Some days in Egypt -- in Cairo and Alexandria were painful to me, but gave a better understanding of this part of the world. A nation where many people get their living from a culture that is completely alien to them, is in flagrant contradiction to their present beliefs and customs. A glimpse into a society that declares itself an islamic one. I don't know whether it is really islamic, I don't know what the "true islam" is, but to me, Egypt is a totalitarian society where people who don't share these -- supposedly islamic -- values, are ostracized, silenced, sometimes even terrorized and killed. A religious totalitarianism is probably more dangerous than a secular one. We could doubt in the basic values of Marxism-Leninism that was the ideological basis of Soviet totalitarianism, but we cannot express doubts about God, his Prophet and the Qur'an. After all, Marx and Lenin were human beings, although idealized, but God is God, it is the supreme, unconditional authority per se. You cannot engage in dispute with God, the only relationship of Man and God is his total submission to Him. What in practice means total submission to some people who are considered mouthpieces of God, the privileged interpreters of his will, his bailiffs and executioners. 

The syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal Al-'Azm has told that the islamic world needs its Voltaires, its Englightenment. Unfortunately there is an opposite tendency in the western world nowadays, a Christian neo-fundamentalism gaining momentum. One of the worst dangers to our world is a clash between two fundamentalisms. Something we are seeing in Iraq to-day. There can be no compromises between fundamentalisms fighting one another, it can be only a fight to death or to a total exhaustion. We see that even between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq it is  very difficult to reach a compromise. Two un-compromising enemies in possession of nuclear weapons -- this is a potential Apocalypsis. Possibly engineered as a self-fulfilling prophecy by adherents of the great eschatological and apocalyptic religions.