Going with the flow throughout the Umma

There is a lot of compressed wisdom in this observation by Phillip Zelikow in today's FT:

...the principal focus of attention [in Islamic countries] is back on choices to be made closer to home. The streams of Arab and Muslim political life are flowing down some new channels. More productive issues are on the agenda than those of the 1990s, when inchoate resentments displaced hatred on to what al-Qaeda called the “far enemy” in America, because the problems at home seemed so impervious to change.