ISLAM RISING : Ideology : Muslims Open Up to Modern World : The faith’s activists draw the headlines, but even in theocratic Iran the broader movement is engaged in less visible efforts to meld religion with secular life.

It could have been a couple anywhere in the world. Married in 1979, they discovered their differences within the first year. She felt wronged by his negligence and greed. He felt betrayed when she went home to mother and refused to return.

A reconciliation eight years ago produced a son, but it only complicated a dysfunctional marriage. Now she wanted out forever.

But this divorce case was unusual because it played out in Islamic Iran. It also illustrated a new but little-noticed effort throughout the international Muslim community to find an accommodation between Islam and a modern, secular world.

The setting for the family drama was an informal court in downtown Tehran. In a drab little office decorated with a faded city planner’s map, a male judge with a snowy beard and a female assistant judge garbed in the all-enveloping black chador presided from two old desks. The bickering couple and a rotating stream of family witnesses sat on four chairs against the wall as each told a tale of marital misery. A phone on the judge’s desk regularly interrupted the morning proceedings.

In the end, despite the husband’s protests, the court granted Sedeigh her divorce from Davoud. But because of a law passed by Iran’s Parliament last year, the case broke from Islamic tradition.

First, the judges promised Sedeigh compensation for her housework during the marriage. In a historically male-dominated country and political system, the law now allows divorced women payment for everything from cooking to nursing children.

Second, a female judge sat on an Iranian family court, a reversal of clerical rulings after the 1979 revolution barring women from the judiciary.

Third, the divorce was decreed by a civil court--as the law now requires--not by the common Muslim practice allowing men to divorce their wives by verbal declaration, whether or not the wives want it.

More fundamentally, the case reflected an evolution within the world’s only modern theocracy almost as important as the 1979 revolution that produced it.

And for the faith in general, the changes symbolize the opening stage of Islam’s equivalent of the Reformation. Although Muslim activism draws headlines mainly for violence by its extremist wing, the broader movement has become engaged in peaceful but less visible efforts to change Islam and the political order.

“Islam is going through a process of dynamic change, a process of intellectual re-examination,” said John Esposito, author of “The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?”

“Islamic reformists are now trying to move beyond general goals and slogans to provide intellectual structures for institutional change within Islam.”

Added Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim, a Sudanese Islamist and intellectual: “There are voices within Islam that identify with international voices of human rights, democratization and economic development, not just issues like the veil, amputations and flogging.”

Iran’s new divorce law contains many implicit precedents that fuel a new spirit of reform addressing some of the same issues--such as the relationship between church and state--central to the 16th-Century Christian Reformation.

The most significant precedent is recognition that the state is superior to Islam--because a divorce must be processed through the state, and according to civil statutes adapted from European law, not Sharia, for it to be binding.

The new statute also hints at separation of powers between mosque and state, at least on some issues--a radical departure for the only monotheistic religion that offers rules by which to govern a state as well as a set of spiritual beliefs.

It also implicitly accepts that laws governing society should be adapted to the times--such as giving women a say in both receiving and dispensing justice.

The changes apply only in Iran. But they are part of a process of questioning, interpretation and change--the formal aspect of which is known as ijtihad-- sweeping Muslim societies from Tunisia in North Africa to Tajikistan in Central Asia.

“Rampant corruption, disregard for fundamental human rights, denial of educational and employment opportunities to women, illiteracy, economic disparities and tolerance of tyrannical regimes are not the symptoms but the causes of our decay,” wrote Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s finance minister, in an article for the International Herald Tribune’s editorial page.

“In my view, as a Muslim, it would be a helpful beginning if the umma, the world Muslim community, looked critically at itself and its problems.”

The process now under way reflects the fact that most Islamists are not fundamentalist. Rather than returning to the 7th Century, these activists are instead future-oriented, using the faith’s original values to improve contemporary life.

“Islam must and can innovate. It is not static. But to achieve our goals, we must be contemporaneous and live in our time, not be mired in the past,” Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s Renaissance Party, said.

Many like Ghannouchi are now reinterpreting the Sharia, the Islamic law on everything from public misdemeanors to capital crimes. Sharia is drawn largely from the Koran as well as the record of the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings, and the examples of his virtuous deeds that serve as a model of behavior for Muslims.

A growing corps of reformers is now adapting Sharia texts and precedents from nearly 1,400 years ago to the 20th Century. It is not the first effort at ijtihad. Nor is it just an intellectual exercise. Many Islamists have little choice.

“For centuries, the mullahs and the Islamic thinkers could say anything about Islam and how a state should work because they were outside the system. Now those in power or those trying to come to power have to figure out practical solutions to real problems, like how to collect trash,” said Farhang Rejaei, an Iranian political scientist. “They can’t avoid accommodating Islam to a modern world.”

In the corridors of power as well as classrooms and coffeehouses, in newspaper editorials and underground pamphlets, the outlines of an Islamic reformation are emerging from intense, daring and sometimes feisty debate on issues ranging from women’s rights to jihad, or holy war. The impact, as Iran’s new divorce law illustrates, can be revolutionary.

In Islamic tradition, two women count as one man in testimony. A man can take four wives, but a woman only one husband. Throughout her life she is under the guardianship of a man, be it a father, husband, brother or uncle. Women are treated as minors.

Tehran’s divorce law effectively recognizes Iranian women as adults, as independent and as equals--in defiance of the Sharia’s rigid gender gap. For this and other reasons, Iranian women are now light years ahead of their counterparts in Saudi Arabia.

Indeed, because Iran has been ruled by Islam for 14 years, awareness of the issues and choices is often more advanced in Tehran. And some of the boldest challenges to Muslim traditions are coming from Iranians like Abdol Karim Soroosh.

A charismatic lecturer who some (reportedly, including himself) view as a Muslim version of Martin Luther, Soroosh is now challenging the theocracy’s highest offices and officials as well as their sources of knowledge. “None of the seminary books are sacred, and they should be refined,” he said recently.

Of the ruling mullahs, he added: “Don’t say that power is in the hands of pious rulers now. I don’t have any doubt about their good intentions and liking the people. But I also know that they are human beings and this is what necessitates criticism, reform and guidance.”

He has also warned that the “Supreme Jurisprudent,” the job first held by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, could lead to fascism. He called on Iranians to discuss Iran’s leadership structure anew.

Now in his mid-40s, Soroosh has even endeared himself to women by asking why Islam is such a dark religion, a reference to black chadors or coats required of all women to show Islamic modesty. He boldly suggested more colors, even bright reds like the traditional dress of Iran’s rural tribes.

To the outside world, however, a more sensitive issue is how Muslim countries treat their many minorities--from animists to Zoroastrians, including Jews and Christians--in a world where human rights is the barometer of modernity and human progress.

In states ruled by Sharia, Christians and Jews are theoretically recognized as people of the same Abrahamic religious heritage and therefore protected and permitted to worship. But they can’t hold public office that exercises authority over Muslims. They have no competence as witnesses in cases involving Muslims. And they are forbidden to proselytize.

Other minorities, such as Iran’s Bahais or Sudan’s polytheists, face harder conditions. At worst, they’re persecuted; at best, they’re viewed as non-persons and therefore denied rights.

In practice, treatment of minorities today varies widely in countries where Sharia is the law. It often depends more on domestic or regional tensions than on Islamic tradition. Yet reformists are breaking ground on minority rights.

Tunisia’s Ghannouchi, a gently graying philosophy professor, is now calling for a “free and open society that welcomes those who have a different opinion or a different religion.

“Those who live in a Muslim state and have a different religion or don’t have any religion are not treated as enemies and are not boycotted except if they start attacking other members of the society--Muslims or non-Muslims,” he wrote in his 1990 book “The Rights of Non-Muslims in a Muslim State.”

