A reader writes:
The parallel to England is eerier than you acknowledge. In both cases, the underlying driver is a religious reformation. Europe's Reformation was led by thoroughly modern leaders,
determined to return to religious fundamentals and to purge the faith of the accreted mass of folkloric and pagan practices. It was also an attack on traditional structures of authority and hierarchies. In place of a large number of deeply-local, culturally specific Christianities, the Reformation proposed a universal faith in which every believer had equal recourse to the scripture, the ultimate source of authority. No intermediation. (Of course, the ironic effect of such universalizing beliefs was to fragment Christiandom into a host of warring denominations, each claiming adherents across traditional social and geographic lines.) It took time - and a shocking amount of bloodshed - before new, stable societies were able to emerge from the chaos.
Compare that to the Islamic world, which is experiencing its own reformation. The young, in particular, are drawn to more universal versions of Islam. In immigrant communities and in urban enclaves, they tend to be embarrassed by the clergy imported from their native lands or from the countryside, who are relatively poorly educated and adhere to practices that are more cultural than religious. They turn instead to preachers offering what seems a purer faith, more closely grounded in Islamic texts.
This is why the West has found itself in the curious position of allying itself with older, tribal authorities against insurgents in Iraq, who are attacking both the West and traditional social arrangements.
It's why the terror attacks in Western nations tend to be perpetrated by those for whom the contrast seems sharpest - young people fully embedded in modern life, drawn to a faith which radically rejects many traditional practices in the name of a purer, reconstructed tradition. They seek the same intellectual rigor in their religious observance that marks their professional lives, and the syncretic practices of their birthplaces seem backward and anachronistic. And, even more radically, they claim the right to seek out and select which religious authorities they will follow.
This suggests the somewhat-depressing conclusion that the shift in the meaning of Islam is going to have to play itself out internally before any measure of stability is restored. Moments of revolutionary change are seldom susceptible to outside interventions in the name of stability. Revolutionary movements that seize power eventually spend themselves, and tend to ossify into regimes that bear a startling resemblance to those they replaced - witness Russia, Iran, or even England's Protectorate. But to imagine, for example, that simply bolstering the old tribal structures can hold back the flood-tide is to place ourselves on the wrong side of history.