It seems like there's more extremism now than there was 50 years ago. Is that an accurate assessment?

Yes, and I think that the oil wells have fed a lot of that, because the Saudis have funded so many religious schools in the poor world that preach this kind of really diabolical brand of Wahhabite Islam. I think they have to take a huge share of responsibility for the growth of extremism. Not all of it, certainly, that would be ridiculous to say, but they've certainly fanned the flames. And the fact that most Islamic countries are unfortunately so badly governed and so repressively governed.

You write in "Nine Parts of Desire" that in poor countries, places where the men feel they're not in control, that the first thing they do is start to control the women.

Yes. If you have an Islamic revolution, think about it. Getting rid of bank interests, that's really going to screw up the economy, that's hard to do. It's Islamically correct to do it, to get rid of interests on loans, but much easier to order women to wear a head scarf, and then everybody looks at a picture of your country and it looks very Islamic. That's an easy thing to do, so that's why getting the women veiled is one of the first tactics of the Islamists.

How do these issues get resolved?

Well, I don't think we've seen any of them get resolved. But I'm hoping that the American Muslim community will have a louder voice in the Middle Eastern region. For example, there's a really good magazine that comes out of Seattle called Sisters, and that gets translated into Arabic and sent back to the Middle East and so forth and it's teaching a much more tolerant form of Islam. It's actually pointing out to women what their rights are in Islamic teaching, and it's very well done and very scholarly and accessible and all those good things. So I think that as the American Muslim community grows in confidence that will be one impetus for change.

I think there is a lot of potential in the kind of Islamic feminism that the Iranian women pioneered -- in terms of quite religious women trying to do reformation work on the religion as it's understood in their country, to the betterment of women. Apart from that it's pretty hard to be optimistic these days. It's going to be a long grind.

What I don't think works very well is Western feminists wagging their finger in the faces of Arab monarchs. I just don't think that's effective. I think it has to come from within Islam, and I think that the best thing Western feminists can do is to support Muslim women and listen to them. And if they say, "It's important to us that our daughters have the right to wear a head scarf to school without being teased about it," then try to figure out a way of having a bit of consciousness raising for our kids in school so that they don't tease girls about that, and then try and see the benefit for ourselves of having a range of approaches to teenage sexuality available for our own daughters.

A lot of us don't have a problem that our daughters might be in school with somebody who's wearing a bare midriff and a bellybutton ring and has 10 boyfriends, but we do have a problem that she's in a class with a girl who wears a head scarf and doesn't date. Now that's pretty cockeyed to me, because it seems you would want her to be able to make her way with a whole lot of options in front of her.

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