The Islamic Enlightenment Will Have Breasts...

...which will, maybe, be concealed under a Burkha.

About a year ago now, an old rightwing friend and co-blogger told me that women would either reform Islam or destroy it. I was sceptical then, but the more I watch events unfold the more sure I am that he was correct. Nowadays, even the extremist members of the Sisterhood - the woman's support group for Hamas - are seeing the way the current of history is flowing. An AP report today sets out how, although the thousands of women who belong to the Sisterhood still hold to Hamas ideology of violence, they are becoming increasingly frustrated by their male counterparts' mysogeny. Yet all expect to overcome that mysogeny and win a bigger voice for women, especially in areas that their culture does not traditionally regard as a woman's preserve.

The story is part of a bigger trend in Islam. One that, I think, in about 50 years or so will mean a new and more moderate version of Islam will emerge from the incestuous bloodshed - spearheaded by Islamic women sick of the bloodshed at long last. There are signs already from Afghanistan and Pakistan of a growing wave of women with a radical, sufragette willingness to adopt their own version of martyrdom (self-immolation and other methods embracing as-good-as-suicide in response to impossible lives) as a mark of their determination to create a radical seachange in their religion. More moderate Islamic men, especially scholars, are also playing their part. Witness the recent conference attended by some very big Islamic names that concluded there was no support in Islam for female genital circumcision.

Coupled with changing demographics in Iran and some other Islamic nations - where young women are now far more likely to go on to higher education than their radically extremist young male counterparts, who have eschewed learning as somehow unmanly compared with fighting - the scene is set for a perfect storm of enlightenment.

If the West, and America in particular, is serious about wanting a more moderate Moslem world, then they would be well advised to - very, very discreetly - support efforts by Moslem women to increase the power of their voice. Efforts like the first international Islamic advisory council for women, which met in New York last week. The American government must, however, be careful to avoid the heavy-handed obviousness of their campaign to push the Sufi school of Islam, which has robbed that school of much of its legitimacy in the eyes of common Moslems.

Environmental pressures drive evolution in proportion to their strength, and the new Islam could emerge and spread far more rapidly than enlightenment Christianity managed. Although they presently still look strong, the spreading quagmire in the Middle East is sowing dissent within the extremists ranks and they are splitting up into antagonistic factions. That will strengthen and hurry the backlash of enlightenment. What that enlightened form will become has to be up to Moslems - and it will undoubtably not always be friendly to American foreign policy. It may even decide to keep the burkha, although I personally doubt it.