Here’s a summary of an excellent article by Salman Rushdie, The Age, Tuesday November 6, 2001:

‘This isn’t about Islam’. The world’s leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks.

The trouble with this… disclaimer is that it isn’t true…

Most religious belief isn’t very theological. For a vast number of ‘believing’ Muslim men, ‘Islam’ stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God – the fear, more than the love, one suspects – but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that include their dietary practices, the sequestration or near-sequestration of ‘their’ women; the sermons delivered by their mullahs of choice, a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with godlessness and sex; and a more parricularised loathing [and fear] of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over – ‘Westoxicated – by the liberal Western-style way of life.

‘Islamists’ – as distinct from ‘Muslims’ in general – are helped in their political quest by poverty and paranoia. This paranoid Islam blames outsiders, ‘infidels’ (particularly the United States) for all the ills of Muslim societies and is the fastest growing version of Islam in the world. Now America’s ’tilts’ (Kissinger’s term) towards this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved of) nation state fuelled this antagonism.

But resentment of other Islamic regimes may be deeper than resentment of the West (there is no love lost betwen the Taliban and Iran, for example).

Many Muslims are now asking: ‘Suppose some of our problems are our fault?’ Muslim voices everywhere have been raised against the obscurantist hijacking of their religion. (Remember when non-communist socialists deplored the tyranny of Stalinism?)

Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world. If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity their voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

‘If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.’