Islam in the grinding poverty of Afghanistan is harsh, its justice unforgiving.
For a woman found guilty of adultery, the punishment is death – which turbaned religious leaders carry out with stones. For ancient Buddhist statues deemed by the ruling Taliban to inspire idolatry, explosives did an equally thorough job.
In the holy lands of Saudi Arabia, Islam shows another face.
The Saudi constitution consists of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, and its accompanying traditions, and all legislation must conform to the Shariah, or Islamic law.
Still, a royal family, not clerics, rules the land. There are limousines in the streets; families watch satellite TV in their homes. In the capital, Riyadh, young men in jeans or white robes and women swaddled in black cloaks flock to a glitzy shopping mall to hang out.
As the terrorist attacks on the United States and the response since have shown, the Muslim world is no monolith. Afghanistan's extremism and alleged ties to the terror have made it a pariah among the leaders of fellow Muslim nations. Even the government of Pakistan, previously one of the Taliban's only friends, has offered support for Washington.
"There is a contemporary perception of Islam in the West that is misinformed, because many people still believe that Muslims across the world are angry, primitive and fanatical," said Salahuddin Ayub, a Malaysian ustaz, or religious instructor for Muslims.
"But they should understand that there should not be stereotypes, that there is great diversity among Muslim countries in different regions."
Islam was born in the Middle East. But it has grown beyond its origins, physically and spiritually.
In countries around the world, it has been adopted in strikingly different ways. From sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Central Asia and the Malay archipelago, the world's "other Muslims" have endowed it with a stunning diversity -- and a complexity born of conflict and compromise.
On Fridays in Cairo, worshippers spill out of storefront mosques onto sidewalks just down the street from the McDonald's. It is a commonplace scene; few give it much thought.
In Saudi Arabia, Christmas decorations, considered blasphemous, are appearing in stores other than U.S.-style supermarkets. They include cards designed in Saudi Arabia showing a reindeer and camel rubbing noses.
Even in countries where Islam is deeply established and Muslims are the majority, today's mixture of cultures and economies, and the looming ideals of Western democracy, present a difficult choice.
The question is asked throughout the Muslim world: How much secularism can Islam take?
Politicians in Egypt and Jordan have tried to assimilate secular freedoms while co-opting fundamentalists, recognizing their influence over a broad range of people feeling the strain of the demands of modern economies.
But to the fundamentalists, secular policies can rapidly become a threat to Islam, and the swings from one pole to the other continue to reflect that deep tension throughout much of the Middle East, and Muslims throughout the world.
Solutions do not come easily.
In Shiite and Persian Iran, Muslims are grappling with the legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution that toppled the shah and made Khomeini the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Under reformist President Mohammad Khatami, himself a cleric, some of the more rigid restrictions on cultural and social activities in Iran have been relaxed or removed. Women dress more freely and are allowed to sing in public and act on stage. Music concerts have been revived.
The most daring Iranian reformists are questioning whether Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should have the supreme political control he now holds, or whether he should be strictly a religious leader.
Hard-liners who want no retreat from their definition of an Islamic state have fought back from a powerful position -- they control the courts and have Khamenei's support.
Mecca and the Middle East will always be at the heart of Islam. But Asia may be where its future is shaped. Here, away from the Arab world, there are other difficulties, and other tensions.
More than half the world's Muslims live east of Karachi, Pakistan, and Asia is home to the four countries with the largest Islamic populations: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.
In the globe's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, muezzin call the faithful to evening prayers while throngs of the young head to discos for nights of drink and dance. This year, a woman was chosen president.
Here, too, the pressures on Muslims are intense.
Calls are strengthening in Asia for stricter observance of conservative Islamic ideals. Women in parts of Malaysia have been ordered to wear headscarves, and local Indonesian authorities closed nightspots last New Year's to avoid a backlash from Muslims in the holy month of Ramadan.
Muslim unrest from Chechnya eastward gnaws at the southern fringes of post-Soviet Russia. In China, which views all religion with suspicion, it is one more ingredient adding to the wrenching transition of a communist giant. For three decades, a Muslim minority in the Philippines has been fighting an insurgency against the largely Roman Catholic majority.
Since the attacks on New York and Washington, Islam in Asia has been reduced in the eyes of many Westerners to a terrorism emanating from the hills of Afghanistan.
But the story of Asia's Islam is above all one of a faith that swept a continent -- by conquest on the Indian subcontinent, by peaceful trade and mysticism across the Malay archipelago -- and adapted to the multitude of beliefs it encountered there.
At the demographic center of the Islamic world -- Islamabad, Pakistan -- female models stream down a runway, the outlines of their bodies clear under sheer blouses.
Working the fashion show audience, Muslim waiters steal glances at the women and compete for the task of carrying refreshments backstage.
In Islamabad lives the divided soul of Asian Islam, split between a religion that imposes ironclad restrictions on the faithful and a more flexible creed that embraces tolerance and diversity.
