Why was this event so special? It was not just the distinction of the members of the panel themselves, beginning with Bellah, arguably the country’s best known sociologist of religion and author of such seminal essays as “Civil Religion in America” and “Religious Evolution,” and groundbreaking books, including Habits of the Heart and Tokugawa Religion. Rather, the significance of the event lay in its recognition of the importance of the book’s project, a breathtaking survey of the whole sweep of the history of religiosity, which is nothing less than the history of humankind.

It can be said that no one else would have dared to write such a book, nor could anyone else have written it. Comparisons have been made to the wide-ranging explorations of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, early pioneers in social thought who also found in religion the key to understanding much about the social imagination. Bellah’s book is that kind of project.

The wonder is that it is written so well. It reads like a travelogue of ideas, a captain’s diary of a long exploration of uncharted intellectual seas. Bellah asks some simple questions: Where did religion come from? How did it develop? These are questions that have no simple answers, though the voyage of his discoveries through different disciplines and schools of thinking are fascinating, from physics to biology, from ancient history to classic texts. Through it all Bellah maintains a wonder about the questions and their possible answers—a humility towards the vastness of the project—that is both endearing and seductive. The reader is easily brought along for the ride.

Though the 746 pages of the book cover much, and will be mined for their varied insights for some time to come, there are roughly three foci. One is the engagement with scientific theories about evolution. Here Bellah explores the literature on the Big Bang, the beginning of the time/space continuum, and the emergence of self-sustaining life. The evolutionary physical and social development of humans is linked with their cultural development, and Bellah is aided by the theories of Merlin Donald, who outlines three major stages in human cultural history: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah views the religious dimensions of this development, seeing in them three types of religious representation—enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

Fully half of the book is devoted to the axial age, one of the most significant stages of religious change in response to the enlargement of human societies’ cognitive and social capacities. Here, in a way that is reminiscent of Max Weber’s comparative project on the religions of India, China, Israel, and Protestant Christianity, Bellah takes each of several ancient cultural traditions in turn, revealing an exhausting study of historical detail. He looks at ancient periods of Greece, China, Israel, and India. What Bellah explores is how—in four cases that are in many ways quite different from one another—they each have developed some of the characteristics of what are the hallmarks of axial age religiosity: individualism, critical thinking, and theoretical and reflective observation.

The third focus of the book is religion itself—what it is, and how it came to be. Unlike many contemporary thinkers who find the idea of religion to be a puzzling and difficult invention, Bellah seems confident in asserting that it is something—a stretch of human imagination that can be set apart from the other, more material aspects of human occupation. He regards it as an alternative perception of reality. It is one of the “other realities,” which, like poetry and science, “break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.” But the ability to perceive these alternative realities does not come easy or early to the capacities of living species. He searches for those moments in the early development of conscious life when basic material needs are sufficiently met, and the mind can roam freely to imagine distant forms of order and other ways of understanding reality. Bellah sees this not just as a cognitive but as a physical activity, and finds the early origins of ritual and religiosity in the simple acts of play.

The critical comments about Bellah’s book tend to be related to these three foci—the relationship of religion to scientific theories of evolution, the historical cases of ancient religion during the axial age, and the conceptualization of religion and how it emerged. Regarding the scientific aspect, Luke Johnson raised the issue of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Johnson observed that Bellah meant to use the term “evolution” in more than a metaphorical sense, but he questioned to what degree that is possible. Religious dispositions are not, of course, genetically transferred traits, so this makes commentators such as Johnson question to what extent the exploration of scientific evidence is relevant to developments in religious expression, and to what extent religion can be said to evolve as opposed to simply change. In the subsequent response, Bellah made clear that religious evolution was real enough, though it was related to the evolving capacities of humans and their societies for different kinds of religious representation.

Regarding the specific case studies that Bellah explores as examples of axial age religiosity, specialists such as Wendy Doniger raise significant questions of their own. Doniger pointed out that changes in ways of thinking are gradual, and that elements of the reflective, philosophical ideas associated with the Upanishads are also present in early Vedic writings. Luke Johnson added that theoretical thinking is the privilege of elites, and for the masses, narrative and mimetic forms of religiosity continue to reign supreme. Jonathan Z. Smith questioned the very notion of the axial age, and suggested that Bellah’s book would have worked just as well without mentioning it. Bellah appreciated these insights, while affirming that different strands of religious representation can exist together, that change often does not work in steady increases but in paradigmatic leaps, and that such moments require observation and explanation.

