In August 1998, three months after I became Muslim, hundreds of civilians were killed when simultaneous truck bombs exploded in the capitals of Tanzania and Kenya. Three years later we would witness two commercial jets slamming into the World Trade Centre in New York on our television screens. In each case the perpetrators are thought to have been Muslim and the spectre of a violent religion has been with us ever since. With every passing year the picture only gets gloomier as even the gentlest believer is charged with explaining the brutality of the world in which we live. A stranger once sent me a message in which he complained that a tenet of my religion is working to conquer every land on earth. A tenet is a central principle or belief and so his accusation threw me for this is not one of either the six articles of belief or the five pillars of faith. The Six Articles are belief in God; in all the Prophets and Messengers sent by God; in the Books sent by God; in the Angels; in the Day of Judgement and our Resurrection; and in divine decree. The five pillars of Islam are the profession of faith in God; establishing the five daily prayers; the paying of alms to be distributed amongst the poor; fasting in the month of Ramadan; and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Naturally our practices number many more than this, but they cannot be said to be tenets.

I have never been one to view the Muslim world through rose-tinted spectacles and I have never shied away from condemning the violence and depravity emerging from Muslim lands. I dislike the refrain that the West is to blame, for although those who study history and politics may see a shadow of truth in this, the full picture is infinitely complex. In any case, to blame others is not the traditional Muslim viewpoint: the Qur'an recounts the lessons of the Children of Israel--the Muslims of that age--precisely so that we may not repeat the mistakes of those who passed before us. Still, I have met Muslims who consider themselves the Chosen People, who look upon others with contempt, considering their lives worthless like Gentiles deserving of whatever they get; meanwhile these Chosen Ones would never think to share their faith. Thus English Muslims like me are not greeted with joy, but with suspicion and disbelief.

We are about to read a "But": I agree that the Muslim world is awash with violence and depravity, but... I once experimented with an Internet search engine, first typing in the word "Muslim" and then the word "Islam". I cannot report that anything positive came back amidst the first ten pages. All across the internet people are writing about the barbarity of Islam--out there, Islam and Muslims are viewed with greater contempt than I could ever have imagined. While undertaking this exercise I came across an article by a military man stationed at Pearl Harbour in the United States of America, which argued that the problem is not with the extremists, but with Islam itself. He cited a horrific case in which the so-called religious police prevented fifteen schoolgirls from escaping a burning school dormitory in Mecca because they were not "properly dressed". It was the author's opinion that because Islam mandates a certain dress-code these people were correct according to their religion in preventing the children from escaping, which thus proved that Islam is a barbaric religion. Yet if this were true, would Islam not prohibit a person facing starvation from eating forbidden meat in the absence of a substitute?

While I cannot deny that house of Islam is far from being in order, I had to object. The author called Islam a barbaric, blood-thirsty and violent religion. Although this description would sadly suit too many Muslims in the world today, I detected a certain amount of the hypocrisy on display. Are those that passionately worship their nation, believing that they stand at the pinnacle of civilisation, free of the same charge? Do those that describe my religion as barbaric, blood-thirsty and violent not see barbarism everywhere as I do?
The nation that invented the nuclear bomb was not a Muslim nation. The nation that used the nuclear bomb, the combined death toll of which is estimated to range from 100,000 up to 220,000 of whom most were civilians, was not a Muslim nation. The nation that created and deployed jellied gasoline as a weapon of war--a substance formulated to burn at a specific rate and adhere to material and personnel--was not a Muslim nation: it was the Germans for those who will point their fingers at the Americans. The nation that has refused to ratify a United Nations convention banning its use against civilian targets was not a Muslim nation. The nation that invented the vacuum bomb which causes its victim to implode from within when it is used was not a Muslim nation. The nation that undertook the extermination of up to six million Jews over a period of five years was not a Muslim nation. The nation that developed Botox and Anthrax as weapons of mass destruction was not a Muslim nation. I could go on.

I see barbarism everywhere in this depraved age of ours. Muslim terrorists have hijacked and blown up civilian airliners, but so have Nationalists, Socialists and indeed States. In 1988 the US shot down an Iranian passenger jet killing all 290 people on board, while in 1983 the US accused the USSR of shooting down a Korean airliner, killing 269 people. What can we say? Perhaps it is our mindset which is at fault, conditioned by the bloodiest century ever. What can be said of a race--the human race--which has turned killing into a form of entertainment? The Romans had their gladiators and we have Hollywood. We have got death and destruction down to a fine art: the subtle thriller about the lone murderer, the action packed adventure of one man verses the terrorists complete with buildings exploding and planes crashing, and the grim horror about the obsessed mass murderer: all in the name of entertainment.

