Terror in America - An ordinary Muslim, Ziauddin Sardar cannot recognise his religion in either the fanatics' deeds or in the media descriptions of "these people"

The fallout has already begun. American Muslims have started to receive threatening phone calls. Muslim websites have been brought down with hate mail. Muslim areas in New York have asked for extra police protection. My own relatives in various American cities are afraid to go out for fear of being beaten. In the UK, the Muslim Council of Britain has also been inundated by hate mail. Headlines proclaim "declaration of war" and lead inevitably to innumerable invocations of the "clash of civilisations", the assumption that all Muslims somehow hate the west and are inimical to the values of western civilisation. "These people", the recurrent phrase that punctuates all references to the perpetrators, is not a specific accusation; it is a general charge. Not surprisingly, fear has spread among all Muslims who, for no fault of their own, will be classed among the perpetrators.

Muslims fear that the scale of the outrage will dictate the logic of the countermeasures. In its determination to punish the terrorists and those who harbour terrorists, the US will lose the distinction between the innocent and the guilty. Its anger is such that it will blanket everyone; it already allowed Lawrence Eagleburger, a former secretary of state to the first President George Bush, to declare: "You have to kill some of these people; even if they were not directly involved, they need to be hit."

Yet Muslim organisations in Europe and America were among the first to declare their outrage. The Muslim Council of Britain described the attacks as "senseless and evil acts that appal all people of conscience". "Unbelievable" was the common sentiment expressed by leaders throughout the Muslim world, from Palestine's Yasser Arafat to Pakistan's General Musharraf.

As a Muslim, I wince at the prejudice that the media are peddling, seemingly everywhere. And yet, senseless suicide and slaughter by fanatics are no part of my faith. Justice is the supreme value of Islam, but seeking justice demands, requires and bears the duty of just means. The matching of ends to means in one inseparable body of values and ethical restraints is the essence of Islamic teaching.

How am I to comprehend, I ask myself, this colossal act of terrorism if the perpetrators turn out to be Muslims? How am I to cope with the presumption that, at some level, all Muslims must be able to understand the minds of terrorists and suicide bombers, because in some dark corner of their psyche they share a common core of ideals?

Clearly, the terrorists do not follow the same prophet Mohammed who so unequivocally forbade the killing of civilians, women and children, the old and the infirm, the destruction of property, burning of crops, and slaughter of animals in any act of war. And I do not for a moment believe they undertake these acts for the services of 72 virgins, permission to see the face of Allah and other nonsense that I keep reading in the press.

As the novelist Tom Clancy said on CNN, it is simply ridiculous to talk of "Islamic" terrorists, the media's favourite epithet. "These people don't act because of their religion; it's because they are fools," Clancy noted. It is quite futile to seek some explanation of terrorist acts in the world-view of Islam.

What we need to understand is that terror is an aberration, that it isolates those capable of such horrendous inhumanity from the rest of the community, that it makes them different from everyone else. The terrorists harm those they perversely claim to defend, whose causes they allege they seek to further.

So, how are we to cope with terrorism, including Muslim terrorism? To leave no hiding place for the guilty, we have to address the injustices that provide the noxious fumes in which terror is conceived. We have to face the awful disparity of compassion that is so commonplace among those who could never conceive of themselves becoming terrorists. In so many parts of the world, we neglect the legitimate needs, basic rights and awful circumstances of people without hope, without justice, jobs or any proper provision. It is not terrorists who spread the seeds of such appalling human waste, oppression and tyranny. Good people who walk by on the other side, who fail to engage and care for just resolution, who tolerate the intolerable, bear responsibility for the ongoing evil of injustice. The inaction of these good people creates the void in which the aberrant, the abnormal, the terrorists seek to assert their monopoly of compassion through evil deeds.

How do we counter the threat of terror? Already we are being told that the implosion of intelligence gathering on the ground is a casualty of peace which, far from bringing any dividends, has led to the devastation at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America has put its faith in technology, in remote sensing, in isolation, in dreams of a shield that will keep it safe from "rogue states" and whatever else stalks the globe seeking its downfall.

The truth is, better intelligence cannot fight terrorism. The best weapons are compassion for the neediest and a willingness to form a partnership with the oppressed and tyrannised, so that they can seek a better existence.

Unless we have a different kind of intelligence - to make common cause, through our differences, across communities - we shall all be victims of terror.

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