AMR ABDALLAH DALSH
Friday prayers: Men worship at a mosque in Equatorial Guinea, where Muslims make up fewer than 1 per cent of the population.
OPINION: When Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis wrote his famous article about the clash of civilisations in 1990, he believed he was seeing the first signs of the next global conflict.
To brutally paraphrase the long and compelling piece for the Atlantic Monthly, Lewis posited the idea that, after the cold war era, the next global conflict was likely to be along religious and cultural lines.
In 1990, he was concerned about Iran, Libya and Lebanon and what he described as a surge of hatred for the West in the Muslim world. On his analysis, the hatred felt by Islamic nations stemmed from shame and anger that the morally corrupt and ungodly West had dominated Islamic culture for centuries.
The religious clash, he said, would be caused by the Islamic belief that those who didn't honour the prophet Mohammed and his precepts must be punished, sometimes by death, and in so punishing, Muslims were doing God's work.
We can now add a few more countries or entities to Lewis's list - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Islamic State, Saudi Arabia and several others.
The trouble with Lewis's analysis, which is mostly correct, is that it tends to treat Muslims as one furious and violent mass, untied to geography.
The counter-argument, perpetrated partly by people like British-born New Zealand citizen Donna Mojab, who wrote a perspective piece in The Press last Friday, is that most Muslims are ordinary decent people, no more devout, passionate or violent about religion than most in the West.
Reading Mojab's piece, you wonder if she is much of a Muslim at all and how she would fare in such places as Pakistan or Iran.
She blames the perception of Islam as the inspiration for violence against the West on the media's slanted and shallow coverage of the Muslim world.
It's easy to blame the media for concentrating on news rather than what ordinary folks are up to but Mojab does not explain why, if the vast majority of Muslims are tolerant, peaceful and law-abiding, violence is an ever-present fear for those Muslims not prepared to toe the line.
The threat of violence acts even in the West as a major brake on free expression and speech and, in much of the Muslim world, violence is a much more present danger to those who dissent from the religious orthodoxies.
While there can be no disputing that only a minority of Muslims believe in taking their beliefs to extremes, an intrinsic part of Islamic teaching justifies the death of opponents, non-believers or believers in other religions.
An ancient text can be used to justify a variety of lethal behaviour as the history of Christianity has shown but, as some commentators have pointed out, you don't get the feeling the Islamic world is moving away from fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran.
As British columnist Rod Liddle pointed out recently in the Sunday Times, it is only in Islamic countries that people risk being put to death for blasphemy or apostasy (renouncing Islam).
"It is not just Muslim extremists who want to punish people for apostasy and blasphemy; it is the view of the mainstream Islamic world," he writes.
He also says a disturbing proportion of British Muslims, according to polls, want apostasy punished by death, insults of the Prophet prosecuted and Islamic law imposed.
In an essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali urges Muslims to reject aspects of their tradition that prompt believers to oppress and wage holy war.
"It's not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labelled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia where churches and synagogues are outlawed . . . It is Iran where stoning is still acceptable."
No doubt Mojab is right in some respects. The focus on the news events of Muslim terrorist bombings and killings will inevitably skew public perception, but most sensible people factor that into the equation.
I agree with Mojab that it's unfair to blame the Islamic religion for the hatred and violence directed at the West. While some look to the Islamic doctrines, it's true violence is caused more by religion-fuelled alienation and resentment, than pure theology.
Emad Shahin, the editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics, says Islam now provides an effective way to appeal to feelings of identity, community, justice, freedom and nationalism all at once. "It is all rolled into one," he says.
Extremism in the Islamic world has thrived and been allowed to thrive for many reasons. Mojab, unfortunately, is looking in the wrong direction if she thinks blaming the media is somehow going to help.
Joining the attack on the backwardness and the tolerance of extremism even in moderate Islamic society might bear more fruit.
- The Press