NINE PARTS OF DESIRE , The Hidden World of Islamic Women is one of a handful books on Islam that gained sudden relevance and new readers after September 11. As I finished reading Geraldine Brooks's look behind the veil into the hidden lives of Islamic women, a phrase from Sentinel founder Mary Baker Eddy's Miscellaneous Writings came to mind. She wrote that our prospects for progress present both "a full-orbed promise, and a gaunt want" (p.355).

First the promise. Brooks tells of going to a beach near her parents' home in Sydney. She shares her space with a Muslim family. "It made me sad that the woman's tiny daughter, splashing so happily with her father and baby brother, would be, one day soon, required to forgo that pleasure.

"Every now and then the little girl's mother fiddled with her headscarf as it billowed in the breeze. That woman had made her choice: it was different from mine. But sitting there, sharing the warm sand and soft air, we accepted each other. When she raised her head to the sun, she was smiling."

That smile converged with another smile I recently saw captured in a news photo of an Afghan woman's unveiled face. She's in the middle of a wedding throng in liberated, but not truly free, Kabul. It's an ironic convergence of smiles. Quite different thoughts probably produced them—the first, a woman's contentment within conformity; the second, another woman's uncertain freedom in uncertain times.

Yet both smiles point to a budding of opportunity for millions of women to choose their own course of development, less hindered by social intolerance. Sadly, it's taken a war to force these buds open, and that leads me to the "gaunt want."

The malice behind recent acts of terrorism betrays a wholesale want to tolerance, reason, conscience. But there's another glaring absence—the want of womanliness. And I'm not referring to the obvious absence of women among terrorist leaders, soldiers, or suicide attackers.

No, it's the militant mindset's want of womanhood—of character components like compassion, flexibility, openness to new ideas. I see these as elements God gives to every woman and man. When men deny or lose sight of such qualities, there's nothing to balance mental muscularity, nothing to restrain animality.

The creative Spirit creates spiritual beings—in His image, as Her offspring. As we grasp the logic of that proposition and its potential for changing the way we think about and relate to one another, we'll more fully see a balanced mentality and behavior expressed.

There's one more chilling aspect of the present gaunt want in Brooks's reminiscences. It should not surprise us that women, too, can want for the heart of womanhood. She recalls conversations with Middle Eastern women friends on subjects like Persian poetry or love and marriage, and in the middle of otherwise lighthearted exchanges, the friend might say, "Israel has to be obliterated."

The struggle against terrorism aims to deny shelter to terrorists. But at a deeper level it's about denying life-support to the anger and ignorance that breed hatred. Hatred of the "other" and hatred of women. Centuries of denial of education to girls, "honor killings" of women, and genital mutilation don't make such violations of basic human rights right. As Brooks points out, these practices aren't rooted in the Koran, nor is diminution of women rooted in original Christianity. And the struggle to wipe out this diminution is only partly won.

When leaders tell us that we're in the fight against terrorism for the long haul, we can hope they are looking beyond what can be done with smart bombs. We can hope that they—and all of us—will remember what can only be done in the heart.