HOME / faith-based: Religion, spirituality, and sacrilege.

"Good Muslim, Good Citizen"And other lesson plans from U.S. prisons in Iraq.

By Andrew K. WoodsUpdated Friday, Jan. 23, 2009, at 6:41 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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Doctrinally, this work isn't very hard. Sheikh Sattar notes, "The Quran points in one direction only—moderate Islam." Despite the common refrain that most of the Quran deals with jihad, it would be equally fair to say that most of the Quran deals with charity. As Ahmed Rashid wrote recently, the Quran clearly bans both suicide and the killing of civilians. (It is true that sharia calls for capital punishment for apostasy, if that can be proven unequivocally, but most Muslims leave this judgment, called takfir, up to God, rather than the local thug.)

One released detainee told me the programs were "a really good way to change [the detainees'] minds about the coalition and the government in terms of Islam." Yet the Pentagon's data show that most of the detainees were never religious to begin with, and most of Stone's reforms—better conditions, shorter detentions—merely ensure that the detainees don't turn to religion out of anger.

Indonesia's program, perhaps the most aggressive and successful of its kind, raises doubts about whether changes in detainees' beliefs are influenced more by questions of faith than of economics. The Jakarta government has used its prisons to try to change the attitudes of more than 100 captured members of the Jemaah Islamiyah, the violent Islamist group responsible for the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002. The program's innovation was to hire released, reformed detainees to go back into their communities—whether or not in prison—to spread the moderate, or at least nonviolent, gospel. According to some reports, the Indonesian program has drastically reduced the radicalism of JI members, but as the International Crisis Group notes, there are no hard data to suggest that the detainees' views have really changed. The program's biggest success, converting more than 20 terrorists to work for the police, was the result of negotiations that included monetary settlements for the family of each detainee.

Then there's the Egyptian program. Larry Wright wrote recently in The New Yorker about the former intellectual leader of al-Qaida, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl, and other members of the violent Egyptian Islamic Group, who seem to have been influenced by visits to their prison cells from clerics like Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt. But after Dr. Fadl issued a statement denouncing al-Qaida's violence, Zawahiri shot back with a note reminding observers that Dr. Fadl's statement was likely produced in an Egyptian torture chamber. If Dr. Fadl's statement is not completely undermined by the fact that he is in an Egyptian prison, it is only a testament to his own stature in the Islamist community.

To say that the United States should play no role in religious deradicalization programs while its tanks roll through Baghdad is not to say they shouldn't exist. It's just that heavy hands don't wield soft power. As the Crisis Group concludes in their review of Indonesia's deradicalization programs, "economic aid … is ultimately more important than religious arguments in changing prisoner attitudes." This won't be the case for everyone—"bad men" from well-to-do families, like Zawahiri, will never be bought off. But even Zawahiri can be defeated if his audience has something better to believe in. They won't condone his violence if it seems as unilateral as our invasion of Iraq; most of them already don't.

One of the sharpest Cold War thinkers, George Kennan, argued that the way to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned countries was through social and economic development programs—not military action. In our better moments, we even funded art programs and literary journals that were explicitly anti-American, under the theory that free speech itself is more important than the contents of that speech. Kennan's thinking has resonance today. Rather than make appeals directly to the detainees' faith—which may or may not work, and are offensive regardless—we ought to seek to empower people with economic and social opportunity. Open societies, after all, become liberal societies, even when they begin in detention centers.

What does Sheikh Sattar cite as his most effective tool for fighting radical ideology? Teaching the detainees how to read.