Smash hit

So the question is not how much we should fear a monolithic Islam and how we should deal with it — because there is no such beast. The question is which group will triumph. The good news is that the debate within Islam did not end in the 19th century. It is as vigorous as ever. It will be won by whoever captures the hearts and minds of young Muslims around the world.

There is no ultimate teaching authority in Islam, no magisterium in Mecca. And the fundamentalists — despite their wealth — do not call all the shots. The Al-Jazeera television station is watched throughout the Middle East. We tend to see it as an Al-Qaeda mouthpiece because it broadcasts Bin Laden’s tapes. It is not. Its most popular programme is a phone-in whose host calls Bin Laden a criminal.

But the direction Islam ultimately takes does not depend only on the conversation it is having within itself. It depends on how it sees the rest of the world. And that means us. For very good reasons we feel threatened by Islam. What we tend to forget is that the Islamic world feels threatened by us. When a bright Muslim boy on the streets of Cairo or Damascus or Jakarta is asked whether he wants to join a jihad against the West or try to coexist with it, he is entitled to turn the question back on us and ask: what does the West want? At the religious level there is evidence of a genuine wish for coexistence. The fundamentalists may have the wealth but they do not make all the running. In Britain and other western countries relations between Christian churches and the Islamic faith are often close. There is even talk, Murad told me, of an “Abrahamic” coalition, bringing together the monotheistic faiths of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, which all claim descent from Abraham.

Most western non-believers want to coexist, too. Don’t all good western liberals preach the virtues of tolerance and multiculturalism? Yet even the most liberal find it is easy to tread on corns. The Guardian had to apologise last week for printing a portrait of the Prophet to accompany an article. The Daily Mail caused outrage when it did the same 18 months ago. And we find it difficult to bite our tongues over such things as attitudes to women.

But it is at the political level that the boy on the Arab street is most likely to throw our liberal good intentions back in our face. What he sees on Al-Jazeera are fellow Muslims being treated appallingly as a subject people in their homeland of Palestine. Tony Blair understands that and wants to deal with it — one of his few differences with his friends in the White House.

The Arab boy has many differences with the White House. He sees it as the centre of a ruthless American empire. Optimists in Washington think he may come to regard American forces as liberators of Iraq, the people who brought democracy and destroyed an irreligious tyrant. They may prove to be right. But when the inevitable pictures finally emerge of poor Muslims blown to bits by western bombs it is more likely that they will see George Bush as a bigger and even more ruthless Ariel Sharon.

If that happens the ground on which coexistence can be built will disappear. Everyone will demonise everyone else. The result will be another explosion. Revolutionaries have always understood that. Provoke the other side into extreme measures and those in the middle have to choose: “Are you for us or against us?” Bush asked that question after September 11. Bin Laden and the fundamentalists will ask it after an Iraq war. The Islamic reformers pray that the boy will not be forced to make that choice.