Amr Khaled, an Egyptian televangelist and media celebrity across the Arab and Muslim worlds, jumped dramatically in the rankings today of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals.

Why is that?

His fans have begun a vote drive on AmrKhaled.net and on Facebook, which FP noted earlier this year was a surprising force for activism in the Arab world. Interestingly, the more controversial Yusuf al-Qaradawi saw a boost in his numbers as well, even though Khaled and Qaradawi haven't always seen eye to eye. Qaradawi and Khaled got into a huge spat over the Danish cartoons issue, with Khaled calling for dialogue and Qaradawi basically calling him a big pansy.

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For the first time ever, a female Muslim Arab soldier has joined an elite Israeli Air Force unit. Upon completing a medic training course with top honors, she became part of the Airborne Combat Search and Rescue Unit 669, a premier unit that extricates wounded soldiers from combat zones in sensitive and highly classified operations.

Unlike Jewish young adults, most Arab Israelis are not required to serve in the military, but this soldier, from an Arab village in northern Israel, volunteered to serve. But Muslims and Arabs are prevented from serving in the elite Unit 669, which requires an extremely high security clearance, due to fears about conflicting loyalties should they have to serve in Palestinian areas or fight Muslim countries. So how did she get in? An investigation revealed that an error was made, although news reports have not described the nature of the error or who made it. (My hunch is that those details are confidential.)

Nonetheless, the unit's commander has been so impressed with the woman's exceptional ability that he is allowing her to stay. Although some on the Internet say she may end up betraying her unit, it may be that in this case an error ended up yielding the correct outcome -- letting in a talented, loyal soldier.

I managed to slog through the entire 46-pages of al Qaeda deputy commander Ayman al-Zawahiri's responses to questions (pdf), and found it very revealing as to how jihadi sympathizers view the terrorist organization.

The general tenor of the questions is sharply critical, so let me boil down the questioners' main beefs here:

• Al Qaeda talks a big game, but never attacks Israel (but we have killed plenty of Jews, Zawahiri responds)
• Al Qaeda isn't doing anything to overthrow the Egyptian regime (it ain't easy, Zawahiri pleads, but it is inevitable)
• Al Qaeda slaughters innocent Muslims (only if they get in the way)
• Al Qaeda is too harsh on Hamas (just the leaders who have sold out sharia law, not the "mujahedin")
• Al Qaeda is rumored to be dealing with Iran (a charge Zawahiri has responded to before with a non-denial denial)
• Influential clerics and ideologues have denounced al Qaeda (Zawahiri takes great pains to paint two in particular, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the subject of "Egypt's Contrite Commander" from FP's current issue, as Zionist-Crusader stooges)

Now, it's entirely possible that some of these complaints were planted by clever Western and Arab intelligence agencies, but the fact that Zawahiri felt obliged to respond to them repeatedly and at length shows that the critiques must have stung a bit. It also suggests that he's got a lot of time on his hands.

Before declaring independence, Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci announced that 100 countries would quickly recognize its sovereign status. It seems he may have been a bit too optimistic.

Currently, 25 countries have or are in the process of recognizing the Republic of Kosova (Kosova being the preferred Albanian spelling). According to the website kosovothanksyou.com, a site created by two Kosovar Albanians to thank recognizing countries, another 28 countries are expected to eventually recognize Kosovo's sovereignty. But that still leaves Thaci short of his hopeful 100. The site includes a handy map showing recognizing countries in blue and potential recognizing countries in yellow:

The list of recognizing countries includes big names like the United States, France, Britain, and 12 others from the EU. But the list falls short on regional players -- Romania and Bosnia have both said they will not recognize Kosovo -- and on emerging global powers like Russia, China, and India. Predominantly Muslim Senegal is the only recognizing country in Africa, and recognition for Europe's new majority-Muslim state has been slow in the rest of the Islamic world too. Turkey and Afghanistan are the only other Islamic countries to have recognized Kosovo so far.

Even if Kosovo does hit the 100 country mark, that's still barely half the countries in the world. Though, I suppose fewer recognizing countries does mean fewer thank you notes.

ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images

The scenes on CNN today of Serbian political and religious leaders holding candles at a vigil to protest Kosovo's independence, as well as the rogue protesters setting fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, bring to mind Graham Fuller's January/February FP cover story, "A World Without Islam." In the piece, Fuller cautions Islam's critics not to assume that a Middle East dominated by Orthodox Christianity would be any more accepting of Western influence than today's Middle East. With Serbian Christians now fighting to retain what they they view as their religious homeland, maybe he was on to something:

The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the “corrupted” and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.

Whatever you think of Fuller's characterization, it certainly seems noteworthy that the United States and the EU are about to go the mat with Russia for a Muslim country at the expense of a Christian one. If the rift between an increasingly religious Russia and the West continues to grow, can it be long until the op-eds start appearing on "The Orthodox Threat" or "The Failure of Political Orthodoxy"? "Orthofascism" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

We've posted about Hamas's "Jihad Mickey" in the past. Well, here's Hamas TV's latest cuddly form of indoctrination for Palestinian children -- a pink bunny that hates Jews:

But I, Assud [pink bunny], will get rid of the Jews, Allah willing, and I will eat them up."

The last 30 seconds of the video really say it all, though earlier the little girl has a nice little statement to make in her interview with the bunny:

Of course, Assud.  We will liberate al-Aqsa from the filth of those Zionists." 

I guess nobody's ever heard of the Waqf -- the Muslim religious council that administers the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif site that includes al-Aqsa.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Kosovar Prime Minister Hashim Thaci (shown at right) gave an interview for Friday's Haaretz in which he professes admiration for Israel and stresses that his majority-Muslim proto-country (which is expected to declare independence any minute now) will not be an Islamic state:

At a time when in Turkey, which also wants to join Europe, the battle over the religious character of the state is heating up, Thaci promises: "Kosovo is going to be a democratic and secular state of all its citizens, and the freedom to exercise religion without any hindrance is granted by the Kosovo Constitution."

This assertion is significant since many Israelis fear that an independent Kosovo, or a potentially unified "Greater Albania" could serve as an Islamist beachhead in southern Europe that relies on Iranian and Saudi support, an argument that Thaci said "does not even deserve comment." It was this concern that lead then Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon to break with most of the international community in 1999 and support Slobodan Milosevic during the NATO bombing of Serbia. Nevertheless, Thaci describes Sharon as a "great leader."

Many also see parallels between Kosovo's struggle for independence and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worry that a precedent may be set. This is but one of the many domino-effect scenarios that have emerged in recent weeks. Thaci argues in response that Kosovo is "a unique case" and "should not represent any precedent." The rebel leader-turned-politician clearly hopes Israelis will think of Kosovars as kindred spirits. Haaretz, at least, is already calling him "the Ben Gurion of Kosovo."

Remember those controversial Danish cartoons from 2005 that depicted the Prophet Mohammed and aroused so much anger in the Muslim world? At least 50 people were killed in the ensuing worldwide riots. Well, the cartoons were republished in Europe today by Danish, Swedish, Spanish, and Dutch newspapers to emphasize freedom of speech and to protest an alleged plot to kill one of the cartoonists. This time, Danish Muslim groups seem to regard the reprinting as an internal, domestic issue and don't plan on internationalizing it. But I can't help thinking, here we go again.

The first time around, the publisher of the cartoons explained his motives in this New York Times op-ed:

By treating a Muslim figure the same way I would a Christian or Jewish icon, I was sending an important message: You are not strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as an integrated part of our life. And we will satirize you, too.

We'll see what the second round brings.

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Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to be justice. A 23-year-old journalism student named Sayad Parwez Kambaksh supposedly goes online, finds an interesting paper, and prints it out. He supposedly brings it to class at Balkh University, discusses it with a teacher and some fellow students. The paper gets copied and distributed. Some students find it objectionable; they say it is offensive and that it insults Islam. They complain to the government.

Kambaksh is arrested in October and put in jail. He says he had nothing to do with the paper. His case goes to trial, but he has no lawyer. In fact, his family is not even aware that he's put on trial. A panel of three judges decides that he should be put to death because the paper he supposedly distributed "humiliates Islam." The Afghan Independent Journalists' Association reports that any paper in question may have downloaded from an Iranian blog, which contained articles questioning the origins of the Koran, among other controversial things.

