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.

Internal Arguments

“That a majority of Al Qaeda are Muslims is not to say that a majority of Muslims are Al Qaeda, or subscribe to its tenets,” Stephen Schulhofer, professor of law at New York University, told me in 2003. But it is also true that almost all terrorists these days are Muslims. That may only be a function of the times we live in— yesterday’s terrorists came from other religions and tomorrow’s may hail from some other. Still, terrorism has forced a debate among Muslims, who are divided. One side says that Muslims should no more have to apologize for their extremists than Christians, Jews or Hindus, and that doing so only confirms the collective guilt being placed on Muslims. The other side believes that as long as some Muslims are blowing up civilians in suicide bombings, slitting the throats of hostages and committing other grisly acts, it is the duty of all Muslims to challenge the murderers’ warped theology. The latter view has prevailed. Terrorism, suicide bombings in particular, have been widely condemned.