Geopolitical Jihad.

• Author: Ortiz, Ximena
• Position: Cartoon of Prophet Muhammad

A CARTOON of the Prophet Muhammad donning explosive headgear detonated in the Islamic world--a picture telling a thousand fighting words. At least that is how many Muslims saw it, particularly those who responded to the depiction of Islam as an inherently violent religion with their own acts of violence.

Some imams and other Islamic leaders expressed frustration with the cartoon riots. Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, instructed Muslims to expect their religion to be attacked but to respond peacefully and with "wisdom and exhortation."

The response by Gomaa and others points to an emergent and overlooked global trend. Militants from the secular Fatah party, and not the Islamic-fundamentalist Hamas party, led the most vigorous protests. In addition, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt regretted, in a roundabout way, the violent response to the cartoons, accusing some politicians of striving "to distort the image of the Islamic movement--to get the people to say they are not peaceful, not democratic, against free speech."

Interestingly, you had Islamists (those that the West tends to see as the enemy) calling for calm and secularists (perceived as our natural allies) summoning religious rage in response to a perceived affront to Islam. That response highlights how difficult it is becoming to distinguish the religious from the political, and vice versa.

While many Middle East experts have pointed to the "medieval" religiosity of many Muslims, Islamists have been adept at folding modern political ideology--nationalism, self-determination, free markets--under the banner of Islam and winning at the polls as a result. The Islamist parties that have either triumphed or made electoral gains in the Middle East--Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Shi'a religious parties in Iraq--made openly political appeals for support, such as ending corruption, promoting national self-determination, improving social services. At the same time, political secularists are dredging up Islamist motifs to galvanize a sense of Islamic identity when it becomes expedient for them to do so. Those developments make it more difficult for Western policymakers and Middle East experts to keep track of and understand alliances, networks and ideologies and to define those forces in society likely to be pro-American.

The electoral ascendancy of Islamist parties highlights not only that democracy will bolster political Islam for the foreseeable future (with troubling implications for a U.S. policy that assumes the promotion of democracy will enhance U.S. interests). It also demonstrates how little support Islamic liberals have been able to gain. Reformers, as Faisal Devil from the New School has pointed out, have attempted systematically to enshrine more liberal interpretations of the Quran into law...