Now, his case goes to the first of two appeal courts. But Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the province where the trial took place, says that only President Hamid Karzai can pardon the student, since Kambaksh supposedly confessed to having violated tenets of Islam. Incidentally, Wahab has never read the paper (to be fair, he was also not on the panel that convicted Kambaksh). 

Kambaksh isn't the only Afghan journalist who's gotten into trouble with the law. Ghows Zalmai was also arrested three months ago, charged with distributing a translation of the Koran that clerics did not accept. Religious scholars have also called for him to be put to death.

At any rate, all of this raises the question: Why did the U.S. go into Afghanistan and topple the Taliban, only to have it be replaced with a system like this? So far, no comment from Karzai, who is attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But he'd better step up.

If you haven't yet read "A World Without Islam," the cover story for our January/February 2008 issue, you really should. Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, has penned a sweeping, thought-provoking essay that has already turned a lot of heads in the United States and beyond. Fuller takes a hypothetical question—What if Islam had never existed?—and walks us through an alternate history of the world as if Mohammed had never founded the third major monotheistic religion in the seventh century.

It's an intriguing thought experiment. With no Muslim faith, would Christianity rule the globe? Would the Middle East today be democratic and free? And the big question, of course: Would the attacks of Sept. 11 never have happened? The answer, according to Fuller, is none of the above. Wipe Islam from the sands of time, he says, and we'd wind up largely in the same place we are today.

Fuller, now an adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is chock full of knowledge and insights on Islam and the Middle East and is eager to hear reactions to his essay. Send us any questions you have for him by this Friday, Jan. 25, and we'll publish his answers here on Jan. 31.

Iran may be an international pariah, but the country is nonetheless eagerly suiting up for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this year's biggest international event. In the Athens Games of 2004, the Islamic Republic allowed just one woman to compete and won only six medals. This year, nationalistic Iran is investing greater resources in its team and hoping for a stronger performance.

An unlikely boost for Iran's "Go for the Gold in '08" strategy has come from the conservative religious establishment: a "special religious dispensation" that allows more women to compete, as long as they wear the proper attire. Check out Haaretz's translation of an al-Jazeera report here:

Couple this with news that Hamas is recruiting women police officers to serve in Gaza, and you have to wonder what's going on in the region.

Nearly a year ago, Passport noted that Finnish PM Matti VanHanen, ever the classy guy, dumped his girlfriend via a text message. Ha, ha. But in the Muslim world, apparently there's a serious debate going on as to whether divorce by SMS is valid, and some countries have even had to explicitly ban the practice. In Egypt, however, the law remains unclear:

An Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband's declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid, a state-run newspaper reported on Thursday.

After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him saying "I divorce you because you didn't answer your husband," Al-Akhbar said.

In line with sharia (Islamic law) men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage.

Egypt actually has a hybrid legal system, meaning that contrary to what most people seem to think, sharia law is already in place in many areas of jurisprudence (though Christians have their own religious courts). A return of the caliphate is not nigh, but if you're a woman in a place like Egypt, the growing Islamicization of the country is bad news indeed. Let's hope the judge rejects this divorce-by-SMS nonsense, if he hasn't already.

Giuliani advisor Daniel Pipes: If Barack Obama isn't a Muslim now, then he must be an apostate.

You just can't make this stuff up. 

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You have to admire Bob Kerrey's skill as a political assassin. While casually shooting the breeze over the weekend with the Washington Post's Shailagh Murray after a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton, the former Nebraska senator and 9/11 commissioner had this to say about Barack Obama:

It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."

Kerrey kept it going Monday on CNN:

[T]here is a smear campaign going on. And people are acting as if he's an Islamic Manchurian candidate. And I feel it's actually a substantial strength. He is a Christian. Both he and his family are Christians. They've chosen Christianity. But that connection to Indonesia and a billion Muslims on this Earth I think is a real strength and will add an awful lot of value in his foreign policy efforts. [...] I've watched the blogs try to say that you can't trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.

