"The Mosque in Morgantown" opens with the Islamic call to prayer chanted above Appalachian foliage and freight trains rumbling through the West Virginia college town. While that heralds a clash between some Islamic and American values, the film (10 tonight, WQED) delves more deeply into tensions between Muslims of different cultural backgrounds and schools of interpretation.

It is the last episode in PBS's "America at the Crossroads" series, exploring the dynamics of the post-9/11 world. Filmmaker Brittany Huckabee spent two years chronicling journalist Asra Nomani's moral jihad against what she viewed as an influx of extremism in her hometown mosque.

Born in India, Nomani grew up in Morgantown, where her father was a founder of the mosque. She left to report for major papers, including the Wall Street Journal. Working in Pakistan in 2002 for Salon.com and largely disengaged from her faith, she was hosting her former Journal colleague Daniel Pearl and his wife when Pearl was murdered by extremists he was trying to report on.

She returned to Morgantown. When she tried to go to her childhood mosque, she was shocked to be ordered to enter through a back door and sit with the other women in the balcony. She concluded that Middle Eastern immigrants were taking the mosque down a slippery slope of puritanical intolerance that led to the grave of Pearl. The film covers her quest to integrate prayer and other activities. She brought all of her heavy-duty journalistic pressure to bear on the tiny mosque.

The film gives fair hearing to her critics, including some mosque leaders who believed her activism was actually delaying needed reforms. Many were deeply angered that she connected their prayer traditions with terrorism.

"The American environment speaks against the whole idea of the slippery slope that Asra is so afraid of," says Ihtishaam Qazi, a moderate leader who opposed her tactics.

On a sociological level, the clashes here are common to congregations of all faiths that struggle to distinguish between essential beliefs and cultural traditions. I've known churches to have leadership meetings as nasty as the one captured on audio in Morgantown. It would be a shame if viewers came away with the idea that bullying is peculiar to Muslims.

From some points of view, Nomani is the bully. When she embarks on a national campaign to integrate prayers she is condemned not only by male Arab traditionalists, but also by women at the most progressive mosque in the nation.

Changes do come to the mosque in Morgantown, but the viewer is left to decide whether they are due to Nomani's activism, the quiet persistence of moderates or both.

Nomani doesn't believe it would have happened without the pressure of her protests.

"It's politically convenient for the moderates to find excuses for their own failures in asserting an inclusive, woman-friendly interpretation of Islam," she wrote in an e-mail. "They failed to do so over the three decades over which the Muslim community has developed in Morgantown."

Nomani left Morgantown to become co-director of a Georgetown University-based investigation into Pearl's murder. She has wanted to solve the mystery since it happened. But first, she said, she had to make peace with Islam

"I had to know in my heart that there was an interpretation of Islam that didn't put women in back corners and justify intolerance and even violence. I discovered that there is."