During the Middle Ages, Muslim society was the world's greatest and most advanced.

It was a pioneer in architecture, in science, astronomy, in economic development, and in the cause of creativity and openness. The world of Islam gave us the guitar, algebra, navigation, optics, the concepts of paradise (arguably) and the university, backgammon, watermelon, artichokes, rice, cotton, asparagus, oranges, figs, dates, coffee ... the list of good stuff just goes on and on.

Ibn Khaldun of Tunis invented the study of history. Some of the West's most influential writers could not have conceived their great books without the example of Islamic literature - Dante, for example, and Voltaire, Proust, Dickens, Borges, Cervantes, Melville. Students of the treasury of poetry will say three, at least, of its most outstanding pearls are from the world of Islam.

It seems odd to say so at this juncture, but it is nonetheless true that we learned religious tolerance and racial equality from Islam - largely the same world now so full of rage and hate because of the existence of a Jewish state in a Muslim region.

What on earth has happened to so change the order of things?

Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University, is widely accepted as the West's leading authority on Islam. In an article in the January issue of The Atlantic Monthly, he suggests that it is Muslim rage about the decline of Muslim society and influence that has created Osama bin Laden and other Muslim extremists.

Professor Lewis mentions two theories that attempt to explain why the decline has occurred. One sees the main culprit "as the relegation of women to an inferior position in Muslim society, which deprives the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusts the other half's crucial early years of upbringing to illiterate and downtrodden mothers." It is not hard to understand that a child brought up in that way is likely to be either arrogant or submissive, substantially a misfit in a free and open society.

The second theory is one Professor Lewis has himself advanced as the cause. He believes the principal reason the West has progressed, while the Muslim world has not, has been the West's understanding of the necessity of a separation of Church from State, and the creation of a civil society governed by secular laws.

The idea is an old one. Jesus is reported in the Bible as having mentioned it - "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," he said, "and unto God the things which are God's." But it was the fledgling United States that first gave the idea the force of law. Professor Lewis quotes Thomas Jefferson as having written that in matters of religion and civil government, the familiar maxim should be reversed, giving: "Divided we stand, united, we fall."

This concept has had the most remarkable effect. It has allowed for the really rapid development and absorption of `the new' in public consciousness. Had the United States not set that pace for the rest of the Western World ... well, it is hard to imagine what kind of world we would be living in now.

In the West, the process of criticism plays a central role in society's ability to progress. Ideas that survive criticism become stronger. Ideas whose weakness is exposed by criticism adapt or fall by the wayside. Fundamentalists are largely marginalised in Western society for good reason - they are people who insist their ideas, and the mythologies they produce, remain in their original state, unchanged forever. The farther their ideas drift from temporal reality, the more sensitive about and resistant to criticism and change they become, and therefore the less they are likely to influence the main stream.

But all over the world, whether in Bermuda or Bangladesh, the exceptions to this Darwinist survival of the fittest in the world of ideas are those contained in monotheistic religions. They contain "holy" territory, in which beliefs and purported facts must be accepted and may not be questioned. Poor old Mr. Salman Rushdie probably knows more about that territory than most of us.

Because of this, religion is slow, at best, to adapt to what we might call the collective consciousness of the moment. The more our ideas about life change and evolve, the more difficult it is for religion to remain `relevant' to the lives of ordinary people. Some Christian Churches struggle mightily with relevance. Others are content to believe that what was sensible 2,000 years ago must still be sensible. After all, it seems the height of arrogance to believe that mere men should be able to alter or augment the Word of God.

Most Christians want to be able to live balanced lives, in which secular success is tempered by a proper respect for God. In order to achieve that, we are put in the position of having to juggle the set of ethics that religion gives us with another set, sometimes at considerable variance from the first, given to us by the secular world.

Are we persuaded that homosexuality should no longer be treated as a crime? If we express that idea we run the risk, not of being debated by people who have different ideas, but of being attacked by those who believe that what is written in the Bible is the Truth - whole, perfect and irreducible - and who believe that the process of questioning is itself a sin.

Although this conflict can be confusing, we can live with it. People commonly "respect" the strong views of those who hold them and try simply to avoid giving offence by not publicly questioning their ideas, no matter how much it seems they might benefit from a vigorous airing. When they must be questioned, as has been the case in Bermuda twice recently, when capital punishment and criminal sanctions for homosexuality were removed from the law, the process is painful.

Painful though it was, we went through it, and we became a better society for that.

But imagine the discomfort of those who live in fundamentalist states, in which that process is an impossibility...out of the question entirely!

Imagine being forbidden by law to educate your daughter. Imagine that a doctor might be unable to treat your wife for illness, not because no treatment existed, but because there are no female doctors and males are forbidden by law to look at a female body.

Imagine living as a sane and educated person in the world of the 21st Century and being unable to speak of your ideas for fear, not of giving offence to someone, but of being thrown into prison, even executed, for the sin of deviating from the Truth.

It is no wonder that a state so repressive, so out of touch with our time, would have difficulty making its way in a world in which freedom has become a possession prized above all others.

A few days ago, Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia granted an interview to two American newspaper correspondents. His principal intention was to dampen down speculation that a rift might be developing between his country and the United States.

Like Osama bin Laden and other Muslims, fundamentalist and moderate alike, Crown Prince Abdullah placed a great deal of emphasis on the role of the Palestinian crisis in the struggle of Muslims and in the problems caused by Muslim fanatics outside the Middle East.

Asked about what the West saw as the severe curtailment of human rights in the world of Islam, the Crown Prince said individuals in his country were allowed rights in harmony with Islamic belief.

He added: "These areas will expand as our culture evolves."

As counterpoint to this sensible and positive statement, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani was quoted in The Jerusalem Post recently as having told a crowd, at Teheran University on Jerusalem Day last December, that the day was approaching when the Islamic world would possess atomic weapons.

"On that day," he said, "the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world."

All that can be said to that is that there is obviously a great deal of territory to be covered before present-day Islamic culture evolves sufficiently to restore freedom and tolerance to the place they once enjoyed in Islam.