“It is the consensus of opinion among modern Muslim scholars that non-Muslims in the modern Islamic state can even criticize Islam freely and praise their own religion.” Muslim penalties for liquor consumption also should not apply to non-Muslims, he said.

But the biggest challenge facing reformists is the modern Islamic political system and its relationship with democracy.

Doctrinaire defenders of the Sharia argue that people have no inherent right to sovereignty in Islam. Even the word Islam means “submission.” All sovereignty is owing to God, and man should submit to God’s will, not man’s. Ergo, democracy contradicts Islam.

Yet as the Islamic reformation widens its focus, several Islamist reformers have begun to dispute traditional thinking.

“Democracy should be a means for all Algerians to express their free political will, to express their conscience,” said Abassi Madani, a leader of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front, in an interview before his 1991 arrest.

“The experience of America is an example of what freedom is. Freedom is the basis of democracy, and freedom should be the best expression of collective will,” he said.

Skeptics and critics charge that most, if not all, Islamist experiments with democracy will be short-lived, lasting only until an election brings them to power or until they face the prospect of defeat.

At this embryonic stage of the Islamic reformation, debate and pronouncements on the compatibility of Islam and democracy do vary widely, depending on the political and physical environment.

Islamists in the former Soviet Central Asian republics, for example, are great enthusiasts about democratic freedoms. Three of five Muslim countries, independent since 1991, still live under hard-line regimes where religious parties are either banned or persecuted.

“When we talk about our goal of an Islamic society, we mean an Islamic democracy. But all the elements of democracy are in Islam, so we don’t need to add the word,” Abdullah Yusuf of Uzbekistan’s outlawed Islamic Renaissance Party, said in a clandestine interview.

Yet his vision of democracy is qualified by Islamic traditions. His party’s version of democracy also means “freedom” from drugs, alcohol, prostitution and criticism of Islam, all forbidden by the Sharia.

On the other extreme is Ghannouchi, who says Western-style democracy and its traditions are a foundation to build a just society. His definition of freedom is compatible with the West’s.

“All democratic systems agree on the principle of equality, elections, separation of authorities, political pluralism, freedom of expression, unions, majority right to lead and minority right to oppose through deliberations. The higher the participation rate, the closer this system is to its ideal,” he wrote in a treatise on Islam and democracy.

But, so far, he is among the few who have declared a willingness to accept defeat of an Islamist party at the polling booth and to cede power to non-Islamists.

The possibilities are still only hypothetical, however. Ghannouchi’s party is outlawed in Tunisia, and he is in exile in Europe--not an unfamiliar position for Islamist reformers.

With the exception of places like Iran, Sudan and Pakistan, most live outside their countries--mainly because Islamist movements are banned. Most also are not clergy or seminarians, but university-educated, often in applied sciences, and sometimes graduates of Western colleges. Soroosh, for example, did his doctorate in pharmacy at a British university.

“They’re engineers, doctors, and computer scientists. And they use their secular training to deal with the sacred texts, which makes their interpretations extremely different (from past interpretations),” Gilles Kepel, the French author of “Intellectuals and Militants in Islam Today,” said. “There’s a big revolution in the Muslim world in terms of access to knowledge, which shows in this new class of Islamists.”

Many are also well-versed in the technological tools of modernity, from computers to faxes and E-mail. Even the smallest Islamist groups now communicate to followers on videocassettes.

Most also consider the traditional ulema, or men of religious learning, incapable of understanding the predicaments of the modern world. “They usually view the ulema as mere lackeys of the powers that be,” said Kepel, who teaches at the Institute of Politics in Paris. “They believe the ulema have been turned into mere civil servants, or agents of illegitimate states.”

The battle for the soul of Islam is challenging the representatives and symbols of the faith, as well as its application.

Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Cairo contributed to this article.