The Salman Rushdie affair and the Gulf War had in some small measure steeled the Muslims to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and face the challenges of the modern world, to realise that they need to engage and understand the West, and make the West understand the Muslim world.

Of course, the old prejudices are still there, but one can sense that the world has changed, in some respects, for the better in terms of understanding one another, despite the problematic relationship between the two worlds that stretched back centuries.

There are many more Muslims in the metropolitan centres of the West today, either for study or to escape economic hardship or political persecution back home. Today, most people have no direct experience of colonialism and there is, in general, an increase in sensitivity in the West towards minority issues, appreciation of cultural differences and awareness of global inequities. After five decades, the Palestine tragedy is beginning to be understood by a wider public from a perspective other than Israel's, perhaps more in Europe than in the United States.

But Sept 11 and its aftermath changed everything. It has threatened to reduce the complex interaction between the Islamic world and the West into an 'us versus them' encounter, of one between good and evil, between freedom and democracy, and the forces of evil and darkness as some like us to believe.

Paying a heavy price

The Muslim world is paying a heavy price for the vile actions of a few. A cataclysmic tragedy when motivated by religion such as happened on Sept 11 forced into the open the deep seated, entrenched prejudices and ignorance that is still widespread among Muslims and the West.

Eschewing political correctness, talk-show hosts, media commentators and right-wing politicians spewed jingoistic lines laced with virulent Islamophobia with impunity, knowing that this time nobody is going to mind. Had the outcome been far less tragic, one could laugh off the cultural ignorance of America who could not distinguish a Sikh from a Muslim.

But the tragedy also brought out the best in humanity. At the level of the individual citizen and the local community one reads of touching gestures of sympathy and understanding shown to American Muslims in their most difficult hour.

Perhaps for the first time the American public was made to realise that while insuring freedom and democracy at home, their successive governments have pursued a foreign policy that have been partly responsible for the dysfunctional societies that breed terrorism.

Could the Americans not have viewed it as being supremely ironic that while they enjoy fundamental liberties, maternal comforts and security at home, their government consistently refused to ratify treaties that would make the global environment cleaner, prevent innocent children from being maimed by landmines and make the world a more just place by sending a message to perpetrators of crimes against humanity that they have no place to hide?

But, however strong the case may be for America's complicity in state terrorism in South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, no one can argue against the position that this time she is fighting a just war.

It is the killing of innocent civilians, the destruction of an impoverished country that had not known peace for a generation and the humanitarian catastrophe that will surely follow that made many people, Muslims or otherwise, to oppose the war. We had hoped that the Americans and their allies would exhaust legal and diplomatic means to capture those allegedly responsible for the Sept 11 attack, and at the same time be honest enough to address the roots of terrorism.

But Osama dropped the bombshell one day after the bombing started with his videotaped message broadcast by Al Jazeera television. He cleverly articulated the Muslim world's wounds and humiliations but his chilling message of asking the Muslim world to unite in an apocalyptic war against the West made us cringe.

The few friends we had left must have found themselves lost for words seeing the support that Osama has among ordinary Muslims in the Islamic lands and his elevation to cult-hero status. So Silvio Berlusconi is right after all. Fukuyama must be ecstatic. Writing in The Guardian not long ago that this tendency for violence, hatred and anti-modern demagoguery is a little more than just a fringe phenomenon that one can almost hear him say that perhaps it is an inherent, immutable facet of Islam. He was confident that history would prove him right a second time.

Tragic spectacle

One month into the war, the civilian deaths, the exodus of refugees, the destruction of Afghanistan's primitive infrastructure were as what we thought would happen, while Osama is nowhere near to being captured. In a way, we had been primed for this tragic spectacle by the invention of that term "collateral damage". A family being wiped out at the breakfast table and an entire village with its people and animals pulverised. That's collateral damage.

Now they say that the war against terrorism is going to take a long time, that the US may never get their Osama, and Ramadan or not, there is no reprieve for him and his hosts. And they might even extend the bombing to Iraq. Come winter, those Afghans trapped within with no food nor shelter is expected to number in millions. Will it take such a massive humanitarian catastrophe before the world's public opinion express its disgust and tell the Bush administration that enough is enough?

Whether the war drags on aimlessly killing more civilians or the bombings are halted on a wave of anger and disgust by the world's public opinion or because the generals have no stomach for a drawn-out war that will cost American casualties, the extremists will have won a strategic victory. The losers are the ordinary Afghans and the rest of the Muslim world.

