AT WAR - Islam in Action: Extremism now, and everywhere. What later?

President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Pope John Paul II are among leaders repeating a mantra that Islam is peaceful and tolerant. The firmest of distinctions must be drawn between the religion and terrorism carried out in its name. There is no quarrel with Islam as such, but only a just war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime behind him.

One understands the great and the good, of course, and the worthiness of their endeavor. This war is more difficult to win without the support of states adjoining, or close to, landlocked Afghanistan. With the exception of China, these states are Muslim. It costs little to appease the Islamic susceptibilities of nervous allies, and tempt them into an Allied coalition. And haven't we all been conditioned by yesterday's multiculturalism into thinking that the world's cultures and religions are already blending into a harmonious adult-education class in perpetuity?

But everyone has been overtaken by events. Political extremism has been for some time the dominant expression of Islam. What's at stake is the place that peace and tolerance are to have in the Islam of the future.

Ayatollah Khomeini promoted the exclusive virtue of Islam, and in his native Iran he was the first to show how this assumption of superiority could be exploited to empower a regime. Self-seeking rulers were quick to follow his example, notably in Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sudan, and it's not a coincidence that these countries are now so fragile. In imitation, revolutionary individuals and groups also fastened on Islam as the means for levering themselves into power-al- Qaeda is one of 175 such groups counted in the Middle East by R. Hrair Dekmejian, a specialist on the subject. Secular rulers tried to defend themselves by establishing Islamic credentials, mostly bogus. Anwar Sadat set up photo opportunities at prayer in the mosque (which didn't save him from being murdered by an Islamic group). In Syria, Hafiz Assad-himself from the minority Alawi sect-claimed to be a mainstream Muslim. Muammar Qaddafi painted the main square of Tripoli an Islamic green, and Saddam Hussein has placed the name of God on the Iraqi flag.

The Muslim world has long been immersed in tyranny, corruption, and poverty. Intellect and reason are the tools for analyzing and repairing this predicament, but whoever tries that approach in these dictatorships risks prison and worse. Islamic extremism fills the intellectual vacuum. It is a protest against misrule. It casts the blame for failure onto others. It offers an all-encompassing identity against everyone else, and a clean sweep too. Power is the end-result of it all.

Commentators have usually argued that Islamic extremism is irrational, and so must prove a short-lived and futile chapter in the history of messianic cults. I too plead guilty to that. But in the meantime it has inflamed the relationships of Muslims among themselves and with outsiders. The struggle to mobilize and achieve power by means of Islamic extremism has had brutal consequences. Every country of the Islamic world has had the recent experience of open or latent civil war, of coups and assassinations of rulers. In Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and elsewhere, untold numbers have been killed, and millions are refugees or in exile.

Right round the boundaries of the Islamic world, Islam offers neither peace nor tolerance. The Muslim component in the territorial conflicts between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, and between the Palestinians and Israel, has so far thwarted all efforts at compromise. In Kosovo and Chechnya, Kurdistan, Lebanon and even Cyprus, in the Philippines, in Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslims are fighting on issues that ought to be susceptible to rational negotiation. But rule throughout the Muslim world is absolute-in other words, without genuine power-sharing. Whether the warfare is led by states or revolutionary groups, the net result is that Muslims are fighting as Muslims against the complete range of their neighbors: Hindus, Jews, Malays, animists, Buddhist and Communist Chinese alike, and many different Christians, in Sudan and Indonesia, Catholic Filipinos and Coptic Egyptians, Orthodox Russians and Serbs.

