As radical movements threaten traditional Islam, even analysts and scholars despair of finding answers.

But contrary to common opinion in the West, not only is a separation of moderation from the new radicalism possible, but it has already been accomplished here in "secular" Turkey. The qualifier to that statement is that the relationship of state secularism to the Muslim religion here is a bit different that most outsiders might imagine.

The afternoon that I walked into the exquisite new offices of the Religious Affairs Administration on the outskirts of Ankara, I was not prepared for what I was to find. But the agency's president, Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, a charming man who is a doctor of Islamic theology, soon explained the "world" - contradictory to most Americans, workable to most Turks - that he oversees.

"Our agency is a constitutional agency," he began, "and the law was established in 1924, just after the founding of the Turkish Republic. The article stipulates that it was established "for the spiritual, religious and moral development and values of the people and to run the mosques and religious places." We oversee 72,500 mosques in Turkey and the imams who lead the community during prayer, preach and talk to people. We have a total personnel of 81,000 people. We also oversee religion in the schools."

There is also an advisory group, the Religious Affairs Higher Board, composed of 829 muftis, or Islamic clerics. When a mosque needs an imam, it comes to this administration, which also appoints imams all over the world - from the strategically important Turkic-heritage countries of Central Asia to the United States to Australia. (However, this administration ministers only to Sunni Muslims, not to the country's Shiite or Alawite communities; Christianity and other religions also do not come under its administration.)

Finally, I had to realize that I was not "getting" it. Here was this obviously capable and educated man who is appointed by the president of the republic to directly oversee the majority Sunni religion in the mosques, in the schools and in the formation of clergy - and yet, Turkey was and is extremely proud of being a "secular" country.

"Yes," he said, as I hesitantly revealed my confusion, "of course, Turkey is a secular country. But as Turkey is 99 percent Muslim, the law gave this agency the duty of running the religious places." And that was that.

I simply set aside the contradictions that Westerners, with our often naively purist ideas of the separation of church and state, feel when faced with the workable accommodations to history that many countries gladly make - and that we should appreciate far more than we do.

Turkey's "reformation" goes back to the first three decades of the 20th century. Until the 500-yeaar-old Ottoman Empire finally fully collapsed when the great reformer Kemal Ataturk announced the Turkish Republic in 1923, the ruling sultan had been one with the Muslim caliph: Thus did God and Caesar sit on the same throne.

In fact, because of the reach of the empire, Ottoman Turkey was in a real sense "Vatican" for most of the Muslim world. But after 1923, there was no longer any doctrinal or administrative center for Islam. And by the end of the century, this lack of any controls within Islam had resulted in the irregular, unschooled and terrorist "Islamic" movements (Taliban, al-Qauida, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad) that the world witnesses today with such horror.

Meanwhile, in 1924, President Ataturk abolished the caliphate, formed the forerunner of today's religious affairs administration, and took the theological schools away from the mosques and placed them inside the secular universities, where they would have to contend on an equal footing with modern science, with political science and with modern economics. Thus was the Turkish "related separation" (my term) invented and enforced.

To Westerners, of course, there is a contradiction here. So be it. In the countries I have covered, wars are finally ended, conflicts resolved and ancient feuds eventually smoothed over by arrangements that are not utopian but that accommodate reality appropriately.

In fact, across the Arab and Muslim world today, our one hope for the de-radicalizing extremist fundamentalist parts of Islam is that there are already companion examples to Turkey's experience. Egypt's moderate religious establishment closely resembles Turkey's, although Egypt is officially an Islamic State and is overseen by the sheikhs of Cairo's great Al Azhar University, in part inspired by Turkish reformation, Tunisia after its revolution in 9156 has carried through a successful process of separating religion from the state. Some of the Persian Gulf states, like Oman, have liberated forms of Islam, and Central Asian Islam is now largely under Turkish doctrinal control.

Meanwhile, Turkey is not suffering the radical problems within Islam that many of the countries which never went through any reformation are. "Yes, there are some radicals in Turkey," Dr. Yilmaz said before I left, "but very, very few. They are pursuing terror in the name of religion."

Then he smiled slightly, and spoke of his country. "None of the other countries are as modern or as secular as Turkey," he said, "so Turkey is the country to experience Islam in the most modern way. For if you do not have democracy, knowledge cannot develop itself. People cannot even tell whether a belief is true when there is a dictatorship.

"For instance," he went on, "in many countries women's rights are very backward. Why, women are not even allowed to drive - or to go to court for a divorce." He shook his head soberly. "So there is no way to compare Turkey to those countries."