When David Selbourne flew into America recently, he had good reason to feel he had arrived in the land of the free. His new book, The Losing Battle with Islam, was featured at New York’s Book Expo, the US publishing industry’s trade fair last week, after it failed to find a British publisher.

One glance at the title and it is easy to see why. The Losing Battle With Islam is a blistering critique of the West’s response to Muslim militancy. Publishers in London were far too “pusillanimous” and “PC” to take it on, says Selbourne indignantly. But in America, a nation with greater “intellectual vigour”, Prometheus Books stepped into the breach and it will be published in September.

The manuscript has already been circulating in intellectual circles in “samizdat” form and it may yet find a British publisher now the Americans are leading the way. But the big brush-off is a prime example of Selbourne’s thesis that westerners are displaying a misplaced and muddle-headed sensitivity to Muslim feelings that is not always reciprocated.

I caught up with him in Washington, where he was meeting think-tankers, policy makers and opinion-formers. “It’s a relief to talk to people who are engaged in this matter,” he sighed. “This is the front line of what matters in the world.” He feels the non-Muslim world is ignoring at its peril the challenge posed by a resurgent Islam.

Controversy comes naturally to Selbourne, a veteran of ideological and cultural wars. He used to teach at Ruskin College, Oxford, the trade union college, and was assumed to be a man of the left until he began writing about the breakdown of civil society and morality in essays and books such as The Principle of Duty.

He is wary of libertarianism and the cult of the individual and considers Milton Friedman, apostle of the free market, to be the “evil genius of our age”. With such views, he was always going to be at odds with the Thatcherite right. Yet his arguments against loosening the bonds of family and community led him to be labelled a reactionary sell-out by the post-Sixties left.

Selbourne’s holiday home in Italy became his refuge and, eventually, his permanent base: “I needed a cordon sanitaire between me and the seething world of competitive English intellectuals.” From there he remains engaged in the war of ideas in the English-speaking world, eagerly scanning British and American newspapers and magazines on the internet and fighting every ideological battle as if the barbarians were at his gate.

“I consider myself to be highly progressive,” he says with a touch of indignation and weariness. “I consider it highly progressive to be against fascism and there are elements of Islamic society which are fascist. People are cowed, and it has to be resisted.”

In Italy last week, in an attack on free speech, the veteran polemicist Oriana Fallaci, author of the bestselling The Rage and the Pride, a diatribe against the West’s alleged cultural surrender to Islamists, was ordered by a judge to face trial on charges of defaming Islam, a sign of the ferocity of the ideological warfare now under way.

With his white beard and gentle voice, Selbourne has the mild manner of a don. He considers himself to be a dispassionate, highly sensible voice of reason but he also has the intellectual force of a flame-thrower. In his new book he scorns some Muslims for “taking liberties” with Britain — supporting attacks on the West by Islamists while expecting that their own “civic and other entitlements will be met in full”.

But much of his criticism is reserved for the West, which is only too eager to flagellate itself for its alleged shortcomings while rushing to understand its opponents’ point of view (the Newsweek imbroglio over the alleged desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay detention base, a story it later withdrew, is just the latest example). Even in America, “the political class has lost confidence in itself”, he complains.

The American imperium, Selbourne argues, “is in a state of confusion”. Its time will pass, just as Rome, Byzantium and the British Empire fell away. The West is losing the battle against Islam for the “same reason the British lost the American colonies. They had insufficient forces, their counsels were divided, and they underestimated their opponents”.

Selbourne dates the reawakening of the Islamic world to the Suez crisis and the outbreak of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. He has been studying the phenomenon and building up an archive of material stretching back for decades.