The truth makes us weep, for we live in a barbaric and depraved age. We see the kidnappings in Iraq today, but we recall the kidnappings of African-Americans in 1960s America. We see the beheadings of innocents today, but we recall the hangings and lynching of innocents yesterday. We think of the bombs on the London transport system, but we remember the Omagh bombing as well. We lament the bombing of a mosque in Pakistan, but we remember the Oklahoma bombing a decade ago. We see Churches destroyed in Indonesia, but we recall the mosques demolished in Bosnia ten years earlier. If we are honest, we see the depravity everywhere: if we remember, if we think deeply. All we can say is that we live in a barbaric and depraved age.
Yet we remember that we are not all killing each other, we are not all involved and we do not all have blood on our hands. There is light and love in the world. Consider the Muslim doctor who will see us when we end up in casualty, the Christian nurse who will tend our scars, the aid workers to those in need or the man who sees to it that his neighbour is well. Despite the depravity, there is still hope. As one of the parables of the Christian gospels tells us, if we remove the plank from our own eyes we might just find that we can see a little clearer.

We live in a world of cliché in which we lazily recycle the words of others. When it is said that Islam was spread by the sword, everyone knows that is a trite expression, but nobody cares: it is a slogan. An Afrocentric collector of pottery who knew I was Muslim once seized on a book I was reading about the earliest followers of Jesus. "Nike-ear, nice-eya," he began, struggling to pronounce probably the most famous council in the history of the Christian church as he eyed my notes in front of me, "Nice-what? I've never heard of it." He went on to tell me that the followers of Jesus did not accept Islam when it came to their lands: "It was spread by the sword," he told me, "Spread by the sword, my friend."

It was not patently clear at the time why he had to make this point, given that my reading material concerned Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah whilst maintaining their Jewish identity and had nothing to do with Islam, but later it seemed quite appropriate. In light of that strange paradox, "that while Jewish Christianity in the Church came to grief, it was preserved in Islam," his intervention seemed to provide a fitting link in my study of the Ebionites who were eventually left behind as Christianity adapted to the influx of gentile converts and who eventually became a distinct group that was rejected as heretical by the emerging church. It prompted me to ponder what became of the all those heretical sects and to reflect on the survival of one of the oldest Christian Churches--the Coptics--whose followers still worship in Muslim lands today.

My Afrocentric companion was not alone in addressing me with words about violence, however. A Jewish friend, on discovering that I was Muslim during my postgraduate studies, exclaimed: "But you have the whole Jihad thing." I considered it strange that a person who had carried a machine gun during her own service in the army could address me in this way, but over the years I have grown used to these odd interrogations. A dear relative never tires of condemning Muslim violence in my presence, hoping that I will reflect and see the error of my ways. My detractors argue that Islam should be considered untrue because of the intolerance and violence exhibited in many parts of the Muslim world today. For my well-meant Christian relative, history must prove rather problematic in this regard. While it may be possible to claim that contemporary Christians are model citizens--living under the protection of a secular state that controls the eighth most powerful army in the world--many examples of Christian power are hardly flattering. If my faith should be lambasted on the basis of intolerance in some societies today, should Christianity then be held as untrue because of its intolerance in centuries past? Although it is legitimate to argue that aberrations such as Hitler were not Christians--he defined himself this way, but mad man is preferred--it is rather difficult to take this line in relation to Bishops and Popes. In 1454CE, for example, Pope Nicholas V gave Alfonso V of Portugal the right to:

invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wherever they live, along with their kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, lordships and goods, both chattels and real estate, that they hold and possess ... to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery and to take for himself and his heirs their kingdoms

In truth, we need not delve back into the distant past nor far from home to witness stark examples of Christian violence or appeasement of violence. Prominent ministers of the Serbian Orthodox Church were complicit in the former during the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian war, while members of the Church of England are tainted with the latter. Although the war was portrayed at the time as an ethnic conflict--but for the spectre of Islamic extremism famously invoked by the Conservative government as its reason for non-intervention--historians now recognise the role that religion played in this shameful episode of recent European history. The massacre of an estimated eight-thousand Muslim in men in Srebrenica in July 1995 is only the most famous case amidst a horrific list of abuse. While as much as half of the cultural-religious heritage of six-centuries was destroyed over a period of three years, imams and Muslim scholars were imprisoned and killed. Imam Mustafa Mujkanovic, for example, was tortured in front of thousands of Muslim women and children in Bratunac stadium and ordered to make the sign of the cross on himself by his Serbian guards, before having beer poured into has mouth and his throat slit. In 2003 Agence France-Press reported that the Serbian Orthodox bishop, Bishop Filaret, "appeared in front of TV cameras with a skull in one hand and a machine-gun in the other during the 1992-95 war." Michael Sells writes:

The violence in Bosnia was a religious genocide in several senses: the people destroyed were chosen on the basis of their religious identity; those carrying out the killings acted with the blessing and support of Christian church leaders; the violence was grounded in a religious mythology that characterized the targeted people as race traitors and the extermination of them as a sacred act.