Finally, there have been questions about the way in which Bellah thinks about the notion of religion and its origins. Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that he was intrigued with Bellah’s suggestion that religion is associated with play, but he wondered whether it was even more related to a certain kind of playfulness—games, which are guided by rules as well as by spontaneous creativity. In responding, Bellah affirmed that play and games are closely related to each other, and for that matter both are associated with another form of familiar human activity, work—and that these three often overlap. The religious impulse is related to all of them, though probably more essentially to the activity of play.

Each of the commentators couched their remarks in the context of an enormous appreciation for the immensity of Bellah’s project, and the value of the book for a wide range of subjects in the study of the role of culture in human evolution. It is a book that is large in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of diligent analysis and fertile reflection, and it sets a new landmark in the efforts to understand the nature of religion in social life.

For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network have been regarded from outside the region simply as immoral terrorists, much of their popularity within the Islamic world has been their moral appeal.

The jihadi ideology has had two dimensions, political and ethical. The political attraction was the alleged necessity of violence to end despotic regimes. Before the protests at Tahrir Square that toppled the Mubarak regime last month, many Egyptian activists were convinced that bloodshed was the only strategy that would work against such a ruthless dictator. They imagined that their acts of terrorism—against the regime and against the “far enemy” of America that they assumed was propping up the Mubarak system—would eventually lead to a massive revolt that would bring the dictatorship to an end.

They also thought that only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and  Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.

These assumptions have been proven wrong. The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world in recent weeks have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.

What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle-class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking. No doubt the passivity of the Egyptian military was also a critical factor; the army did not forcibly resist the protests, as the military has in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

Yet one cannot underestimate the importance of Tahrir Square, and similar protests in Alexandria and throughout Egypt. Clearly, they constituted the catalyst for change. Perhaps not since the peaceful overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines has the world seen such a dramatic demonstration of the power of nonviolent resistance. The protests were not the weapons of jihad, nor were the voices of opposition the strident language of Islamist extremism.

There was also a religious element to the protests. The peak moments came after Friday prayers, when sympathetic mullahs would urge the faithful into joining the protest as a religious duty. But theirs was not the divisive, hateful voice of jihadi rhetoric. In a remarkable moment when the Muslim protesters were trying to conduct their prayers in the Square and Mubarak’s thugs tried to attack them as they prayed, a cordon of Egyptian Coptic Christians who had joined the protests circled around their Muslim compatriots, shielding them. Later a phalanx of Muslim protesters protected their Christian comrades as they worshiped in the public square, an urban intersection that was for that time transformed into a massive interfaith sanctuary.

The religiosity of Tahrir Square is far from the religion of radical jihad. Rather than separating Muslim from non-Muslim, and Sunni from Shi’a, the symbols that were raised on impromptu placards in Tahrir Square were emblems of interfaith cooperation; they showed the cross of Coptic Christians together with the crescent of Egypt’s Muslims in a united religious front against autocracy.

Imagine what Osama bin Laden must have made of all of this as news trickled into the cave or cellar or whatever lair in which he is hiding. Imagine even more the puzzled chagrin of someone like bin Laden’s primary lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian medical doctor who joined the most extreme Islamist jihadi movement years ago, convinced that only violent guerrilla warfare would topple someone like Mubarak.

Tahrir Square clearly showed that Zawahiri was wrong. Does this mean that al Qaeda is finished, and the radical struggles of jihad will fizzle into history?

Perhaps, in part. It is unlikely, however, that the al Qaeda organization, such as it is, will be abandoned. The small group of people who comprise the inner circle of the bin Laden organization will no doubt harden its resolve. Like the followers of millenarian movements who become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs when the prophesied end of the world does not terminate on schedule, the true believers of al Qaeda will soldier on. They may become more extreme in their rhetoric, more desperate in using acts of terrorism to draw attention to themselves and their increasingly impossible view of the world. Yet the al Qaeda inner circle has never been large, and its organization—though capable of conducting horrible acts of terrorism—has never been a consistent and widespread threat.

