Let the bright young things in the foreign service talk to them, listen, find out what they are up against and what can help. Then work through the ambassadors in country, and through state and the cabinet over here, to do what can be done.
The immediate results may be things like exchanges of students, conferences, lectures, CSPAN presentations, publications, changes in educational policy, other policy recommendations in the host country.
It will not produce any dramatic, quick results. But in the long term, it may make a difference. And if nothing else, some decent people wrestling with a difficult problem, in ways that are profoundly in our interests and theirs, may see the effort is appreciated.
Rahman was at one time a highly respected figure in Pakistan. He had a crack at reforming their education system himself back in the 1960s, but encountered serious resistence. That was before he had worked out his whole, nuanced understanding of the issue and its problems. The less strident religious people in the country, especially those with a basically nationalist political orientation, may be open to his ideas.
In some other places (e.g. in Algeria, to a lesser extent Turkey), his ideas may be useful in other ways, to moderate somewhat the sometimes illiberal anti-religious policies sometimes engaged in by governments fearful of the influence of Islamic fundamentalism. Just dislike of Islam and repression, can wind up creating recruits for the extremists. Whereas reform ideas can accomodate the value many see in their traditional faith, without delivering people into the hands of the extremists.
As for the perception that Islam has all sorts of bad things wrapped up in it, that is certainly true, as things are today. The more the majority stays trapped in literalism, the more this is so. It is easy to see why. Literalism means making the historic practices of the 7th to 10th centuries a normative model for current actions and attitudes. Just as excessive literalism about Leviticus, or reflections on the political and military practices of the ancient Israelites, would produce unduly harsh practices here.
We often forget how general the problem was. Religious tolerance is a recent achievement in the west, historically speaking. Even after it was recognized in principle, it was often lacking in practice, and modern ideologies often repeated the same stance as previous religious intolerance. Nor was this problem denominational; it was quite general.
Some debators and apologists right now pretend that anything intolerant in the history of Christianity was an aberration, but this is a whitewash of the historical facts. I am not speaking of the origin of Christianity, to be sure. But every denomination, when it had power to do so, practiced intolerance (except the Quakers, perhaps a few others that late).
Luther and Calvin approved the suppression of heresy by violence. The puritans in Massachussets hanged Quakers on Boston common. A catholic king of France ordered all protestant subjects in his domains to be killed. The inquisition was not formally disbanded until the 19th century. Anti religious sentiment was just as extreme. The French revolutionaries cried "all the bishops to the lamposts". Confiscations of property simply because of the denomination that controlled it was a regular feature of European civil war and insurrection until the 19th century. And these practices extend nearly as far in the other direction. Suppression of heresy was nearly the first use the established church made of its power, once recognized by Rome. In the high middle ages, some Popes (ones not indeed renowned for their piety) claimed a right to rule every country in the world.
There were better men too, of course, who opposed unjust practices, however speciously argued. The point is merely that no doctrine has ever been immune to intolerance, and that tolerance established as a principle is of comparatively recent date.
It matters, then, whether contemporaries can provide their own input about the nature of justice. Contemporaries have something quite important to say about the matter. And if a religious tradition is sealed against all internal reform, then such input can only occur as hostility to that tradition, in toto.
The great calamity in that, is that many people will have attachments to both sides, some to the better aspects of a tradition they see threatened by outside hostility, others against a tradition that seems deaf to demands for obvious justice. The extremists gain as allies everyone who has seen anything good in one of the great monotheisms. Not the way we'd like to go if we can help it.
But for those who see good things in their religious traditions to also abide by modern standards of tolerance, they have to see, not an irreconcilable clash between them, but a way to preserve what is best, while modifying what can be improved. Literalism will always see any claim of improvement as a usurpation by mere men of a perogative not properly theirs. Because tolerance was nowhere to be found in the 7th century, a truly rigid literalism will never approve tolerance.
That is why I said earlier, that the way Islam answers the question of legitimate interpretion and reform, will determine how it deals with the modern world, and the modern world's relationship to Islam will depend on that answer.
The history of Islam contains lessons enough for them to learn what they need to know. They do not lack men of conscience or insight to show them justice. It is a question of whether they hold themselves free, as a people or as a civilization, to legislate equitably based on such lessons. Or whether they choose to view themselves as incapable of arriving at knowledge of such things, and therefore as bound to dead letter a thousand years old.
We cannot make that choice for them. Some will choose wrongly, and many or few, sooner or later, we will have to fight those who do so. The more choose rightly, the less they will hurt us and the less we will hurt them. In the end, they can only cease to be our enemies by becoming their own masters, by assuming the difficult authority to think for themselves, instead of letting an old book do it for them.
Rahman has shown at least one way that leads to that end. For that he deserves praise, and his ideas deserve a wider audience.
There is also another book I recommend, by a man named Leonard Binder, called "Islamic Liberalism". It is not an easy book for an outsider to the field, but for foreign service types dealing with this issue it may be worth mastering its contents. It examines numerous recent (well, 70s and 80s) movements of thought within Islam that contain elements favorable to democracy. Which does not always mean pro-western. But it might help to get a sense of the lay of the land, for people whose business is to know such things.
I hope this helps.
I nominate you to head our Department of Middle Eastern Affairs, or whatever they call it. Until we find a way to climb out of these foreign entanglements...