The backdrop is the enduring struggle of Muslims worldwide to maintain a religious identity and culture while confronting the economic, social and political forces of Westernization.
This is true both in places left behind, like Afghanistan, and in more industrialized Asian nations like Indonesia and Malaysia.
Predictions about which way the region is headed are precarious. But no one can deny the growing strength of orthodox Islam, despite Asia's long history of diversity and tolerance.
"Between the more accommodating and modern Islam and the more fundamentalist Islam, I would say the recent gains have tended to be made by the fundamentalists," said Ng Kam Weng, a religion expert at Kairof, a think tank in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
"What you want to ask is whether these gains are permanent. I think the jury is still out."
Afghanistan is just across the border from Pakistan. But it is a world away.
After years of struggle, first to repel Soviet troops and then of civil war, the Taliban religious militia emerged to impose an Islamic regime so severe that even other conservative Muslims call them extremists.
Guided not only by Islam, but also by Afghan tribal society and a history of poverty, the Taliban have banned videos, TV and music. Girls cannot go to school after age 8. Women may not work and must wear head-to-toe coverings called burquas. Men must have untrimmed beards. Violators have been whipped in the streets.
Through the 1980s and '90s, Islamic radicalism was most closely associated with the minority Shiite branch of Islam, through the Iranian revolution and the Hezbollah guerrilla war against Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon. Because of the centuries-old Islamic split between Shiites and Sunnis, this radicalism resonated less with the Sunnis.
Attention is turning to what inspiration the Taliban -- and alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden -- may provide to Sunnis elsewhere.
An exile from his native Saudi Arabia, bin Laden is believed to have found a haven in Afghanistan that has allowed him to set up a training ground for terrorists. Though not a part of the Taliban, his relentless militancy and calls for a holy war against America and the Jews have made him a symbol of the extremism the Taliban promotes.
"If you look at where radicalism and the dangers of radicalism are occurring, you have the Taliban and the export of a Taliban outlook and mentality," said John Esposito, a specialist in Asian Islam at Georgetown University. "When we talk about militancy in the first part of the 21st century ... (it's) going to come out of the Sunni experience."
The export of those ideals is steaming ahead.
Pakistan's president has promised to back the United States' efforts to find and punish Bin Laden, but support for the Taliban remains strong there. Crowds of protesters have burned effigies of President Bush. Some villages follow restrictions on dress and entertainment modeled on Taliban rules.
The threat goes further.
Islamic separatists fighting in Kashmir, western China and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia draw inspiration -- and, allegedly, training in weaponry and terrorism -- from Taliban teachers.
But the road of the Taliban remains a lonely one.
Indonesia is also poor. It has also struggled through political upheaval. Sectarian skirmishes and bloodshed continue. But it has chosen a much different course than that of the Taliban.
Call it the Muslim melting pot. Islam is the religion of 85 percent of the country's 210 million people, but its more than 13,000 islands also encompass large pockets of Christians, Hindus and ethnic Chinese practicing Buddhism.
Perhaps mixing is inevitable, and the Islam practiced there is hardly uniform. Strict Islamic mores rule in Aceh province on Sumatra, for example, while Muslims elsewhere practice a faith strongly tinged with remnants of Hindu and animist rituals that predate Islam.
Flash points are many, with ethnic bloodshed flaring recently on several islands. But the diversity also brings openness and flexibility. The country's major Muslim group, the Nahdlatul Ulama, once hired sorcerers to drive evil spirits from a meeting hall, something Muslims elsewhere might consider blasphemous.
That broad tolerance has helped put Indonesia in the vanguard of a growing movement in the Muslim world: democratic Islam.
Indonesia's first democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid, a Muslim cleric, reached out to religious and ethnic minorities and refused to promote strict Islamic law.
It was a bumpy start. Wahid was accused of incompetence and corruption and ousted this year. But he has been succeeded by a leader seen as even more democratic and reformist -- Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the founder of modern Indonesia.
That is a significant fact.
In Saudi Arabia, women are expected to cover themselves head to foot before going out in public. They cannot drive, and when traveling must be accompanied by a male chaperone.
East of Afghanistan, Islam imposes fewer restrictions on relations between the sexes.
"When it comes to issues of dress, of people meeting in public space, of work ... by and large, Asian Islam has been far more pluralistic in outlook," said Georgetown's Esposito.
Pakistan has had a woman leader. So has Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim nation of 126 million where women run small businesses and are the key workers in textiles, the top export industry. The government encourages girls to get educated.
Bangladesh is ruled by secular not Islamic law -- and it shows. Women don't have to wear veils. They are encouraged to work and are given loans to start businesses or go to school. Almost 1.3 million women work in garment factories that earn 70 percent of the country's export income.
Parliament in 1998 passed a law allowing women to run for village council. Tougher laws have been passed against rape and other attacks on women.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved