Muslims have worldly grievances galore, and it is these that need to be addressed. Gijs de Vries, the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, has said that American foreign policy is the major cause. A solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute won’t eradicate terrorism, but it would eliminate one of the main tools of terrorist recruitment, he has said, adding that the same logic applies to Iraq. 1 Similarly, a 2006 report by the Alliance of Civilizations, a United Nations-sponsored cross-cultural group of twenty prominent world figures, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, said the main cause of the rift between the West and the Muslim world is not religious but political.2

One of the biggest shortcomings of the war on terrorism was the misreading of Osama bin Laden’s initial popularity among Muslims. He always had two constituencies — the few who joined his terrorist campaigns and the many who identified with his articulation of Muslim grievances. Western commentators analyzed his Islamic theology and ignored his political message. Muslims did the opposite.

The West needs to get over what French orientalist Maxime Rodinson famously called theologo-centrism — seeing Muslims solely or mostly through the prism of their religion.3 Like any other faith, Islam can be and is used by both fundamentalists and liberals, and by the violent and the peaceful, to rationalize their agendas. To blame terrorism on this or that holy book is to be intellectually lazy and politically dishonest. Besides, Muslims are no more going to rewrite the Qur’an than Jews are the Torah, Christians the Bible or Hindus the Mahabharata.

Laying collective guilt on Muslims is counter-productive. Law-abiding Muslims are no more responsible for 9/11 and the London subway bombings and other acts of terrorism than Japanese Canadians or Japanese Americans were for Pearl Harbor, or German Americans, German Canadians and German British were for Nazism. It is useful to recall what Anne Frank, hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, wrote in her famous diary: “When a Christian does something wrong, it’s his fault. When a Jew does, it’s the fault of all Jews.”

Confusing religiosity with extremism is obtuse. Just because a Muslim is religious does not mean that he or she is a militant.

The West cannot tell Muslims which Islam to practice either. Conservative interpretations of Islam are as legitimate as conservative interpretations of Judaism and Christianity. It is fallacy to think that the only good Muslim is one who is secular, a minimalist believer, or not a believer at all. If anything, the West needs to be wary of those Muslims who may be too ready to parrot what it wants to hear. America lost Iran to the Islamic revolution in 1979 by listening mostly to pro-American Iranians. The Bush administration got into trouble in Iraq by accepting the tall tales told by exiled Iraqi politicians about weapons of mass destruction and how the invading American troops would be welcomed with flowers.