So, although the hardened activists associated with al Qaeda will linger on, the fate of the global jihadi ideology—or rather the world view of cosmic war that the jihadi rhetoric promoted—is a different matter. This view of the world as a tangle of sacred warfare has been an exciting and alluring image among a large number of mostly young and largely male Muslims around the world for over a decade. It is an image that was brought to dramatic attention by the September 11, 2001, attacks, and stimulated by the perception that U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against Islam. This jihadi vision of sacred warfare was propagated by the internet, through postings in chat rooms and the dissemination of YouTube types of videos showing graphic acts of U.S. military destruction in Islamic countries and calling on the faithful to respond.

Some did respond, and the response was a series of attacks during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These global jihad attacks—in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, Mumbai, and elsewhere—were not orchestrated by any single terrorist command. Some were connected with sophisticated regional organizations, but they were not in any direct sense al Qaeda-conducted. But they were all united by the jihadi vision, a vision that provided the moral and strategic legitimation for the terrorist attacks. The jihadi image of warfare provided the moral justification by linking real acts of violence in the world with the divine struggle between the forces of good and evil, order and disorder, that lies within the mythology and symbolism of every religious tradition, including Islam. And the jihadi idea of cosmic war provided a strategic legimitization of violence by the implicit promise—as a leader of Hamas once told me—that if one is fighting God’s war, one can never lose. God always wins.

Yet, as Tahrir Square showed, God does not always have to fight, at least not in the terrorist ways that the jihadi warriors imagined. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not produced a single political change.

This is a profound anti-jihadi lesson, and the significance of Tahrir Square has quickly spread around the world. It has ignited similar nonviolent protests elsewhere in the Middle East, and it may also have altered the thinking of activists in other cultures as well. Intense discussion is underway in Palestine, where the Hamas-dominated strategy of strategic violence has been largely counterproductive; will a new nonviolent and non-extremist movement of young educated Palestinian professionals create a different kind of impetus for change in their region of the Middle East?

The rise of a new nonviolent populism in the Middle East may seriously undercut the viability of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resistance may lead to a violent backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolution in Iran, in 2009. The current protests in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya face an uncertain end. Failure of nonviolent revolution has, in the past, been the occasion for renewed acts of violence.

So the jihadi warriors may again have their day. For the moment, however, Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of nonviolence.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Today we will be discussing the topic of “Rethinking Secularism in a Global Age.” Bob, the idea is to get around to the contemporary situation, the rise of political Islam, the rise of a new kind of religious politics, the whole issue of what is religious and what is secular in the contemporary world, the rise of global civil society and the role of religion there.

That’s where the conversation is heading, but I thought we would begin way back in the time that you are currently working in, in ancient history, with the development of religion and religious evolution—the Axial Age, on which you have recently written an essay that is going to be a part of your new book, which I think will be out fairly soon, about the transition from theoria (the word from which we get “theory”) as religious practice and religious insight into, in Plato and the Greek philosophers, a different perception, a different kind of discovery, which was more intellectual than it was spiritual.

Is this about religion? Is this about the emergence of secularism in this particular time? Or do you want to just avoid using those terms altogether?

ROBERT BELLAH: I certainly think, at this point, both the word “religion” and the word “secularism” are used in such chaotically diverse ways that they are almost useless.

Nonetheless, I think what you are pointing to is relevant. If you go into the deep evolution of the human species and look for where religion is, you find something that’s quite different from much of what goes on today. Today many people, including the harshest critics of religion, like Dawkins, Hitchens, et cetera, think religion is a theory or a set of theories that are simply wrong: science has disproved those theories; therefore, we don’t need them.

The point of the essay that you are talking about is that theory emerged at a certain moment in human history, and before that, it didn’t exist. We can say it emerged a long time ago, in the middle of the first millennium B.C., about 2,500 years ago. But looking at human evolution, it’s extremely recent; it’s the flick of an eye. Probably between 1 million and 2 million years ago humans communicated entirely with their bodies, what is called mimetic culture. We still do. It is never lost. It’s critical. For religion, it’s absolutely fundamental.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But when theoria developed, at least the way you have explained it—the earlier use of the term was related to something we might call religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, because—again, in this complex use of the word—everything starts with religion. The key to understanding mimetic culture is ritual. I think ritual is the phenomenological basis of all religion. Ritual, of course, is part of our lives. If you live in the university, you are hemmed in by an extremely elaborate set of rituals. We don’t call it that, we don’t remember that, but that’s what it is.