A Nigerian journalist, Ulanugu Eneh, has written, "The greatest threat to Nigeria as a nation as presently constituted is Islamic extremism." In Sudan, in almost two decades of war, the government has killed about 2 million Christians and animists, and introduced Sharia law, jihad-or holy war-and forced conversion to Islam. In April this year, over 50 Christians were arrested at the Episcopal All Saints Cathedral in Khartoum, and most of them, men and women, were then jailed and flogged. At Khartoum University, over 20,000 Christian books were burned or vandalized. In Algeria, conversion from Islam is forbidden. At least 100,000 Muslims have been killed in the civil war there, and in addition to these atrocities was the murder of Bishop Clavier of Oran, and the beheading of seven Trappist monks. At Hodeidah in Yemen, three nuns from Mother Teresa's order were murdered. On returning to Somalia from America, Prof. Haaji, a Christian convert, was shot dead. A bomb in a Christian bookshop in Gaziantep in Turkey killed a four- year-old boy. Gunmen have just killed Christians at worship in their church at Bahawalpur in Pakistan. Egyptian Islamic extremists regularly vandalize Coptic villages. Muslim converts to Christianity there are prosecuted under a law prohibiting the use of religion to "ignite heavenly strife." Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outstanding Muslim academic who has campaigned in behalf of justice for Copts, is now in prison on a charge of "tarnishing Egypt's image."

Imperialism is a highly complex interplay between conqueror and conquered. The Europeans built their empires in the past through confidence in themselves and their culture, but they could never have succeeded in colonizing unless the local peoples correspondingly doubted the strength and validity of their own culture and society. Overwhelmed, the local peoples generally adopted the values that accompanied European power. Now, in the compass of opinion reaching from Khomeini to bin Laden, European values have lost their force, and Muslim imperialism reemerges from the historical shadows where it has been invisible for so long.

The 20th century saw immense movements of populations, as dispossessed people fled wherever they could in search of a better life. Millions of Muslims have settled in the West, and many more aspire to. Most major Western cities have Islamic cultural institutes and mosques and charities. Imams and community leaders on the one hand, and multiculturalists on the other, have worked as proselytizers and missionaries. Islam is the fastest-growing of all religions, and in several European countries Muslims already outnumber the Christians who attend church. In Britain, a poll reveals that four in ten British Muslims believe Osama bin Laden is justified in his attacks of September 11. Just over two-thirds stated that their Muslim faith was more important to them than their British nationality. Polls elsewhere in Europe show comparable findings.

This is the milieu now demonstrating in support of Osama bin Laden and providing volunteers for his network, and raising funds through charities that are fronts for extremism. Time will show whether these are the temporary troubles of integration, or on the contrary a reverse colonialism in an age when Westerners in their turn seem to doubt the strength and validity of their own culture and society.

In interviews and broadcasts on the al-Jazeera television network, Osama bin Laden speaks for alienated Muslims. He makes a habit of contradicting the great and the good in the West. For him, Islam is not in the least peaceful or tolerant, but on the contrary engaged in a war, and a holy war at that, jihad on a global scale. He lumps together the United States, the "Russian bear," the United Nations that to him is "nothing but a tool of crime," and Israel. In his imagination, every Muslim is engaged in the same struggle against a Judeo-Christian conspiracy to destroy Islam, and Muslims must now rise up and put an end to the wicked conspirators. Khomeini revived the medieval concept of a war between Islam and the West, and bin Laden has succeeded in making a contemporary reality of it.

Those who perceive themselves as victims of powerful and far-reaching conspiracy also grant themselves every right to go to war against it. Islam will empower them and free them, handing the infidels their due deserts. A leader is calling. All they need is weaponry. A golden age will be coming true, in which-as the placards proclaimed at the recent racist jamboree in Durban-"Islam Will Dominate the World."

Rulers and revolutionaries alike in Muslim states face choices that will define the future. Either they enter a world order open to reason, or they accept the bin Laden strategy that jihad is the exclusive expression of Islam. Time is running out for fence-sitters like the Egyptians and Saudis, and that goes for Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and those 175 armed groups, too. Continued rejection of equality and power-sharing can only lead to the sort of backlash from the rest of the world now unfolding in Afghanistan, and then it's a long goodbye to peace and tolerance.