(Better to post the whole article here...It asks for membership when you click the link...)
"Liars! Liars!" someone screamed at a news conference infiltrated by Islamic scholars and others from the hard-core faithful who shouted and lunged at the panelists to a degree that no journalist could ask a question. "You are all Zionists! You are all infidels!"
The long-simmering internal debate over political violence in Islamic cultures is swelling, with seminars like that one and a raft of newspaper columns breaking previous taboos by suggesting that the problem lies in the way Islam is being interpreted. On Saturday in Morocco, a major conference, attended by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, will focus on increasing democracy and liberal principles in the Muslim world.
On one side of the discussion sit mostly secular intellectuals horrified by the gore joined by those ordinary Muslims dismayed by the ever more bloody image of Islam around the world. They are determined to find a way to wrestle the faith back from extremists. Basically the liberals seek to dilute what they criticize as the clerical monopoly on disseminating interpretations of the sacred texts.
Arrayed against them are powerful religious institutions like Al Azhar University, prominent clerics and a whole different class of scholars who argue that Islam is under assault by the West. Fighting back with any means possible is the sole defense available to a weaker victim, they say.
The debate, which can be heard in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, is driven primarily by carnage in Iraq. The hellish stream of images of American soldiers attacking mosques and other targets are juxtaposed with those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading civilian victims on his home videos as a Koranic verse including the line "Smite at their necks" scrolls underneath.
When the mayhem in Iraq slows, events like the slaying in September of more than 300 people at a Russian school - half of them children - or some other attack in the Netherlands, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia or Spain labeled jihad by its perpetrators serves to fuel discussions on satellite television, in newspapers and around the dinner tables of ordinary Muslims.
"Resistance was never like this - to kidnap someone and decapitate him in front of everyone," said Ibrahim Said, delivering pastry in the Cairo neighborhood of Nasser City recently.
"This is haram," he went on, using the Arabic word for something forbidden or shameful, and then quotes the Koran on his own. " 'Verily never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves.' That means nothing will change unless we change ourselves first."
Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, director of the Dubai-based satellite network Al Arabiya and a well-known Saudi journalist, created a ruckus this fall with a newspaper column saying Muslims must confront the fact that most terrorist acts are perpetrated by Muslims.
"The danger specifically comes from the ideas and the preaching of violence in the name of religion," he said, adding, "I am more convinced there is a problem with the culture, the modern culture of radicalism, which people have to admit. Without recognizing that as fact number one, that statistically speaking most terrorists are Muslims, we won't be able to solve it."
Mr. Rashed senses there is a movement in the Arab world, if perhaps not yet a consensus, that understands that Muslims have to start reining in their own rather than constantly complaining about injustice and unfairness. The violence has not only reduced sympathy for just causes like ending the Israeli occupation, he says, but set off resentment against Muslims wherever they live.