Then, when language emerged around the period—we don’t know for sure—between 50,000 and 120,000 years ago, we get narratives. Narratives add an enormous amount of information to what was communicated through bodily, or mimetic, exchange. Again, we’re still there. Most of our lives are controlled by narratives, not by logical reasoning, not by science. But rational, logical thought emerges at a certain moment, and that is the so-called Axial Age, more or less around 2,500 years ago.

There, too, it comes out of religious experience. The two examples I gave in that little paper are Plato and the Buddha, two of the great rationalists. People who think Buddhism is some kind of crazy mysticism haven’t read very much. The Buddha could give you very definite reasons for everything that he said—he could convince you rationally. He was, of course, coming out of a profound transformative experience that we would call religious.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: And everything before the Buddha, of course, in the Hindu tradition was ritual, which is about the role of the Brahmins.

ROBERT BELLAH: Well, not everything, because the Upanishads already had the beginnings of something like theoria.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Before that, there were the Brahmins and manipulating the gods and the role of—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, certainly, before the Upanishads, it’s all ritual. Hinduism is ritual to this day. Of course, all religions are. That’s why refuting religion as if it were a set of theories is not the point, because you are not getting at what religion is all about.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But there is ritual without religion. You can say that the way you brush your teeth, the way you comb your hair—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: We all live through patterned activity.

ROBERT BELLAH: The way you give a lecture. The academic lecture is one of the most ritualized things in the world, a highly formal ritual.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But at what point, then, do you think of ritual in terms of religion? Is it that it is collective or is it the character of a ritual that points to the transcendent? At one point you had a famous quotation about the definition of religion that talked about the transcendent as being an essential character of what we think of as religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Again, the transcendent—what the hell does that mean?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: What does it mean? You’re the guy who used it.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. I would say this. The religious side of mimetic culture—“ritual culture,” let’s say, which is an easier term than “mimetic”—is that it’s about the most important things. It’s a way of expressing those important things by a group together. But there is a sense in which every form of ritual is quasi-religious. The university is an institution that we believe in. Some of us are ready to lay down our lives for it when it’s under attack. Family ritual is critical—and in danger. The family meal is a central expression of the common life of the family, and it has a religious dimension. The family is an instantiation of a kind of group that, through its deep ties, is tied into and related to some pretty deep meanings. So you are sliding in and out of what is religious and whatever this word “secular” means.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Still, despite the fact that you can have sex without marriage, people are getting married.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. And now gays want to get married because they want to have that right, too.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: They want to participate, yes.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, they want that as a possible thing to do. In Europe, you have to be married in a secular setting first. Then you can have a church wedding if you want. But in the United States, we think of marriage primarily in a religious context.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: In the definition of religion that you just used—that is, the kind of patterned activity or thought related to the deepest, most important things in a collective context— marriage, whether you think of it as being religious or not, is religious.

ROBERT BELLAH: It is, yes. I think so. It also, because it’s a powerful force that can compete with other kinds of demands on human beings, can become a negative thing.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right. So now let’s go back to the Greeks. If theoria is now being taken over by the Greek philosophers as a patterned activity regarding thought or ideas, rather than mimetic activity, is this, in a sense, a kind of new religiosity? Classically, we think of the origins of secularism in the Greek philosophers. Yet we had Wilfred Cantwell Smith for a number of years arguing that philosophia—and he went right back to the Greeks, where you do—began essentially as a religious tradition, only not calling it that.

ROBERT BELLAH: It was very convenient for Christians who wanted to adopt a lot of Greek culture to say, “Oh, that’s philosophy, not religion.”