When the Greek Orthodox synod awarded Radovan Karadzic the Order of St Denys of Xante--its highest honour--in the midst of the ethnic cleansing, the evangelical Anglican Bishop of Barking, Roger Sainsbury, was a lone voice in the Church of England in offering condemnation, even as the Greek bishops described Karadzic as "one of the most prominent sons of our Lord Jesus Christ." For the Church of England, the spirit of ecumenism carried greater import than human life, as it sought to maintain positive relations with Orthodox members of the World Council of Churches. The Catholic theologian, Professor Adrian Hastings, wrote in The Guardian at the time:

Reflecting on the response of the churches in Britain and within the Ecumenical Movement to Bosnia once more, I remain appalled by how little they have done at the level of their leadership to recognise without ambiguity what has been happening, to condemn what is evil and above all to offer any significant support to a European nation oppressed in a way unprecedented since 1945. Again and again, church leaders in this country have been urged to visit Sarajevo, to show some really significant degree of human and religious solidarity with the Muslim community of Bosnia in its ordeal. They have entirely failed to do so.

Elsewhere he wrote:

What have the churches done to speak out in defence of Bosnia, of its peace-loving Muslim community and against a revival of the most virulent racism? There appears to have been a most striking silence from all the principal church leaders in Britain. It will go down in history. We pour out our tears at the Holocaust but close our eyes to the Holocaust happening now. "Only he who shouts for the Jews may sing the Gregorian chant", declared Bonhoeffer fifty years ago. Only he who shouts for the Bosnian Muslims is entitled to do so today.

What can be said of Archbishop George Carey--who only a few years later demanded that Pakistani Muslims exhibit the tolerance of the Christians--given his refusal to meet his counterpart in the Bosnian Muslim hierarchy during the war? He has made much of his role in inter-faith dialogue since his retirement, but was silent at the hour of greatest need. Likewise he has made much of the Muslim predicament in light of the terrorist acts on 11 September 2001, but prefers to forget the greater crime of Srebrenica in 1995 and his own Church's appeasement along the road that led there. In truth, Christian involvement in violence is as shameful as the Muslim's.

Should we expect Christians to abandon their faith because of the violence and intolerance exhibited in the past and in other parts of the world today? Should proud atheists abandon their position based on the behaviour of communist regimes? Are they useful criteria for determining the truth? I did not adopt Islam on a whim of fashion or for social convenience, thus questions like "What about the terrible way Muslims behave?" prove irrelevant. What is important is what a religion itself teaches in relation to these matters and so Muslims are fortunate to find that the orthodox position is clear. Muslims soldiers, for example, are expected to observe strict codes of conduct and sophisticated rules of engagement in war, defined from within the faith, not without. Islam does not recognise the concept of total war--in which innocent civilians may be killed and their property destroyed--but only allows warfare if it is a means of limiting greater harm. "And fight for the sake of God those who fight you,"says the Qur'an, addressing those in authority, "but do not commit excesses, for God does not love those who exceed (the Law)." Peace is preferred to war, however: "Now if they incline toward peace, then incline to it, and place your trust in God." Scholars of Islam have always held that a Qur'anic verse that ordered the Muslims to fight the idolaters referred to a specific historical episode in which the Meccan Confederates had breached the Treaty of Hudaybiyya and that no legal rulings could be derived from the verse on its own. Even if this were not the case, they state that its interpretation would still be dependent on other indicators, in which case it could only refer to a situation during a valid war when there is no ceasefire.

A famous hadith records that "The best Jihad is a true word in the face of a tyrannical ruler." Islamic Law states that a Muslim soldier may not kill any women or child-soldiers unless they are in direct combat and then only in self-defence, and all other non-combatants are included in this prohibition. There is no legal justification for circumventing this convention in Islamic Law and any such action is defined both as haram and a major sin. Furthermore, the decision and right to declare war does not lie with an individual--even if he is a scholar or a soldier--but only with the executive authority of the state. Under Islamic Law the ends can never justify the means unless the means are in themselves permissible.