The point Kerrey makes in these statements is, on the face of it, a nice one: Obama's diverse roots could be a real asset abroad. But if you think the Obama campaign is eager to receive compliments that include the words "Hussein" and "madrassa," especially from someone who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, then I have a bridge to sell you in New York City. (Also, it's worth noting that it wasn't a "madrassa" in any case.) Obama supporters and others recently jumped all over the Washington Post for running a front-page story about how rumors that the candidate is some sort of "closet Muslim" could hurt him politically. The critics accused the Post of essentially laundering a smear. But the point made in the story seems to be on solid ground: Americans simply aren't ready to elect a Muslim president or even someone falsely rumored to be Muslim. It shouldn't be this way, but it's simply a fact that associating Obama with Islam hurts him politically.

And thanks to Kerrey, this issue became the dominant political story of the week. The only thing many voters will hear is "Obama Muslim," even though the Illinois senator is a Protestant Christian. Emphasizing his father's African roots is standard fare for Obama, and it's one of the first items on his campaign bio. But the Muslim thing? That's a bit tricky given today's political climate.

Toby Jones, an assistant history professor at Rutgers and a former analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes in with a thoughtful rebuttal to yesterday's post about Saudi Arabia: 

While I applaud the spirit of your critique of Anne Applebaum's take on gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, I'm afraid your rejoinder is wide of the mark. Applebaum is right to criticize the ruling class, but wrong to say that the fate of women there isn't dictated by religion at all. Part of the challenge is to figure out what is religious about gender in Saudi Arabia and why religion gets invoked to justify women's subordinate status. Rather than seeing the issue as one of doctrine, or as the product of the peninsula's tribal past as you suggest, it would be more helpful to see it as political. More specifically, the kingdom's treatment of women has everything to do with the issue of the political, juridical, and legal structures of authority that flow from the basic contract between rulers and the clergy. Women have been thrown under the bus by the kingdom's rulers to the religious scholars who see control over women and women's bodies as one of the last bastions of their spiritual and social power. Islam does not dictate such treatment of women. We know, however, that the tenets of faith become fuzzy when authority and power are at stake.

On the issue of Saudi liberalism, you've parroted the Saudi state about the fault lines that exist in the kingdom and why we (the United States) should support the political status quo there: It is a place where a liberal leadership routinely squares off against a regressive, tribal, and dangerously conservative (religious) populace. The suggestion that the Saudis know what pace of reform the "traffic will bear" is hard to take seriously. Authoritarian states regularly claim to be "reforming," a process that typically leads to a stronger authoritarianism in the end. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Ask any Saudi reformer, including Abdullah al-Hamid who is in jail for promoting reform while Islamic militants are rehabbed and freed from prison, if the state just needs more time and that it will get there.

While there are plenty of Saudis who would be familiar to American liberals as a result of their having studied here, it is more important to recognize that there are also plenty of Saudis educated in their own system that express values and political goals that we should embrace and pursue more seriously. On the matter of gender apartheid, it is also time to take seriously the voices of Saudi women who have their own thoughts to offer about how to improve their fate. They are not hard to find.

Anne Applebaum rightly condemns Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, but I think she misunderstands the political dynamics in the kingdom. Writing about a truly abhorrent case in which a Saudi court ruled that a woman who had been brutally gang raped had to face  a punishment of 200 lashes and six months in prison, Applebaum opines:

Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia women still can't vote, can't drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.

The comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently the journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that the "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

If you meet Saudi officials, you soon realize that many of them are actually Western-educated liberals. The oil minister, for instance, went to Lehigh and Stanford. The ambassador to the United States attended Texas and Georgetown. Before 9/11, more than 60,000 Saudis came to the United States each year. That number is now down to around 25,000. Still, in 2006, more than 11,000 visas were issued to incoming Saudi students. Think most of those kids don't absorb American culture and values while they're in college? Many of them go back and become high-ranking officials in Saudi Aramco or the government. They will tell you that widespread, systematic discrimination against women in their country is a tribal issue and has nothing to due with Islam. 

Some top leaders, such as Interior Minister Prince Naif bin AbdulAziz, are basically religious fundamentalists. But in general, the "Saudi ruling class" is a relatively liberal group sitting on top of a deeply conservative population. It's an elite that constantly jockeys with the religious establishment for power; sometimes the liberals win, and sometimes they lose. Certainly, Saudi Arabia's reformers move more cautiously than we in the West might like. But they know far better than we do what the traffic will bear. Remember: Before oil was discovered in 1938, Saudi Arabia was largely a land of tribal nomads and subsistence farmers. Just 70 years later, the country is a modernizing state and one of the linchpins of the global economy. This is a lot for any country to absorb. Give the Saudis time. They'll get there.

