E Pluribis Islam?

At a recent event in India, I asked Pakistan's former president, Pervez Musharraf, whether he would support his country's tireless human-rights activists. He invited me to pose a different question. I didn't.

"Sit down!" the retired Army general then ordered.

Things probably won't get that tense when Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari, visits Barack Obama next week. But maybe they should, given the Taliban's growing reach and Zardari's plunging credibility. The two presidents will be joined by a third, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a religious "moderate" who routinely barters away the rights of women and minorities to warlords and mullahs.

As a reform-minded Muslim, I admit that these guys make the notion of diversity in my faith look laughable. Their track records underscore why we have to venture beyond geopolitical hotspots to fathom the future of progressive Islam.

A year ago, I traveled to Indonesia during Kartini Days. That's when almost 300 million people, most of them Muslim, pay tribute to an early 20th-century Indonesian feminist named Kartini. Although a controversial figure—too revolutionary for some, not radical enough for others—the nationwide affection that I witnessed for her rivals the respect I observe each April in the U.S. for Martin Luther King Jr.

I arrived in Jakarta to launch my book and film, both of which call on Muslims to embrace human rights and freedom of conscience for all. Hundreds of students showed up, ranging from transsexuals to Islamists. They spoke their minds. They disagreed. In between the verbal sparring, guitarists strummed, poets recited and dancers kicked up their Javanese heels. Nobody downplayed their conflicts; instead, they treated dispute as a necessity of democracy. Everybody left safely—including the most vocal transsexual, who proudly announced that after her surgery, she fought for the right to wear a headscarf. She won. My uncovered head spun at the layers of nuance being expressed.

For all its promise, exemplified by last week's national elections favoring secular parties, Indonesia nonetheless flirts with peril. In only 10 years, Islamism has gone from being a joke to a force. Once an authoritarian state whose military quashed any inconvenient element, Indonesia introduced democratic reforms a decade ago. Since then, a free press has emerged. So has political Islam.

Like Muslims elsewhere, Indonesians are watching the import of Saudi-style Islam. Sometimes known as Salafism, it preaches a borderless caliphate anchored in the moral absolutes of the Prophet Muhammad's initial successors. A global village for the virtuous and valorous, Salafism purports to offer a way—no, the way—to combine reverence with modernity. Binding black and white, rich and poor, woman and man, mighty and weak, the theory of Salafism is transcendently pluralistic.

Then there's reality. In practice, Salafis displace pluralism with puritanism. True to the dictates of dogma, they use intimidation and violence to spread their gospel. This summer, a small but steroidal gang of Islamists assaulted human-rights activists in Jakarta. Police stood by as the extremists crashed a religious freedom rally, organized after Indonesia's government imposed restrictions on a minority Muslim sect.

Salafis call the move a defense of Islam's integrity. Pluralists call it a violation of Indonesia's Constitution. Moderate Muslim leaders call it none of their business. Those moderates embody the communal silence that has allowed militant Islamism to metastasize worldwide. Emanating from a secular democracy like Indonesia, such silence is made all the more tragic—with implications that can be frighteningly personal.

Consider the e-mail sent to me by Sakdiyah, a student who attended my film screening at Indonesia's largest university. Since 2005, she has passionately promoted progressive Islam in the same city that houses the Indonesian Mujahedin Council, a radical Islamist outfit. No longer can she and her friends deny their fears: "We tried to organize a seminar on pluralism and received phone calls saying that they would send hundreds of Allah's soldiers to stop us."

Spartan Islam is hitting home. "My family will send me threatening letters whenever I get my work published," Sakdiyah writes. "I often find myself giving up when I face my father," Sakdiyah writes. "Then I lie. I don't want to hurt him, and I don't want him to hurt me because I don't want to hate him. So how can we get along? How can I use my freedom of speech in a matter that will make people understand, especially when they are conservative?"

This is a defining dilemma for the new generation of Muslims in Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, India, Iran, France, the United States and elsewhere. They are wired enough to witness how others live, making many of them disgruntled by the maldistribution not just of material wealth but also of individual liberties. They struggle loudly against the colonizing cudgels of U.S. foreign policy. They denounce their own arrogant governments. And in the West, they finger the catchall specter of racism. But behind the placards, they text their peers about how they're resisting what a Muslim lad in Britain described to me as "tribalism"—community pressures to clam up and conform.