A thought occurred to me one morning whilst listening to the radio in my car: do suicide bombers pray al-Istikarah--the prayer in which we ask that God guides us towards that which is best for us. We had just heard a report from Baghdad which detailed more civilian deaths. When we pray al-Istikarah, truly consigning the matter to God and suspending our own inclinations, Muslims believe that God will make events unfold in the direction that is the best for our worldly and religious affairs. Given that orthodoxy considers suicide bombing haram I imagined the individual intent on this course of action being arrested shortly after praying al-Istikarah, or falling down a hole, oversleeping or dying before ever getting as far as carrying out the act. My blurted-out question pales into insignificance of course, once we read what the orthodox scholars of Islam say about suicide bombing. It is right that we reflect on the fact that the first time this means was used by Muslims was in 1994, when Hamas blew up a public bus in Jerusalem: less that fifteen years ago. Prior to the most recent war against Iraq, the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers were responsible for more such bombings than any other organisation. Amongst those that carried out suicide bombings during the campaign against French, American and Israeli targets in Lebanon in the 1980s were Christians and members of secular leftist groups such as the Communist party. When Hamas adopted this practice in 1994, many jurists of Islamic Law immediately sought to make clear that such actions were indefensible.

Still, I am frequently reminded of violence apparently conducted in the name of Islam. A work colleague recently approached me early one morning and asked me to explain how young people could be persuaded to take their own lives by older people who clearly had no intention of giving up their own. Naturally I could not help him with his enquiry, but still he continued to probe me on the spectre of a group of newly religious men disembarking from a train at London's Kings Cross with rucksacks packed with explosives strapped to their backs. It was not enough for me to disown terrorism and its perpetrators: because I share a faith with group of men who did not return home on 7 July 2005, I must face an inquisition which demands answers to questions I do not understand.

Everybody has their own story to accompany the events of that sunny day in July; I remember my experience well. After the commotion of the morning, I was asked to attend a meeting with my manager in the afternoon during which we intended to discuss the implementation of a national computer system in our GP Practices. I was with my colleagues at first, but then my mind began to wander. I was sitting at the back of that now mangled bus. I was on my way to work, minding my own business, lost in my own world. There was a bag left underneath my seat. I looked to my left and right, I assumed it belonged to one of my fellow passengers, but I did not ask them. Perhaps they were wondering the same thing, but we all kept our minds on our own business, the way we always do. I was not in my meeting now: my colleagues were speaking but I did not hear them. Instead I was in that bus and it suddenly exploded and what was the end for me? I felt sick. I could see those poor souls as their bodies were torn to shreds by a bomb beneath the seat: their last moment gone before they could even see it coming. The shock jolted me back to my meeting. I was supposed to be taking notes, but I had missed the conversation and it had passed me by. Did the people who did this never visualize that moment as I did in my meeting, I wondered? Did they never imagine that when they planted their bombs? Could they have done this if they had? I felt as though I was going to be sick, but I blocked it from my mind: back to our ill-fated computer system. When we left the room at the end of the meeting we were told that our organisation was no longer on standby to receive a mass evacuation of casualties. We had officially been stood down. The crisis was over for us, but I still felt sick.

That evening my wife was stranded in London as public transport ground to a halt and had gone to wait with a friend. I left home at half past eight finding clear roads all the way, from this hilly valley to those towers of concrete. Indoors eyes were glued to television screens and few cars passed me all the way. I arrived at twenty past nine just in time for Maghrib, gliding through the ghost town. I told my friend that I was disgusted by all this--I said that I knew our thoughts should be with the victims, but I could not help praying that the perpetrators were anarchists or something. My friend said they were--but he was using it as an adjective. I wanted it to be the noun. In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful: if only we dwelled on this. Would there then be any of this chaos? In the Name of God, not in my name or yours. If we truly reflected, would men of religion cut down innocents with explosives, thinking their deeds are good?

