In Arabic, 'Internet' means 'Freedom'.

Jonathan Rauch writes in the National Journal that somewhere in Baghdad there is a man who is editing Arabic versions of liberal classics, who I doing so at the risk of kidnap, beating, and death, because he hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org (MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic), which was launched in January, can change the world.

Interviewed by e-mail, he asks to be known by a pseudonym, H. Ali Kamil. A Shiite from Iraq's south, he is an accomplished scholar, but he asks that no other personal details be revealed. Two of his friends have been killed in the postwar insurgency and chaos, one shot and the other "slaughtered." Others of his acquaintance are in hiding, visiting their families in secret. He has been threatened for working with an international agency.

It was an American (Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington) who was lecturing in Baghdad on principles of constitutional government that gave Mr. Kamil the impetus to begin his work.

Intellectual isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. …[F]ive times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium…Authors and publishers must cope with the whims of 22 Arab censors.

No wonder the Arab world and Western-style modernity have collided with a shock. … in recent decades the Arab world has been singularly cursed with bad ideas. First came Marxism and its offshoots; then the fascistic nationalism of Nasserism and Baathism; now, radical Islamism.

Firmly establishing liberal ideas took centuries in the West…and [t]he liberal world's intellectual underpinnings are as difficult to grasp as its cultural reach is difficult to escape.

Yet few who are genuinely intellectually curious can read J.S. Mill or Adam Smith and come away entirely unchanged. The suffocating Arab duopoly of state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online.