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But, in fact, of course, it was religious. It always was religious. Pierre Hadot, the great French classicist, speaks of philosophy as a way of life, a total way of life, and certainly always tied into some sense of transcendence. It’s there in Plato centrally, and it’s also there in Aristotle, it’s there in Stoicism. It’s just part of that side of our tradition, and it gets absorbed into Christian theology. Thomas Aquinas, certainly one of the two or three greatest Christian theologians who ever lived, is saturated with Aristotle. So where does philosophy end and religion begin?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But theoria, in its pre-philosophic meaning, meant to go and look at a religious spectacle and then come back and tell what you saw. In Plato, it becomes the philosophic quest to actually see the form of the good.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Like in the cave.

ROBERT BELLAH: To come out of the cave and see what’s really there, what the truth is, a vision of the truth.

Nonetheless, once you have seen the truth, you look at the normal world in a different way. You see through all of its falsehoods. That gives you the beginning of the chance to use theory in a different way—namely, as a critical form of undercutting accepted beliefs. Certainly, both Plato and Aristotle—Plato was one of the great deconstructionists of all time—he wandered throughout the entire history of Greek culture—Homer, the tragedians, all of Greek poetry—and replaced it with whom? Himself, because he saw the truth and he saw all these people as saying a whole bunch of lies.

That notion of theoria gets into our notion of science. Science takes nothing for granted. It asks questions about everything. There’s nothing that is taboo. We can doubt everything. We can’t doubt everything at once, but at least we can doubt things one at a time. That is a direct inheritance from—the term itself that we use, “scientific theory,” comes from the Greeks.

Download the entire interview here (PDF).

For this reason, An-Na’im has created a website where chapters of the book are available in a variety of languages-Urdu, Bengali, Bahasha Indonesia, Persian, Turkish, Russian, and French, in addition to Arabic and English. Moreover, as An-Na’im explains, a great many English-speaking Muslims, especially expatriate Pakistanis and Muslims of Middle East origins in the UK and the United States, will read the English version of the book in print and on the website. It is difficult to know how many readers have accessed the chapters in their various languages, though a recent visit to the site indicated that a forum set up for comments had thus far garnered only one remark: “nice site,” said the reader, adding a smiley face .

There is reason, however, to think that there might be more interest in An-Na’im’s thesis than that within the Muslim world, since he is unabashedly pro-Muslim and opposed to secularism. An-Na’im affirms that religion in general—and Islam in particular—has a role to play in public life. He admires shari’a and thinks that it should be embraced, but accepted voluntarily. In fact, An-Na’im believes that it does a disservice to Islamic principles for them to be forced on the public whether it accepts them or not. For the sake of Islam, then, he believes that the state should be neutral with regard to the enforcement of religious values and concepts. For this reason he insists that the state should be secular. It is a position not unlike that of the Iranian Sh’ite theologian, Abdolkarim Soroush, who advocated that Islam and politics should be separated for the sake of Islam, which he thought had become compromised by becoming an instrument of the state.

One would think that this pro-Muslim view of the separation of religion and state would be seriously considered within Muslim society, and within some quarters it has been. Yet in the Sudan, the country of An-Na’im’s birth, the response from the state has been hostile. The mentor of An-Na’im, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, was tried for apostasy and executed by the Sudanese state in 1985. Taha, who some regard as the “Gandhi of Sudan,” had earlier been jailed by the British for his role in Sudan’s independence movement. His political party, the Republican Brothers, was intended to be an alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood, calling for a secular constitution and political framework rather than one based on strict Shari’a codes. Like An-Na’im, Taha was a deeply religious man, and regarded the separation of religion and state to be essential for the purity of the Islamic faith as well as vital for the protection of human rights. According to Packer’s article on An-Na’im and Taha in The New Yorker, “The Moderate Martyr,” as a young law student at the University of Khartoum in the 1960s, An-Na’im had been in a “deadlock” between his love for Islam and his admiration of human rights, and it was something of an epiphany for him to find in Taha the acceptance of both. Indeed he saw each reinforcing the other.

