From its beginning, the Muslim religion was seen, by those inside it, as a movement of social revolution. The period of its dominance—roughly 700 to 1200 CE —is viewed by orthodox Islam as the high point thus far of human civilization, and there is a deep, long-existing desire in Islamic culture to reestablish this Islamic hegemony. In the Islamic view, when Islam is practiced properly, by the application of Islamic Law (Sharia), a society will be created wherein every aspect of life (including the economy) is guided by a set of just, unchanging rules derived from God...

  If someone type the keywords "Islam+fastest+growing+religion" inside the google's search window, one ends up getting around 14,400 matches. For a Muslim, that will be very heartening (as if quantity bereft of quality isn't sufficient enough already). For a non-Muslim, that's alarming to say the least.

From India to Israel to Europe to US of A, some people are indeed scared. Scared of this harmless and pleasant reality. To create a demon out of increasing Muslim population, India and Israel calls them as a 'breeding like rabbits' community, set to overtake majority community in their respective countries within decades (the fear might be valid in case of Israelis as it's an occupying force in the land of Palestine, consisting of non-native Jew Immigrants unlike Indian Hindus), while US and Europe have embarked upon tighter Immigration rules for people from Third World Muslim countries, implementing a policy of 'guilty until proven innocent'. Mosques and Community centres are routinely being  investigated and approval to build any new ones is simply out of question. On the contrary, we all know and studies confirm that it's neither the high reproduction rates nor Immigrants that make Islam the fastest growing religion of the World. It's what Muslims prefer to call as - 'Reversion' to Islam by enlightened men or thinkers of all communities.

What are the causes of this deep seated fear against increasing community of Islam? Here is how, Patrick Eytchison, explains this in his synthesis, titled 'Oil and Islam'. He writes :- "A deep structure interweaving resource depletion, culture trends and the capitalist economy under girds the Bush administration’s policy of international aggression and domestic repression. Seen in the context of this structure, the administration’s actions are neither inept nor irrational. Instead, they represent the carrying out of a cold logic to preserve the privilege of a ruling class faced with the most severe crisis of its two hundred plus year existence: i.e. the exhaustion of its energy resource base, and the parallel rise of an oppositional semiotic/social movement as strong as, if not stronger than, Marxist communism".

He continues, "The purpose of this essay is to outline that structure. This will be presented in two sections; one on resource depletion and then one on the rise of the Islamist movement. It is only with an understanding of the historical confluence of these two forces that the profound ecological-historical rootedness of present ruling class insanity can be grasped, and with hope an effective resistance built.

   Western fear of Arabs and Muslims has emerged as one of the most striking political and psychological phenomena of recent years. Fear is perhaps too mild a word for it. The emotion that has seized the western world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is more like paranoia.

A whole intellectual industry has sprung up in the west, seeking to dissect and understand the "violence", "hate" and "fanaticism" which the Arab and Muslim world is said to direct against the west.

What is the root of this "Arab rage"? Almost invariably, western commentators have concluded that the essential cause lies in the "failed" societies of the Arab world, in their absence of democracy, their abuse of human rights, their economic mismanagement, their oppression of women, their exploding populations, their soaring unemployment, their poor education, their technological backwardness, even their lack of Internet access!

In Davos this year, the consensus among business and political leaders attending the World Economic Forum was that poverty and economic backwardness were among the main reasons why Arabs and Muslims embraced Islamic fundamentalism, and, in some cases, resorted to terrorism.

Last Monday, Thomas Freidman of The New York Times claimed to know the essential cause of terrorist violence: it was the lack of jobs. He put the blame on Europe which he described as "the real factory of Arab-Muslim rage". On the same day, in an article in Britain's Financial Times, Sir Lawrence Friedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, wrote that the Arab world was suffering from the collapse of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's pan-Arabism and from disastrous economic policies. His gloomy conclusion was that the "real alternatives" for the Middle East were "chaos or autocracy".

Exporting the problem to the Arabs

In my view, this type of analysis is neither accurate nor disinterested. It represents an attempt to export to the Arab and Muslim world the west's share of responsibility for the present unstable state of affairs.

Soon after 9/11, several commentators, especially in the US, began to argue that the terrorist attacks were not in any way a response to American policies in the Middle East – to its limitless support for Israel, its control of Arab oil, its military bases, its client states – but sprang from the very nature of Arab-Muslim society.

This analysis provided Washington neo-conservatives with the argument they needed to press for war against Iraq. If it was accepted that Arab terrorists were the product of sick societies, then the way to protect the US from further terrorist attack was to reform these societies, if necessary by force!

I think this argument was nothing more than a malicious smokescreen concealing the real motives for attacking Iraq – which were to subdue the Arab world and promote the strategic interests of the US and Israel.

A fundamental question needs to be asked: Is the prime cause of terrorist violence sociological or political?

Is the bomber in Baghdad, Kabul or Tel Aviv, in Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca or Istanbul, driven by poverty and hopelessness or by a burning sense of political grievance?

Were the suicidal hijackers who demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Centre driven by backwardness and unemployment or did they believe they were striking a blow against American imperialism?

I believe the essential conflict between the Arabs and the west is political, as it has been for very many decades ever since Arab hopes for independence and unity were betrayed and disappointed after World War I.

It will only abate once the west, and the US in particular, address fundamental Arab grievances, of which the Palestine problem is only the most prominent.

Reform needed

No one can deny that the Arab world is in urgent need of radical reform. Political pluralism, social justice, basic freedoms of expression and association – above all the rule of law – are all glaringly absent. In several states, ruling elites have remained in power for far too long and have robbed the country with impunity. But these are not the causes of terrorist violence against the west and its Arab friends.

Arab writers, intellectuals and businessmen have been among the first to denounce the failings of the Arab world and to warn that if reform does not come soon from within these societies it will one day be imposed from outside.

Many Arabs and Muslims understand that the central problem with which they need to wrestle – and which has concerned Arab reformers for generations - is how to acquire the many good things the west can offer while preserving Arab independence.

The message the US has sought to convey by its invasion and occupation of Iraq is a different one, and is wholly focussed on American interests and on American fears for its own security. America's policy – its double standards and its countless interventions in the Arab and Muslim world – are at the root of terrorist violence.

The Arabs should propose a bargain to the US: "Resolve the political problems that plague and distract us – Israeli expansion, the plight of the Palestinians, American armed force at the heart of our region, our still incomplete independence – and we will undertake the necessary reforms of our societies, free from the pressures of war and occupation."

In this emerging global dynamic, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden each play a particular and significant role. By stubbornly raising their interpretation of the Sharia above secular modernism in the face of international outrage, they move to the front as the vanguard of militant Sunni fundamentalism. By clearly and with a charismatic voice articulating the vision of an Islamic revolt against the West (although his actual demands have been limited to the removal of Western occupying forces from the holy sites of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem and changes in the present Saudi ruling house) bin Laden, in combination with his financial position and military record in the Afghan War, has put himself forward as a hero-figure on which oppositional Islamic consciousness can focus.

Together these two phenomena make the threat to Western interests inherently embedded in Islam’s self-understanding powerfully explicit. For this, they must be destroyed.

Working on the same precept Moody Adams, 71, a religious writer and lecturer, presenting his Christian interpretation of the Quran says, "My battle is with the Quran, they (Muslims) want to see that the laws of the Quran are enforced by every country of the world." Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel 'Platform' was released in Britain in the month of September 2002, appeared in a Paris court charged with inciting religious and racial hatred. The father and mistress of the character Michel in 'Platform' are murdered by Muslims and in one passage he says: "I had a vision of migrating flows criss-crossing Europe like blood vessels. Muslims appeared as clots which were only slowly reabsorbed." This vagueness is at the heart of the problem Daniel Pipes identifies in ''Militant Islam Reaches America,'' a collection of essays he has written over the past decade. A so called, scholar of the Middle East as well as a habitual polemicist, Pipes often highlights similarities between the structure and methods of the Islamist groups and those of the fascists and Communists. While he cautions against seeing them as equivalent, his message seems to be that the new Islamic man should be combated with tactics similar to those employed during the cold war. He ignores the cost of America's obsession with Communism -- the perilous flirtation with nuclear annihilation, the violation of civil rights and liberties at home, the often mindless embrace abroad of any movement, however corrupt or autocratic -- including militant Islamist groups -- if it agreed to join the United States in its fight against the Soviet Union. He endorses ethnic profiling -- ''if it is true that most Muslims are not Islamists, it is no less true that all Islamists are Muslims'' -- but he fails to discuss its potential dangers. And though he claims to respect Islam and its adherents, he finds that in the war on terror, ''all Muslims, unfortunately, are suspect.''

The fear is made out to be very Real.