In Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, The Kite Runner, the protagonist's Baba offers his son some secular wisdom: "...[No] matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin...and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft...When you kill a man you steal a life...When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to truth. When you cheat, you steal...fairness...Now, if there is a God out there, then I would hope that he has more important things to attend to than my drinking Scotch."

Hosseini's secular Baba could scarcely understand the Islamist furies that engulfed his land. He, like many men of his generation, fell on the losing side of what the scholar Fouad Ajami called "the generational fault line, between secular parents and their theocratic children."

In my travels in Muslim lands, I've drunk tea (and Scotch) with this aging post World War II generation of secular Muslims, men and women of national pride, who long for modernity and exhibit heightened senses of honor and morality unlinked to their faith.

I recall these secular "Babas" as I watched footage of Iraq's framers build their foundation for justice.

As Iraqis prepare to ratify their constitution next month, we must remember that constitutions are, if nothing else, a set of laws intended to ensure a community's "justice." Iraq's framers concluded a just order must not violate Islam or, they note, democracy.

Perhaps this was a necessary compromise, but on a philosophical level, the secular generation has lost another battle here. The Muslim world must still face that defining modernity moment: when a critical mass of people acknowledge that virtue is not linked to religion. The Enlightenment hastened that moment in the West. Iraq's constitution writers contributed to the delay of that moment in the Muslim world.

In America, we cherish the separation of religion and state. We should also cherish the separation of religion and justice. Our Bill of Rights represents the highest form of justice, not the highest form of religion.

But there is, indeed, good news: an Iran-style theocracy was avoided. The new Iraqi state should pay heed to the lesson of Iran, a tormented land where clerics have largely failed their people, spawning widespread anti-clericalism and frustration with the ruling elite.

The lesson is this: Vague promises of protecting "Islam" or "democracy" will matter little unless the state--in that great Enlightenment era phrase--delivers the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Iraqis, like Iranians, will eventually see that happiness comes with more democracy, more prosperity, more security and less Islamic dogma. The secular "Babas" could have told them that.