A week later our organisation decided to collectively observe two minutes' silence, standing in the blazing sun in the car park outside our office. I felt sad and distant from my colleagues at the time, for I would listen as they spoke of this event momentarily, only to find that the happy, jolly mood prevailed as if nothing of significance had happened. That day I hated some of my friends as they stood out in the car park, laughing and joking merrily right up until the clock struck twelve. There were two minutes without words--although all the cars but one continued their journeys onwards--but as soon as the two minutes were up a bunch of fools burst into laughter at the hilarity of their self-centred nonsense. I returned inside in silence, lamenting the hideous hypocrisy. For the past week I had been wandering around in a daze, fearing that the Muslim's time in this country was up, that we had reached the end of the road: the Reichstag had been torched, thus the pogroms would begin. Looking around me, however, I doubted this now for these people were indifferent in extremis. Life in the Big Brother household was the greater concern in my office. Two days after the bombings I had journeyed to a meeting in East London and I found myself remarking to my wife that the residents did not look sad at all. Quite the contrary: it was business as usual with smiles on a thousand faces. Journalists were defining the mood as a nation getting on with life as normal in defiance, but indifference seemed a more accurate description to me. As we stood in the car park at midday on 14 July 2005, we all witnessed the real display of dignity. A Muslim taxi driver had stopped his car just on the roundabout and now stood with his head bowed next to his door in the middle of the road. There he remained for the next two minutes as the traffic worked around him: an island amidst the chaos.

Whilst staying in Turkey barely a month after those three tube trains and a bus were blown up in London, it became apparent that the loss of British life was only considered a tragedy if it was a means of scoring points against Islam. If ever we were unfortunate enough to mention our faith or to walk to the mosque for prayer, our socialist companions would remind us of what had happened that fateful day and who was behind it. I would respond by pointing out that the leftist PKK blew up British citizens only a few days later, but apparently this would not be condemned with the same ferocity--instead they were silent. Much was being made of the bombings in the Turkish press for it suited their agendas like it did our companions--they suffered from selective sympathy and the inability to harbour equal sorrow for all victims of violence.
In making their cheap political jibes they forgot that Britons had experienced thirty years of terrorism at the hands of the IRA and that Londoners were the target of a white supremacist who planted nail bombs in the hope of sparking a race war much more recently. Were the lives of the victims of these attacks worth less because the perpetrators happened not to be Muslim? They also ignored the fact that July marked the sixtieth anniversary of nuclear bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the tenth anniversary of the slaughter of 10,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. Are Muslims peculiar amongst humanity as perpetrators of extreme violence? The answer is no of course; the last century and the beginning of the present one have been marked by extreme violence--wars on massive scales, the development of the most terrifying weapons ever conceived, the extermination of whole peoples, torture and terrorism. If the lives of all innocents killed in this chaotic madness are not considered to be of equal worth regardless of who they are or who killed them, we ourselves begin to slide into complicity. Our horror, sorrow and anger no longer stem from our reaction to the inhumanity of others, but from on whose side we are. I wished that the Turkish chauvinists would reflect on this.

I have never been a good Believer, neither as a Christian before those five years of agnosticism nor as a Muslim ever since. My faith has never been zealous; when I said I did not believe in God from the age of fifteen even my atheism was agnostic. Nevertheless, however simple my faith may be, I do tend to take words seriously. I waver and slip often, sometimes steaming off as if towards oblivion, but those short Semitic sayings always call me back before long.

My literal interpretation of Gospel advice to turn the other cheek meant that I would never stand up for myself if I was picked on at school--it was a revelation for me when a family member asked me why not in my final year of junior school. We were brought up on the good book, attending church and Sunday school throughout childhood. The earliest of those snippet teachings remain with me, so still I censure friends who "take the Lord's name in vain". I suppose it is this simple, literal faith of mine which leaves me so disappointed with the world we live in: we--believers of all faiths--are taught one thing, but then told to do something else according to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I am not under any illusions about the conflicts defining modern-day Britain--the most vocal voices define us as a secular nation, while traditionalists maintain this is a Christian land--but one can still dream that something of our religious heritage might shine through and colour the way we treat one another. Just imagine what public life would be like if it were defined by the citizen's faith rather than a bizarre Machiavellian worldview. How would all this public calling-Muslims-to-account look in the light of words their saviour is said to have uttered?

How can you say to your brother, "Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye, when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye. Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye."

There is no denying that we Muslims are falling far short of our ideals in our personal and political relationships, but it is gross hypocrisy for British politicians and the Press to demand that we get our house in order whilst they themselves are falling short. Who are we? A tiny minority making up 2.7% of the population; a disparate group made up of many ethnicities and following numerous interpretations of Islam. Finding myself reading about Camp Xray, Abu Ghraib and the cost of the war in Iraq--indeed, reflecting on European intervention in the colonised world in general and its lasting legacy--various truths dawned on me. It is in no way reassuring--just very sad indeed--but it is still true to say that we Muslims are not alone in needing to get our house in order. The trouble is all of us seem to have planks in our eyes and none of us can see.