particular quote from Ebadi’s essay that deserves re-reading:

I am a Muslim. In the Koran, the Prophet of Islam has said: “Thou shalt believe in thy faith and I in my religion.” That same divine book sees the mission of all prophets as that of inviting all human beings to uphold justice. Since the advent of Islam, Iran’s civilization and culture have become imbued and infused with humanitarianism, respect for the life, belief and faith of others, propagation of tolerance and avoidance of violence, bloodshed and war … The discriminatory plight of women in Islamic states, whether in the sphere of civil law or in the realm of social, political and cultural justice, has its roots in the male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam.

Commentators like to blame Islam for creating suicide bombers, oppressing women — even, as bizarre as it might seem, encouraging pedophila. As is the case for most religions, of course, Islam the faith is a lot different from Islam as the faithful practice it. After all, Christians found ways that the teachings of the great pacifist, Jesus Christ, could be used to justify burning alive thousands of Jews and Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition — it doesn’t take many aspiring demagogues before a religion of peace starts spawning legions of hatemongers. Thankfully, questions are beginning to be raised these days about the un-peaceful practices of certain religious extremists (during the Cold War, the United States found it useful to ignore the Muslim ones). Scholars are even questioning whether conventional translations of the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, are accurate about some rather important points — is it seventy-two “virgins” or seventy-two “fruits”? (Not to be outdone, scholars of the New Testament are also raising some crucial questions.)

In spite of what the fundamentalists (of all faiths) might say, religion is a quite malleable thing — the devil, so to speak, is in the details, and who decides those details matters a great deal. The face that Islam will show in this new century will depend on which leaders take power in Muslim countries. Which brings me back to Shirin Ebadi. She is the kind of leader that Western countries should be encouraging — a Muslim feminist who implores other Muslims to remember their faith’s humanitarian spirit, its vision of global unity that the Iranian poet Rumi once described in this way: “The sons of Adam are limbs of one another/Having been created of one essence.” If Ebadi and other like-minded Muslims can gain power in their countries, they could do much more than the hordes of CIA agents and Special Forces commandoes embedded abroad presently seem capable of doing — that is, sweeping away the terrorist-inspiring hatred that has become America’s bugbear ever since it clawed its way across the ocean on September 11. Even the more neoconservative figures in the Bush administration — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for instance — are finally coming to the view that, in addition to dropping bombs, it might be a good idea to start peddling a “kinder and gentler” Islam abroad.

The problem is, of course, that even liberal-minded Muslims like Ebadi are being alienated by the “shock and awe” foreign policy of the Bush administration. Ebadi asks: “Why is it that some decisions and resolutions of the UN Security Council are binding, while other council resolutions have no binding force? Why is it that in the past 35 years, dozens of UN resolutions concerning the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the state of Israel have not been implemented — yet, in the past 12 years, the state and people of Iraq were twice subjected to attack, military assault, economic sanctions, and, ultimately, military occupation?”

These are troubling questions — for the extremists, without question, but also for those Muslims who want to see an end to the fanaticism. If the United States truly wants to stop terrorism, it needs people like Ebadi on its side. But as long as the Bush administration stubbornly clings to its current policy of hyper-aggressive unilateralism — a policy that has created only more enemies in the Muslim world — liberal Muslims will have a hard time convincing anyone in their countries to listen to them. And that does not bode well for the sanctity of Islam, nor for the security of Americans.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen