LONDON: As the Afghan bombs fall, the hate spills forth from the impoverished alleys of Quetta like blood from a festering, badly-bandaged wound. In Palestine, the fury of a dispossessed people briefly flares, only to turn inward upon itself as if in self-disgust.

From Jakarta to Cairo to Tehran, the symbols of the west’s and, specifically, America’s perceived economic and cultural domination are assailed. The world is no longer safe, it seems, for McDonald’s.

In Britain, too, despite all British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s best-intentioned ecumenism, the voices of an alienated Muslim community echo out from his London offices in Downing Street’s cosy meeting rooms and are subsumed in the general clamour. Muslims everywhere, or so it appears to a puzzled, alarmed and largely secular western public, are up in arms, metaphorically if not physically.

But in Kabul and Kandahar and across Afghanistan, the bombs keep falling, the refugees keep running, the children stay starving and the Pentagon, fresh out of sheds to blow up, instructs its pilots to seek “targets of opportunity”.

In Amman and Baghdad people marvel that westerners do not recall the destructive colonial legacy their forebears bequeathed, do not understand the damage that dysfunctional relationship still does now, and blunder on to repeat the mistakes of the past. They wonder why, and how, the execrable violence visited upon New York is somehow deemed less illegitimate when turned against Arabs in Gaza or Sudan or Iraq.

And then, as Osama bin Laden’s nightmare videos promising a holy war against “Jewish-Crusader aggression” attempt to summon “the entire Muslim nation” to his banner, all the talk is of a clash of civilizations, of Islam versus Christendom, of a stark, unavoidable choice between “us” and “them”.

This is no choice. The dichotomy is false. Nor is it a “clash of civilizations” in the sense that very little of what is happening now can be termed civilized at all. It is more a long-running dialogue of the deaf, now become a shouting match conducted with eyes closed and thought suspended.

What victims have we all become of our mutual ignorance, prejudice, selfishness and forfeited respect! How little have we learned since Plato, who never heard of Muslims or Christians, first tried to construct an ideal society founded on injustice for the many and felicity for the favoured few. And what a terrible price we may yet pay if bigoted extremists aping Osama, the ultimate symbol of failed social order, are allowed to exploit these self-created divisions.

For Al-Qaida is not a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, nor is Islam especially prone to nurturing terror. Every ideology, every form of political organization and every religion has through history produced its inquisitors and witch-burners, its fanatics and dictators. The trick is to survive them and in doing so, destroy the roots and sustaining causes of their despotism.

The alleyways of Quetta are impoverished, as in so many developing countries, because there is no economic justice in a world run from Wall Street. The Palestinians burn American flags not because they support Osama but because, despairing of redress, they fall into his trap. The rage expressed in Egypt and other Arab countries is directed outwards because corrupt, oligarchic regimes deny their people the freedom to rage at them, as well they might.

The symbols of western power are attacked not on Al-Qaida’s behalf but because they represent, too cruelly, the impotence of an Islamic culture that once proudly led and now feels beleaguered. Most Muslims surely want an end to western military and political interference.

But above all, their societies require a restoration of the self-respect that only greater openness, improved civil rights and an increasing, shared prosperity can bring.

America, for its part, is targeted because, oblivious to history, it has in many ways projected its influence, its values and its interests with little understanding of its consequent obligations. A century ago, much the same might have been said of Britain or France. The west, not Osama, is its own worst enemy when, as appears to Muslims to be the case now, it wages war with impunity, making the rules, bending the law, ignoring consensus and bullying its friends. Blair can chivvy Muslim leaders and give Arabic TV interviews until he is blue in the face. Bush can scatter bribes and blandishments up and down the Gulf. But they will not be accepted as true friends and partners of Islam until their governments, and the societies they lead, discard their inherited, supercilious assumptions and pursue, on the basis of equality, a shared search for justice sensitive to both traditions.

To conjure the spectre of a systemic collision between the west and the Muslim world is to play Osama’s game. To ignore the tensions that this crisis has exposed and exacerbated would be dangerously to prolong and deepen misunderstanding.

But the solutions for both the west and Islam, and for their mutual relationship, are ultimately to be found within. It is no good screaming abuse and insults at each other. Before casting the next stone, each and every one of us should first look in the mirror. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.