POLLY TOYNBEE, the Guardian's columnist, is at the forefront of liberal causes in the UK: day in and day out, she hammers the government and right-wing politicians for showing any sign of bias against any underprivileged community.

And yet she proudly labels herself an "Islamophobe". Fiercely anti-racist, she sees no contradiction between defending Asians and Africans in the UK - many of whom are practicing Muslims - and rejecting their faith. She bases her views on the general perception of Islam in the West as an aggressive and intolerant religion that marginalizes women and religious minorities. If a liberal, well-educated and highly articulate person like Ms Toynbee can hold such views about Islam, it is easy to imagine how the average westerner looks at it.

Just as most of us make little effort to understand the essence of other faiths (or, indeed, our own), ordinary Europeans and Americans gain their knowledge not through original texts but media sound bites and images. And these are highly damaging to Muslims, consisting as they mostly do of bearded fundamentalists carrying Kalashnikovs; newspaper reports of fathers forcing their daughters to marry men against their will; and women being forced to cover themselves from head to foot. In brief, Muslims are seen as violent and intolerant, and by implication, their faith is seen as the root cause for this backwardness.

We may protest all we like, pointing to the tolerance and equality preached by Islam, and to the great cultural flowering it encouraged in its earlier days. The unpleasant fact is that because of a relatively tiny minority of the billion or so Muslims around the world, the entire ummah has been tarnished by the same brush. Indeed, the Taliban have done more than any other group to ruin the image of Islam. Their latest decision to make Hindus display yellow marks smacks of the Nazi policy of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David on their clothes. And their recent destruction of the great Buddha statues in Bamiyan reminded us that their stone-age practices have more to do with tribalism than Islam. But whatever their motivation, they claim to act in the name of their faith, and so in the eyes of the West, they represent one aspect of Islam, never mind that most Muslims all over the world abhor and reject their policies and behavior.

Against this backdrop of ill-informed condemnation of a faith and its followers, it is easy to understand western apathy over the institutionalized repression of (largely Muslim) Palestinians by Israel and of Chechens by the Russian government. In the western psyche, Muslims are generally lumped together and seen as fundamentalists, and the next step to the terrorist label is a short one. This composite image inspires both fear and loathing.

And yet secular Muslim countries like Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco continue to attract millions of tourists and billions of dollars. The citizens of these countries are just as devout Muslims as in the rest of the Islamic world, but are seen as moderates, and not as threatening, totally alien figures. The point here is that in a shrinking world, you cannot simultaneously try and attract western capital and technology while cursing the West and despising its values.

Mutual respect and tolerance only come through the acceptance of other points of view and modes of behavior. Unfortunately, many Muslims who have decided to make their homes in the West have chosen to alienate themselves from the mainstream, living in self-created ghettos of the mind. While they accept and enjoy the many advantages of living in the West, they fiercely reject any moves to integrate themselves into the society and cultural milieu they live in. Many members of the younger generation of Muslims in the West inhabit a twilight zone in between their parents' mental world and the real world around them. A small minority of them have turned to a particularly militant brand of fundamentalism that alienates them further from society. These extremists reinforce the negative image of their religion, except in their case, the perceived terrorists are not some distant Taliban; they have infiltrated into the heart of the western world.

So it should not surprise us when a terrorist outrage occurs in the West, and Muslims are the first to be suspected. This stereotyping is obviously harmful and hurtful to the vast majority of peaceful, law-abiding Muslims who just want to get on with their lives. In a sense, a small minority of extremists is holding the majority of believers hostage.

There is a tendency to react to media stereotyping with anger and defiance, justifying what this handful of zealots is doing by blaming the West for not intervening when Muslims are clearly the targets of oppression from Kashmir to Palestine to Bosnia. But this is a chicken and egg situation: Americans and Europeans are largely indifferent as they cannot empathize with people who seem so alien. Public opinion is more sympathetic to nations westerners can identify with more readily. In world affairs, there is no such thing as objective truth, and expecting foreigners with little interest in the legalities of international affairs to side with us is expecting too much of human nature.

The fact is that like it or not, it is the West that currently calls the shots in global finance, technology and diplomacy. Most Muslim countries today are in various stages of underdevelopment, and therefore require substantial financial and technical assistance from the West. And here in lies the rub: can these same countries (or a handful of their citizens) simultaneously afford to alienate Europeans and Americans by adopting a confrontationist posture?

Or to use General Aslam Beg's fatuous but memorable phrase, can the Muslim world maintain an attitude of "strategic defiance"?

The Chinese, ever pragmatic, have courted overseas investments on a huge scale, sending their GDP soaring, and have been trading furiously with the West, accumulating enormous surpluses. They see the strategic advantage of cooperating with the West to strengthen their country, even though they have major ideological differences with the countries they are doing business with. Many Muslim thinkers and politicians, on the other hand, continue to fight ancient battles. Incapable of logical thought and rational action, they prefer to live in the past. In doing so, they are dragging the rest of the Muslim world down with them.

If we are to develop and compete economically with the rest of the world, we need to break out of the shackles of history we have placed on ourselves.