In this rich and interesting book, An-Naim is determined to bring Taha’s way of thinking to the wider Muslim world. The book examines the relation of Islam and politics in history, and finds that most political authorities in Muslim societies have not forced their beliefs and principles down the throats of their subjects. At the same time, the relationship between Islam and secularism has been problematic. An-Na’im examines the cases of India, Indonesia and Turkey for insights into how the secular state can be embraced by Islam. He also critically analyzes the attempts of Mawdudi, Qutb, and modern Muslim activists to create an Islamic state, which An-Na’im regards as inappropriate for Muslim tradition, for it tacitly accepts the Western constructs of nationhood and religion. For Islam to be true to itself, An-Naim argues, it must be free to play a positive public role unfettered by state control. It is a compelling argument, one that deserves wide discussion. Some twenty years after the Sudanese regime attempted to silence Taha’s thinking, it is impressive to see that An-Na’im’s writings and multi-language website continue to give him voice.

Being a young Californian, I was not used to wearing suits, but Bhutto was Bhutto, the very model of urbane sophistication, and I wanted to impress him. Besides, he was a Berkeley graduate himself, and in fact had been proclaimed the University’s “Alumnus of the Year” shortly before my trip. The meeting with Bhutto did not disappoint—he was a charming and intelligent man—and I was glad I bought the suit. I don’t know whether it impressed him, but it was the sort of thing he might have noticed, and, as it turned out, it outlived him.

Later when I met his daughter, Benazir, my first impression was that she was very much her father’s daughter: gracious, articulate, witty. In her case an American undergraduate experience—at Harvard rather than Berkeley—was capped by graduate work at Oxford, again following footsteps established by Zulfikar. She became head of Oxford’s debating society, opposing the Cambridge team, which was also headed by a foreigner, a Greek woman now known by her married name, Ariana Huffington.

Benazir was as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as they come, and it is easy to see why savvy members of the U.S. administration would see her as a useful prop for President Pervez Musharraf’s sagging reputation. Her approval ratings were well over sixty percent; Musharraf’s were in the teens. The Pakistan People’s Party that her father founded and that she continued to lead in exile could provide a democratic base for the odd couple of Musharraf as President and Benazir as Prime Minister in a shared power arrangement.

So when she was killed on Thursday before the New Year, it is understandable that one might wonder whether the fate of secular civility that she represented in Pakistan was also in peril. Like most societies, Pakistan has a range of popular leaders—from urbane statesmen like the Bhuttos and the man often described as the founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—to rough tribals in the traditional societies near the Afghan border. It is in these areas that the Taliban has flourished, and, most likely, the places where Osama bin Laden has been able to maintain a secret hiding. It would be easy to conclude that in Benazir’s assassination, these crude, autocratic traditionals had won.

But the situation is not as simple as that. In an interview given last year, Benazir described the political situation in Pakistan as a contest between dictatorship and democracy. By “dictatorship,” she meant the military regime of Pervez Musharraf. But she then went on to say that that many Pakistanis presently see the only democratic option as the political parties of the religious right, and that she wanted to present a secular democratic option. Implicitly she was recognizing the force of religious politics in the democratic politics of the country.

Islamic parties have indeed had a significant following in recent Pakistani elections. Parties such as the Jamaat-i Islami (Islamic Party), Jami’at al’ Ulama-i-Islam (Party of the Community of Islam) and Jami’at al’ Ulama-i-Pakistan (Party of the Community of Pakistan). The supporters of these parties have been an interesting mixture of groups, including tribal traditionalists, the disaffected urban poor, and young urban intellectuals who found in the Islamic parties a voice for their anti-authoritarian responses to what they regarded as the government’s capitulation to Western modernity and the homogenous forces of globalization. These young radical intellectuals were among the leadership of some of the more extreme Islamic political groups, including a virulent coalition in Pakistan’s Punjab region, the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (Islamic Democratic Front), which opposed Benazir Bhutto’s brief rule and was a critical factor in her electoral defeat in 1990. Since then, the Islamization of politics in Pakistan has become a major theme. The Islamic legal code, the shari’a, has been proclaimed the law of the land; secular civil laws have been repealed.

Still, Pakistan is not yet the Islamic country envisioned by its most influential Islamic political theorist, Sayyid Abdul A’la Maududi, usually referred to as Maulana Maududi. Maududi was born in 1903 in what is now the state of Hyderabad in India. He was hardly a country bumpkin—his father was a lawyer and Maududi became a journalist and a political theorist. He became convinced that the very concept of the modern nation-state was a European invention that had no place in Islamic society. For this reason he opposed the creation of Pakistan. Maududi’s thinking has been an important part of the intellectual apparatus of the modern jihadi movement, including the ideas of the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, and activists such as Ayman al Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.

