Yet most Muslims argue that their faith is not violent. There exists a small group within the larger Muslim community of more than a billion people, they explain, that responds negatively to the challenges Islam faces from the West.

Instead of learning from the West, they want to bring it down by force: “We will bring America and its allies to their knees,” boasted Osama Bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda terrorist network planned and executed the 9/11 attacks.

Such groups since then have strengthened their resolve to hurt the West and Westerners, carrying out a series of terrorist attacks around the world.

Karen Armstrong, a British scholar on Islam, describes this as “a modern political phenomenon,” which started with the dispossession of Palestinians from their lands and continues to spread.

“The need is to stop this process and make Muslims realize that violence brings neither salvation nor prosperity,” says Ayaz Amir, Pakistan’s most popular newspaper columnist, known for his courageous attacks on Muslim extremists.

Maulana Ehtaramul Huq Thanvi, a former lawmaker and prominent Muslim scholar from Karachi says, “Terrorism is not as widespread as some in the West would like to believe. The West should acknowledge that all prominent Muslim leaders and senior officials have strongly condemned terrorism. No one has ever suggested that any prominent Muslim was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

But privately, Muslim intellectuals acknowledge that many in the Muslim world admire people like Bin Laden. They blame America’s “aggressively anti-Muslim policies,” as Thanvi put it, and the failure of the Muslim world’s Westernized elite, for whatever appeal the extremists may have.

“You cannot see people being killed in the streets of Iraq every day and not be affected by it, particularly if you are a Muslim,” he said.

Maulana Ahmed Javed, a religious scholar, points out that no Muslim state has an effective government that “can bring justice, freedom, and prosperity to its people. Such governments do not reflect the collective view of the people they govern.

“This allows groups with extremist ideas to win support, although they are a tiny minority in every Muslim society,” said Javed.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf addressed the impact of US policies on Muslims at a recent conference on religious tolerance in Islamabad: “Being an influential world power, the United States should play its role in resolving disputes and address the grievances of the Muslim world,” he said.

But he then reminded Muslims that while they may have differences with the United States on issues like Afghanistan and Iraq, they should not forget that “a timely US intervention also saved the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from massacre.”

Musharraf repeated his claim that “an overwhelming majority rejects the ideas of groups like Al Qaeda,” but did not explain why this majority does not speak its mind.

Addressing this issue in a recent television interview, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that moderate Muslims are reluctant to express their views because the “moderate view goes against the street view, and... they are not in countries, in societies, and in political systems where it is easy to speak out.”

But Muslim intellectuals say that recent violent terrorist events have empowered liberal Muslims around the world, giving them the courage to speak out, and they are publicly discussing issues they would not have dared to address before 9/11.

For instance, at a recent discussion on Islam on a private Pakistani television channel, Motahir Hussain, who teaches international relations at Karachi University, openly blamed both religious and secular Muslim leaders “for keeping Islamic societies backward.

“All they do is talk about wars and conflicts. There’s very little discourse on peace and development,” he said. “Thus all our resources are wasted on fighting for this or that cause rather than doing something constructive.”

Thanvi believes that the groups calling for jihad against the West are “unwise friends of Islam who have done much harm to their faith.”

Amir, the columnist, says that Most Muslim countries had no concept of democracy when they became independent from Western colonial powers in the twentieth century. “There is no place for opposition in their political system, there’s the government and the governed.”

According to him, challenge to despotic rulers in the Muslim world came from religious circles. And in the early 1980s, when the war in Afghanistan began, “they pushed these opposition figures into Afghanistan, hoping that most would perish while fighting the Russians.”

Jamal Ismail, an Arab journalist who has interviewed Osama Bin Laden and written a book on him, says that many of those fighters wanted to return home after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“But they were not welcome. Those who went back had no jobs, no social support, and no skills. The only skill they knew was that of war. So they had no choice but to return to Afghanistan and join the jihad, this time against fellow Muslims, as the Russians had already left.

“Through this process of rejection, they mutated into Al Qaeda,” says Amir, “and are now a headache for the whole world.”

Nasim Zehra, a Muslim writer and a former fellow at the prestigious Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, believes that the United States and its allies will ultimately be able to overcome this problem, but how long this will take, she is not willing to predict. “It is usually the silent moderates who win, but it takes time,” she said.

A senior Pakistani intelligence offer, who did not want to be identified, complained that the Americans wanted “immediate results, while this war requires patience and a long engagement.

“If you want to finish off Al Qaeda before the November elections in the United States, nobody can stop you from desiring so, but it is not going to happen,” he said. “What we fear is not Al Qaeda, but America’s resolve to stay engaged,” said the officer, reflecting a general sentiment in the Muslim world that Washington’s attention span is very short and is often decided by domestic political concerns such as presidential elections.

The intelligence officer believes that US, Pakistani, and Afghan troops can together win the war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal belt if they continue relentlessly to pursue the suspects hiding there.

Anwar Iqbal is South Asian affairs analyst for United Press International