Any attempt at mending the West’s frayed relations with the Muslim world must begin with the recognition that just as the reasons given for the war on Iraq were proven to be false, most of the explanations tying terrorism to Islam have not stood the test of time.

When fifteen of the nineteen terrorists of 9/11 turned out to have been Saudi citizens, several experts blamed Wahhabism, the austere interpretation of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The problem with the formulation was that the Saudi ruling family, the official guardian of Wahhabism, has been a staunch US ally, assiduously courted by the Bush family, and remains the chief guarantor of the energy needs of the West. Moreover, the Wahhabis have historically been more concerned with fellow Muslims than non-Muslims.

We were told that terrorists were hatched primarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in madrassahs. But we know now that most of those who carried out the al Qaeda-like bombings in Bali, Jakarta, Istanbul, Amman and other places were not all graduates of those schools but terrorists of disparate backgrounds. The bombers of the Madrid and London trains were young Muslims born or raised in Europe. So were the two Britons who went to Israel in 2003 to be suicide bombers. So were those who turned up in US-occupied Iraq to join the insurgency. So was the Dutchman Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo van Gogh. So were some of the one hundred or so people charged and tried in Britain, Germany and Canada on terrorism-related charges. Most were not even religious — they had girlfriends, they had visited pubs and, in some cases, done drugs.

Another theory — crude, lewd, sensationalist and as obsessed with sex as the centuries-old Western fixation with the Prophet Muhammad’s marriages — was that suicide bombers were inspired by Islam’s promise of virgins in Paradise. That may have motivated the religiously inclined but not others, and certainly not women bombers such as the “black widows” of Chechnya, who had no such sexual favors to look forward to in heaven.

So we must return to earthly reasons for the terrorism involving Muslims. The wars and conflicts in Iraq and the Israeli Occupied Territories are not theological. Nor are those in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Chechnya. Equally, the domestic economic and political deprivations of hundreds of millions in the Muslim world have little to do with religion. The alienation of European Muslims is not a function of Islam but of European racism; the young who rioted in France in the fall of 2005 were not making any religious demands but rather asking to be treated as the French citizens that they are.