The Afghan tragedy is no doubt a very painful experience for Muslims, in the same way that the Balkans tragedy was. But the civilian deaths and destruction in Afghanistan is a reciprocation of the Sept 11 attacks, a vile act of aggression on innocent civilians by a tiny band of extremists who carried it out in the name of Islam. This, like it or not, forces us to take a real hard look at ourselves.

We used to lament that acts of limited localised terrorism committed by Muslims rebound negatively on Islam in a way that IRA's terrorism does not on Catholicism or that of the Tamil Tigers' on Hinduism. But isn't this sounding tiresome?

Semi-literate demagogues

Terrorism, like it or not, is a Muslim problem, wrote Ziauddin Sardar in the Observer recently, citing the examples of Islamic jihad in Egypt that killed tourists, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines and other Muslim countries plagued by this problem.

"It goes without saying that the bulk of the victims are also Muslims, Sept 11 notwithstanding. Thus terrorism, the horror it provokes and the consequences it breeds are more familiar to Muslims than to any other people". Sardar puts the blame on the radicalisation of the Islamic movements, whose leadership had passed from intellectuals toiling against autocracies and despotism in Muslim societies to semi-literate demagogues.

"The movements became a mirror image of what they were fighting ... generating fanatic militancy, a fundamentalism that is as autocratic, illiberal and repressive as the established order they seek to dethrone."

Tariq Ramadan, a young reform-minded intellectual best known in the francophone Muslim world for "Islam en question" (consisting of an interview with Le Monde Diplomatique's Alain Gresh) in a recent issue of le Nouvel Observateur, stated that it is the absence of internal debate among Muslims that spawned the seeds of extremism.

He viewed Islam's golden age not so much for its material civilisational achievements but for its embrace of debate and exchange of ideas. The Andalusian civilisation has been idealised as the model of tolerance, but it was the free atmosphere debate even on Islamic thought that interests Ramadan the most.

This absence of internal debate that Tariq Ramadan spoke of echoes what Anwar Ibrahim wrote about "the hijacking of Islam" in Time magazine a few weeks ago. The grotesquely dysfunctional Arab societies ruled by despotic monarchs and presidents may well have led to the hijacking of Islam by puritanical extremists who long for a apocalyptic show down with the evil West.

But that certainly is not a uniform phenomenon throughout the Muslim world. In Malaysia, perhaps it was more an "abdication" by the moderate intellectual elements of the Islamic movement that led the centre-ground to be occupied by a new wave of puritan, political Islam, though operating within the framework of democracy however flawed it may be.

Muslims complacency

Not wanting to miss out in the boom of early 90s, giving an Islamic flavour to "Asian values", the moderate Islamists seemingly forgot about the earlier struggle for a society based on justice and the rule of law, democracy and the love for learning and enlightened culture, but instead pursued the goals of creating Islamic capitalism. Islam has finally arrived and Malaysia is the model to follow.

Critiques of Anwar Ibrahim would be quick to put the blame squarely on him but it is the complacency and barrenness of the Muslim intelligentsia of that period that must take the responsibility for this abdication.

Not long after Anwar Ibrahim's book The Asian Renaissance came out, Malaysian joined her neighbours in the crash of 1997-1998, exposing the hollowness of Asian values. Anwar eloquently articulated the values and ideals of an Islam that is compatible with a just, civil society in a modern, pluralistic nation state in the sections of the book that touch on Islam.

But his book came a little too late and its reach was probably severely limited by the poor reading habits of Malaysians. Furthermore, he was then writing from the side of the establishment, a strong enough consideration perhaps to evoke the disdain of the Islamist opposition at that time.

The aftermath of Sept 11, especially the tragedy of Afghanistan, calls for a critical self re-examination. Terrorism by extremists in the name of Islam, while directed at the West, is as much a challenge to Muslims.

The Muslim intelligentsia has the responsibility of actively reviving the tradition of internal debate and critical thought, and to strengthen dialogue and engagement with the non-Muslim world. Failing this, the centre ground will be continually be occupied by purveyors of extremism who have reduced the message of Islam in all its inclusiveness, which in the past has built a tolerant civilisation rich in learning to a fixation on power which often turns out oppressive.