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Do you think cooling your heels in an airport for a few hours is pure torture? It could be much, much worse. A group of more than 1,500 Muslim pilgrims in Tanzania recently endured a flight delay of nine days. They were supposed to depart on Dec. 3 for Mecca for the hajj, the pilgrimage that is one of the pillars of Islam. But because of bureaucratic snafus, the pilgrims were stranded at the airport until Dec. 12 (and some until Dec. 13).

But patience is apparently a virtue. A correspondent for the BBC reported that the pilgrims were not angry, but, rather, saw the delays as a test of their faith. One pilgrim said:

Anyone who gets angry because of flight delays at this time of year does not know Islam.

It's a helpful thought to keep in mind. Such cognitive reframing may help you manage stress, whatever your religion (if you have one), as you head to the airport this holiday season.

ISAM AL-HAJ/AFP/Getty Images

It's hard to avoid the impression that the teddy-bear imbroglio in Sudan was a piece of elaborate theater designed to give Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir a chance to magnanimously pardon the offender and thereby chalk up some brownie points with the West. Just scanning the headlines, one would have the impression that Bashir has courageously faced down the mob that was baying for the hapless schoolteacher's blood. Bashir's spokesperson is certainly cultivating that storyline:

There was a political risk in this decision. Although the pardon is a presidential prerogative, because of the rising feeling and tensions that have been generated many Sudanese will see it as unfair to them and that it might encourage others to do the same.The president considered the intentions behind the actions when he made this decision [to pardon]. 

The wise moderate in the midst of extremists—it's not a bad image to have as frustration grows over delays on Darfur peacekeeping. 

JENS-ULRICH KOCH/AFP/Getty Images

This has not been a good day for free speech in the Muslim world. In addition to the news that the British teacher who was arrested in Sudan for insulting Islam by naming a teddy bear "Mohammed" at her class's request has been charged, the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins's atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, has been called in for questioning by prosecutors and may face charges of inciting religious hatred. Turkey took heat in 2005 for prosecuting Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk on the dubious charge of "insulting Turkishness." Those charges were eventually dropped and the government promised to soften the law.

That the Turkish government would enforce secularism by banning head scarves in universities ... while a prosecutor considers indicting a publisher for propagating the works of one of the world's leading secularists seems to reveal something deeply schizophrenic about Mosque-state relations in Turkey. I can't wait to hear Dinesh D'Souza weigh in on this one.

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Forgive for a moment a short trip down memory lane: Back in the last half of June, Hamas had just kicked Fatah out of Gaza, the surge wasn't working, a huge truck bomb decimated a Baghdad mosque, early leaders of the "Anbar Awakening" were killed in a suicide bombing, and one of U.S. President George W. Bush's steadfast Republican supporters broke ranks with him on Iraq. Not a great month by anyone's count, least of all President Bush.

Amidst these dismal headlines, the White House managed to regain control of the headlines with a big announcement on June 27. That day, Bush declared that he would appoint the first U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 countries that promotes "solidarity and cooperation among Islamic states."

Bush's aims for the appointment were simple:

[T]o "listen and learn" and share U.S. views with delegates from Muslim nations. The appointment is intended "to demonstrate to Muslim communities our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship," [Bush] said. 

Great, right? A small gesture, but nice all the same. Except for the fact that five months later, nada. Zip. Zilch. No envoy.

The gesture is obviously symbolic, a band-aid for a deeply wounded U.S. image in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. But why even bother to announce such an appointment, which is supposed to express the United States' intention to reach out to Muslims and at least appear interested in their points of view, and then not do it? It seems so careless. I asked the White House's press office when we might be able to expect an announcement, and I was told in true Yogi Berra fashion, "when we announce it, we'll announce it." I got the feeling they forgot.  

June, 2007, was the month of unfulfilled promises, it seems. On June 5, Bush declared that he'd ordered Condoleezza Rice to cable every U.S. ambassador in an unfree nation with the following message: "Seek out and meet with activists for democracy. Seek out those who demand human rights." Sounds nice, right? The Post's Jackson Diehl checked in on the status of the cable in early August. It still hadn't been sent.