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Mark Juergensmeyer, professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a specialist on religious violence, put it similarly: "Osama bin Laden is to Islam [what] Timothy McVeigh is to Christianity."

After initial emphasis on Islam as a religion of peace, a second interpretation came to the fore. Editorials started to emerge that were less optimistic about Islam per se and far more alarmed about the scope and depth of militant Islam. Novelist Salman Rushdie, on whom the late Ayatollah Khomeini once issued a death order, wrote in The New York Times:

If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side? . …[Islamists have] a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness, and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over—"Westoxicated"—by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

Others have been naming Islam's dark side as well, without suggesting that all Muslims are terrorists. Thomas Friedman, author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, has taunted Osama bin Laden in his New York Times columns, while also warning of the terrorist's popularity in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other Muslim nations.

British journalist Julie Burchill wrote a scathing article in The Guardian against the "sustained effort on the part of the British media to present Islam—even after the Rushdie affair and now during the Taliban's reign of terror—as something essentially 'joyous' and 'vibrant,' sort of like Afro-Caribbean culture, only with fasting and fatwas."

Melanie Phillips, writing in The Times of London, raises the possibility of treason among British Muslims. "As if the progress of the Afghan war wasn't enough to worry about, a nightmare specter is emerging at home. The attitude of many British Muslims should cause the greatest possible alarm that we have a fifth column in our midst . …Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help to destroy the society that sustains them. We now stare into the abyss, aghast."

In the weeks after the World Trade Center crumbled, there was no proof of an Islamic world totally united against terrorism. Rick Bragg reported in The New York Times about Muslim boys running through their school compounds in Pakistan on September 11. They were "celebrating, stabbing the fingers on one hand into the palm of the other, to simulate a plane stabbing into a building." Palestinian authorities went into overdrive to suppress images of youths celebrating the deaths in America.

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January 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1