We like to think - or rather we comfort ourselves with the thought - that the West, especially the United States, is caught in a frenzy of Muslim-bashing. We try not to realize that our own condition, a mixture of ineptitude and backwardness, is an invitation to bashing. We are not the victims of a cosmic conspiracy. We are responsible for our backwardness ourselves.

We have not managed our affairs well. This is true of almost all the countries that call themselves Islamic. Even when the end of colonialism came, the world of Islam continued to be exploited - again not because of any malevolent conspiracy but because the bankruptcy of ideas that lay at its heart invited exploitation.

Israel dominates its Arab neighbours not simply because of American dollars and American arms. If it was simply a question of money, Arab petrodollars could push Israel into the sea. Israeli domination comes from the power of knowledge and technology. Compared to its neighbours it is a developed country. For its own kind, if not for the Palestinians, it is also a democracy. Both these things give it a commanding edge. Which does not whitewash its repression in the occupied territories. But that is hardly what I am saying.

Our answer to the challenges of the modern world has been twofold. The affluent classes of the Muslim world, including its rulers, have been happy to become appendages or clients of the West. The disadvantaged or those at the bottom of the heap have discovered comfort and security in a crude form of Islamism.

If our elites have failed their respective people, if we have been left behind in the race of knowledge and ideas, our excuse is not that we have been poor learners or that we have a long way to go before we catch up with the West. We like to say that we have been bad Muslims and have not kept faith with the true tenets of Islam.

So towards a self-defined purity of Islam many of us have tried to return in the conviction that this journey back in time holds the key to all our problems.

This journey into the past took no cruder form than the emergence of the Taliban. It has taken no cruder form than the ideas firing the zeal of Osama bin Laden and his followers. The West feels threatened by Al Qaeda terrorism. But perhaps we may consider that Bin Ladenism is a greater threat to the world of Islam than it is to the West.

For the West it is but a physical threat in the form of terrorism. For the world of Islam it is a threat more grave and sinister for it to be trapped in Bin Ladenism is to travel back in time to the dark ages of Muslim obscurantism. It means to be stuck in the mire which has held the Islamic world back.

Since therefore this threat for us is less military and more spiritual or intellectual, we have to be careful about the choice of weapon. The black-and-white simplicities of the Bush administration won't do for us because our concerns and requirements are different. The demonization of Iraq fits in with American preconceptions not ours. The 'axis-of-evil' is an American construct. Who else could have dreamt of it?

The threat to the Muslim world comes from other things. From authoritarianism, from the fact that apart from the half-exceptions (please note, half-exceptions) of Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan, the concept of democracy is alien to the Muslim world. The threat to it comes from intolerance and the lack of knowledge.

Bin Ladenism is the purest distillation of these problems. We shouldn't require Washington to tell us that it is in our interests to exorcise this evil. We should have the sense to realize this on our own. But at the same time this fight should be ours and we should be defining its agenda and setting out its aims.

This is not what is happening. The Bush administration is doing all the defining while lesser states are being pressed into active service in America's 'war on terrorism' and its impending war on Iraq (both things having got mixed up somewhere down the line).

Far from improving matters, this war on terrorism is making things worse for the Islamic world. For it is feeding resentment against the West - and by extension, the values it stands for: secularism, tolerance and democracy - and at the same time making heroes and martyrs of those recruited to the standards of Bin Ladenism. Across the Muslim world as the West is demonized for launching a 'war of civilizations' against Islam, popular sentiment veers towards those shadowy figures and organizations seen standing up to the new imperialism.

In other words, Bin Ladenism is seen not as something primitive but as a movement symbolizing the spirit of resistance. In other words, the sources of terrorism strengthened even as its manifestations are assailed.

Pity the Islamic world whose kings, emirs and dictators are once again policemen in a crusade not of their choosing. During the cold war the same Muslim regimes (except for Egypt), now foot soldiers in Bush's war on terrorism, were in the forward trenches of the US's war against communism. None more so than Pakistan which has never felt more secure than when labelled as America's most allied ally.

There is nothing wrong in being America's friend except that between that and a client who is rewarded only so long as he does his patron's dirty work (and is then discarded), there's a world of difference.

But who are we to educate the West? We can plead and in some cases expostulate. But we are in no position to convert the West. But why should we even be thinking on those lines? Our problem is to convert ourselves. We have to convert our thinking and remove the shackles of obscurantism from our minds if we are to know the meaning and value of freedom and dignity.

National dignity and sovereignty are empty phrases as long as minds are enslaved and our only wisdom is borrowed wisdom. We have to pull down the walls of authoritarianism and make our political systems more democratic if at all we want to improve our lot and gain some respect among nations.

The flame of knowledge is one and indivisible. Down the ages it has passed from civilization to civilization. When it was with the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians and the Chinese, theirs were the civilizations which shone the brightest. When it passed to the Greeks they were the world's leaders in science and philosophy.

For a thousand years Rome was the centre of the world. Hindu mathematicians used modern numerals when the rest of the world was unaware of them. When the shadows lengthened over the Byzantine Empire, the torch of learning, one and indivisible since the beginning of time, passed to the Islamic world where it remained for several centuries. When the Islamic world fell into decline, this same torch passed to the West where it has remained since the 15th century.

The West is superior to us because the eternal flame of knowledge and learning is in its keeping. And as long as this holds true, not all the oil in the world can deliver the Muslim world from its backwardness. To the extent that countries like Japan and China have altered their destinies, they have done so by warming themselves at the same flame.

We must remember that of all hierarchies in the world, that of knowledge alone knows no caste or creed. It is not Christian or Muslim or pagan but simply knowledge and those wanting a place in the sun must look into no other mirror but this flame for their salvation.