Despite Maududi’s opposition to the idea of the Pakistani nation-state, when the country was created he joined it and his party, the Jamaat-i Islamiya, entered the democratic electoral process as a way of building a power base for the advocacy of an Islamic state. Over the years the Jamaat-i Islamiya (the JI) has remained the most influential Islamic party in Pakistan, but it did not remain the only one. Internal power struggles within the JI, compounded with ideological differences, resulted in the rise of many new parties, including the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, founded by radical Muslim students at the University of Karachi in 1978. It drew its support from the mohajir, immigrants from India. It was rumored that the movement was supported initially by Pakistan’s secretive Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) in order to undercut the political support for Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the state of Sindh. Since its founding the movement has been accused of a number of terrorist incidents, including political assassinations in Sindh in 1992. In 1996 the government’s heavy-handed crackdown on the MQM resulted allegedly in hundreds of deaths. The revived version of the MQM has been more moderate, and in 2005 it captured the Karachi municipal elections.

After September 11, 2001, and the alliance of President Musharraf with the United States-supported war on terror, some Muslim groups, such as the MQM, supported Musharraf’s position on the war on terrorism. Others, including the JI, saw Musharraf’s position as a sell-out to US President George W. Bush. The JI took an uncompromising stand against the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and enjoyed a revival of its popularity. The JI became the centerpiece in a coalition of Islamic parties aimed against Musharraf and what was regarded as his pro-American policies.

Opposition to Musharraf and what was perceived to be his pro-U.S. stance deepened in 2007 after a bloody confrontation between government security forces and radical Muslim clerics and students at Islamabad’s Red Mosque. The leading cleric at the mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had openly announced his support of the Taliban and Osama bin Ladin, and many of the students in the schools and seminaries located in the mosque compound came from Taliban-influenced Pashtun tribal areas of Waziristan along the Afghanistan border. Some preachers at the mosque had called for Musharraf’s assassination. After the end of the standoff in July 2007, which resulted in the death of Ghazi and scores of students and militants who were barricaded in the mosque, riots broke out throughout Pakistan. A series of suicide bombings were aimed at government installations and Shi’a religious sites. Some of the most deadly attacks were on Shi’a mosques and festivals in the Pashtun areas near the Afghanistan border.

The leaders of many of these Islamic movements have been urbane and sophisticated politicians. Even some of the most extreme are articulate and impressive defenders of what they regard as anti-Western but democratic movements. Videotapes of interviews with Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the slain clerical leader of Islamabad’s Red Mosque, show him to be conversant in sophisticated English. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of the leading figures in the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, had been a student at the London School of Economics where—according to President Musharraf in his book, In the Line of Fire—he was recruited into the British intelligence agency to infiltrate jihadi organizations. At some time after that, Musharraf speculates, he presumably affiliated with the jihadi movements himself and acted as a double agent. But there was no question that he was a sophisticated, smart guy.

The modern, democratic nature of many of these Islamic opposition movements in Pakistan complicates our picture of the political situation there. It also clouds the images on the crystal ball as to what will happen next. It is easy to see why many of these religious politicians would dislike Benazir—a secular,Western-oriented, Shi’ite, powerful woman—but it is not clear what alternative they would accept in her place. It may be that the dictator, Musharraf, despite his incredibly low popularity ratings and being distrusted by both the radical religious right and the urban secular middle class, has had a better sense of how to deal with the Islamic radicals—playing a sort of role similar to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in first placating the Muslim political groups, then cracking down on them. It is a strategy, however, that only postpones a confrontation or an attempt at a more genuine synthesis between two forms of modernity, one of them religious and one of them secular.

Benazir may have understood this issue, and have acknowledged that many of the Islamic movements in her country were genuinely presenting a democratic voice for a non-Western non-secular form of modernity for Pakistan’s future. But her final moments—standing up in an open sunroof of her bullet-proof van—showed that she dangerously underestimated the unpredictability of their power.