Competing explanations for Islamic terrorism

Radical Islamism is more than a response to western actions: it is an ideology that provides a battle cry and a battle order.

The competing explanations for a resort to terrorism are many, but you can more or less group them round two poles.

One of these was vividly expressed in the Guardian last Saturday by Karen Armstrong. Tony Blair had been wrong, she said, to call for moderate Muslims to act and speak out more decisively against radical Islamists. He had missed the point: all Muslims, moderate or radical, were deeply stirred by the sufferings of their co-religionists in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine, and the "strong emphasis placed by Islam on justice and community solidarity" made this a religious issue.

"It is disingenuous of Tony Blair," she wrote, "to separate the rising tide of 'Islamism' from his unpopular foreign policy, particularly when Palestinians are being subjected to new dangers in Gaza."

This pole is defined, roughly, by the belief that it is the west's, or America's, fault that radical Islamists are violent. While violence may be wrong - Armstrong certainly believes that - it takes its root and justifies itself in its own eyes in the empathy with the victims of, and anger with, the West's actions.

The other pole has been evoked, at least as vividly, by an ex-Muslim, now a non-believer: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born Dutch MP whose apostasy (as many of her former co-religionists saw it) and outspoken criticisms of Islam earned her death threats and police protection. Further, a campaign against her in the Netherlands mounted by some elements in the left saw her temporarily stripped of her citizenship, a move that was the main cause of the collapse of the country's centre-right coalition last month. To the death by John Lloyd

Mark Alexander