The difficulty, Andrew stressed to us, lies in the extremist brand of Islam with the demand of its leaders for all-encompassing obedience. In this, Islam has a lot in common with Communism. Neither is monolithic. There are places in the world where both are more liberal; places where they are dogmatic and totalitarian. In the Central Asian republics that used to be part of the old U.S.S.R.—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan—fundamentalist forms of Islam are battling for control. In Afghanistan they already have it. The effect on people’s lives of these theological
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