John McCain recently reminded Americans that the great strategic challenge facing the West—and, indeed, the civilized world—is extremist Islam. And more important than any martial aspect of that threat, he said, is the ideological struggle between moderate and extremist understandings of Islam.

Yet going on seven years after the attacks that brought America's attention to the problem, it is hard to say that we as a nation—a government and a people—have gotten any closer to identifying, much less aiding, those voices of Islamic moderation that we hope will ultimately triumph.

My profile of Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, provides a brief look at the work of an important Muslim jurist who argues that traditionalism, particularly traditional Islamic jurisprudence, is the best antidote to Islamic extremism. Followers of the grand mufti, including many of his former students at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, believe that his approach to Islam and Islamic law has a profound influence not just on Egyptians but on Muslims throughout the Middle East and even beyond. But others are more skeptical. They say that his position as a state-appointed official makes him suspect in the eyes of most Egyptians.

While both sides are partly right, the skeptics might seem to have the stronger case, at least if recent history is any guide. While Islam has prayer and mosque leaders (imams and mullahs), the religion has never had a formal priesthood. But it has long had an elite class of scholar-jurists, or ulema, whose deep learning in sharia (religious law, as based in the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet) and the different methodologies of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) has endowed it with special clerical authority. By dint of their scholarship, the leading sheiks of the ulema were empowered to issue fatwas, religious-legal opinions on matters large or small that might arise in the everyday lives of Muslims. At least until the founding of modern Iran, the ulema never ran Muslim nations, but good Muslim rulers, whether caliphs or kings, have always been expected to respect the authority of the ulema and particularly their authority as specialists on sharia .

"We are not rigid," says Dr. Essam El-Erian, a physician and high-ranking official in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. I have come to his Cairo office to discuss the brotherhood's agenda. More specifically, I hope to explore how the brotherhood's use of Islam as the basis of a political program might be at odds with the views of Muslims like Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, who rejects the idea of Islamic political parties on the grounds that they create divisions among Muslims.

A genial man with a confident, sometimes booming voice, El-Erian tries immediately to set me straight: "Islam cannot be used by anybody," he says. "Islam is Islam. All of the basics are in the text."

As readers of this blog may know, I traveled to Cairo recently to interview Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, for a story that appears in the March 17 issue of U.S. News.

A scholar and jurist who studied and taught for many years at Cairo's venerable Al-Azhar University, Gomaa since 2003 has been head of the Dar al-Ifta (the house of fatwas), a government office charged with rendering nonbinding religious legal opinions on virtually any question that might arise in a Muslim's life. As grand mufti, Gomaa ranks second only to the Sheik of Al-Azhar in Egypt's official religious establishment, and he also has considerable influence in the wider Sunni Muslim world. I went specifically to learn more about his traditionalist approach to Islam and particularly Islamic sharia law, an approach that he claims provides the best antidote to the simplistic, puritanical versions of Islam that are the seedbed of radical and often violent Islamic extremism.

Given the American penchant for change, it might not be surprising that more than one quarter of all Americans have left the religions of their childhoods. And that number would be close to 44 percent, a new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows, if changes among Protestant denominations were included.

Change and creativity have long been a fact of American religious life. But the extent to which Americans move among different religious groups, or out of religion completely, has been hard to determine, in part because the U.S. Census does not track religious affiliation. But the new Pew survey, based on 35,000 telephone interviews, provides compelling proof that American spiritual life is more fluid than ever. And while it appears that Roman Catholicism has lost the most as a result of adult attrition, the ranks of the unaffiliated (including atheists, agnostics, but mostly people who see themselves as nothing in particular) have swelled the most—with more than double the number of people who say they weren't affiliated with any particular religion as children.

I set off to Cairo this week to meet and interview a man who is considered to be one of the most influential voices of moderation in the Islamic world. His name is Ali Gomaa, and he is the grand mufti of Egypt, a leading scholar of jurisprudence and head of the Dar Al-Iftah (literally, the House of Fatwas), a state-sanctioned body that issues religious judgments on matters ranging from employment and finance to gender relations to, well, just about anything of importance in a Muslim's life. In terms of religious authority in Egypt, and indeed within the larger Sunni Muslim world, the grand mufti ranks second only to the grand sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, perhaps the foremost center of Sunni Islamic learning.

The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, is widely known as an intellectual and academic as well as man of the cloth. But he appeared to be surprised by the fury he unleashed both within and outside his church last week when he remarked to a gathering of British lawyers, and then in a radio interview, that the United Kingdom would have to accommodate limited use of Islamic sharia law by its Muslim citizens. Allowing Muslims to use their own courts for civil cases relating to matters such as divorce and finance was not only "unavoidable," Williams said, but necessary for social harmony.

Besieged by criticism—including the outrage of church traditionalists who charged that Williams's proper job was to defend the biblical foundations of British law—the archbishop repeatedly sought to clarify his position. But each successive attempt seemed to provoke even stronger rebukes, including calls for his resignation. While not going that far himself, the former archbishop, George Carey, asserted that Williams had "overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes." And some 150 of the elected church representatives attending this week's general synod were reportedly prepared to sign an open letter of protest if Williams did not issue an apology.