"Without a change on the level of ideas, any reconciliation of Islam and democracy is not going to come about.

Unless you fight out that battle on the plain of ideas and say it is perfectly legitimate to have a more liberal version of religion, then I think ultimately you will have long-term problems having genuine democracy in a Muslim country.

We should not minimise the fact that there is a conflict of ideas at the present, not with Islam as a religion but with particular interpretations of Islam."

There are some interesting quotes from Fukuyama in here, unfortunately spun together by a reporter who is trying to push him into a partisan pigeonhole. I don't think Fukuyama is a neoconservative any more then I think he is a democrat. His thinking is driven by observations and not ideaologies.

On a somewhat unrelated tangent, it strikes me that the fundamental problem with ideaologies is that people have a tendancy to prefer ideas that are philisophically pure to ideas that that actually work well for people in practice. This is because philiophical purity is easier to accept then messy reality with its endless caveats. Once you've got an ideaology you can reach a conclusion on any issue based on how that ideaology informs you to think about the matter rather then based on the actual realities of the matter itself. This fallacy seems the core problem at all ends of the spectrum. It infects communists, fundamentalists, and libertarians alike. Most idealogical (and partisan) commentators frame their points of view as "the other guy's ideology doesn't work in practice, so we should prefer the most pure form of my ideaology." In order to move past this we must get people to observe that ideaologies don't work. In order to do that, there must be a word for the ideaological fallacy. What is that word? Does anyone here know?

Francis Fukuyama: The acceptable face of the neo-cons? | Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile