BAKU, Azerbaijan — Could world tensions be lessened by more women's rights in Muslim countries? One thesis has it that modernity will not be measured by technologies or longevity, but by how much women in the Muslim world will be able to take their place as equals in the world.

Azerbaijan hosted 250 diplomats, scholars and elected officials (comprised mostly of Muslim women) from 50 countries to take stock of where they were and where they want to be while the world is increasingly described as a "clash of civilizations" between Muslim and non-Muslim nations.

Much like Hawai'i's multi-ethnic society, Muslims, Jews, and Christians live in peace in Azerbaijan and actually like each other. Just two hours north of Baghdad and Tehran, Azerbaijan sits on the path of the ancient "Silk Road," and is a crossroads of civilizations that have traditionally hated each other. Azerbaijan now is a showcase of progressive Muslim women's rights.

The Saudi women were concerned that they still couldn't drive legally in their country, but a Moroccan city mayor, the first female elected in that nation, thought that eventually women's rights would be granted, but the right to vote might take a long time.

Others were not quite so confident and cited a litany of limited rights for Muslim women, such as marrying off children to older men, female genital mutilation, little or no access to education, no voting or even eating with men.

A chorus of Muslim women stressed time and again that there was nothing wrong with their religion, but there was something wrong with their male-dominated traditions and misinterpretations of the Quran that allowed such practices to persist.

Case in point: 60 percent of college graduates in Saudia Arabia are women, but 5 percent of the workforce is female. The brainpower lost by Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia is incalculable.

The first lady of Azerbaijan, Mehriban Aliyeva, touted the rights and gains of Muslim women in her country, which in 1918 became the first Muslim country to allow women to vote and was ahead of the U.S. women's suffrage movement by two years. The presence and strength of women in the political arena was reinforced by six first ladies from South Africa, Angola, Poland, Latvia, Hungary and Argentina who made the case that the women around the world were not weak but rather were denied the opportunity to be strong by male dominance.

With the purpose of encouraging women in Muslim countries to increase their input in national and international affairs, the Azerbaijan conference hit a home run. The take-away for Hawai'i was that the war on terror is not about a war between civilizations, but an internal war taking place in both the Muslim and nonMuslim nations of the world, especially where the command and control of one gender refuses to allow the other gender to be equal. The identity of Muslim men, rather than Islam, is a pivotal question for the future.

Hawai'i's Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, the East-West Center and University of Hawai'i can play an important role in this dialogue in a world that is dying to understand each other. The event ended with a "Baku Declaration" that set forth a call to world governments to provide education and dialogue as the major ingredients for increasing understanding between east and west, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim.

This is something Hawai'i is a natural at, and we have been invited to attend the Baku 2010 conference, where there should be a lot more Muslim males in attendance to answer the charges by the Muslim women in Baku in 2008.

Rep. Gene Ward, R-17th (Kalama Valley, Queen's Gate, Hawai'i Kai), is a member of the House International Relations Committee. He was invited to the conference by the Heydar Aliyeh Foundation and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and did not attend at taxpayer expense. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.