Pressures on intellectual freedom come from many sources.

Throughout much of the Muslim world, university students are among the most ardent fundamentalists, fueled by the literal interpretation of Islam taught at madrassahs (Muslim religious schools). The network of madrassahs in turn links up with religious political parties across national boundaries. In Muslim countries, madrassahs are seen as a legitimate Islamic alternative to unaffordable private schools patronized by the westernized elite.

Professors, particularly in the liberal arts, are often cowed by their own students into silence, both in their teaching and in their writing. Like some postmodernist gone mad, the student of literature may see fiction as nothing but the expression of the writer's politics, while the science student is not concerned with questioning fundamentals, but with applying technologies to religious and political ends.

The results for intellectuals range from a denial of the finest traditions of open debate to working in an environment of omnipresent threat. (In Islamabad, a professor at a medical college this year was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death, after students complained about him to the local religious leader.) It is impossible to ignore the discrepancy between the Islamic emphasis on knowledge and the questionable climate for scholars and intellectuals in Muslim countries. Great scholars of the past, men like Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab historian; the 14th- century writer Ibn Battutah; and the 11th-century writer Abu Raihan Muhammad Al-Beruni may have made the rulers of their day uncomfortable, but they continued the Islamic tradition of the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of all. That such renowned Muslim thinkers might today be placed in a cage or threatened with physical harm undermines the Islamic belief that any person may develop his or her intellect to the fullest, yielding a diminished and alienated sense of Islam itself.