Mosques are full. The use of the hijab is on the rise. Madrassahs are packed. Zakat (charity) is at record levels, especially where governments have failed to provide essential services. In Egypt, much of the health care, emergency care and education are provided by the Muslim Brotherhood; in the Occupied Territories by Hamas; in Lebanon by Hezbollah; in Pakistan and elsewhere by groups that may be far less political or militant but are no less Islamic.

Since many state institutions are riddled with corruption and nepotism, some of the most talented Muslims, rich and poor alike, have abandoned the official arena and retreated into the non-governmental domain of Islamic civil society.

The empty public sphere has been filled with firebrands — ill-tutored and ill-informed clergy or populist politicians who rally the masses with calls for jihad for sundry causes. The greater the injustices in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israeli Occupied Territories, Chechnya or elsewhere, the greater the public support for jihadists. Jihad has also proven to be good business for many a mullah (Muslim cleric) who has become rich or influential, or both, preaching it. Unelected governments, lacking the legitimacy and confidence to challenge the militant clerics, have alternated between repressing them or trying to out-Islamize them.

To divert domestic anger abroad, many governments also allow and sometimes encourage the radicals to rant at the US and rave at Israel, or just at Jews. Sometimes even the elected leaders join in, as has Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denying the Holocaust and reportedly calling for Israel to be wiped off the map.

In reality, most Muslim states are powerless to address the international crises that their publics want addressed. They have neither the military nor the economic and political clout to matter much to the US, the only power that counts these days. Or, as in the case of Egypt, Jordan and the oil-rich Arab oligarchies, they are themselves dependent on Washington for their survival.

Feeling abandoned, the Muslim masses find comfort in religion. The Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation was a secular struggle before it became “Islamic.” The same was true of the Lebanese resistance to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and also of the Chechyn resistance to Russian repression. Similarly, domestic critics of authoritarian regimes have found a hospitable home in the mosque.

Islam being their last zone of comfort, most Muslims react strongly — sometimes irrationally and violently — when their faith or their Prophet is mocked, as the world witnessed during the Danish cartoon crisis (see European Muslims). They react the way the angry disenfranchised do — taking to the streets, shouting themselves hoarse and destroying property, without much concern for the consequences, and engendering even more hostility in the West toward Muslims and Islam. But, as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King famously said, riots are the voice of the voiceless.