ìTechs Awaken to the Muslim Market,î by Jeremy Wagstaff, Wall Street Journal, 29 July, p. B4.

ìImmigrants Keep IslamóItalian Style: ëModern Muslimsí Forge Hybrid Culture,î by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 24 July, p. A15.

Neat story. LG of South Korea (maker of my phone) wants to market cells in the Middle East. Their gimmick is an embedded compass that helps the faithful better locate Mecca for direction in their daily prayersóa total hit.

Other electronic marketing efforts: phones that recite the call to prayer, provide prayer times for more than 5,000 cities in a database, store electronic recordings of the Quran.

So long as approval is sought from the right authorities (apparently the Al-Azhar Al-Sharif Islamic Research Academy in Cairo is a biggie), it's relatively easy to market such products without offense. Some Muslims like the products because they allow for low-key worship, while others find that goal offensive in terms of seeming to deny who they are.

But defining who is a good Muslim isn't any more a set issue worldwide than defining who is a good Catholicóin fact probably far less because there is no central Islamic authority. So, in many ways, when Muslims migrate to Core states like Italy, they're a lot more on their own than adherents of other religions in terms of defining what's an acceptable mix of clinging to tradition and moving toward assimilation. So-called "modern Muslims" in Italy naturally lean toward hybrid solutions simply because their ranks stem from such varied sources around the world. As one guy put it (an American transplant from the Bronx who picked up his Islamic faith via Sudan): "There are all kinds of Muslims here, and most of them are modern. We don't have to print Islam on our T-shirts."