An extraordinary meeting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1665471,00.html

An extraordinary meeting

For Muslim leaders to admit Islam is in crisis is a bold move, to act on it would be revolutionary, writes Brian Whitaker

Monday December 12, 2005
Leaders of more than 50 Muslim countries met in Saudi Arabia last week for an event billed as "The Third Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference". The title was quite a mouthful and it failed to set the western media alight with excitement, but the event itself was extraordinary in every sense of the word.


Speaker after speaker acknowledged that the Muslim world is beset with challenges on an ever-widening range of issues. It is suffering from a deep-seated social, economic and religious malaise with which it has so far proved incapable of dealing. In the words of the summit's final communique: "The Islamic nation is in a crisis".


Such thoughts are not new, but to hear the confessions of failure expressed with such frankness, by the very people who have been presiding over the mess - and broadcast to millions around the Muslim world - was little short of revolutionary. Equally extraordinary was the fact that these discussions took place in Saudi Arabia - home to some of the world's most reactionary Muslim clerics - at the behest of the Saudi king.


The outcome was a 10-year plan that amounts to nothing less than an attempt to modernise Islam or, as one of the conference papers put it, to "revamp existing mindsets".

snip

Please fix.

... here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1665471,00.html