WORLD VIEW: In the eight months since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, attitudes in the West to the Islamic world appear to have hardened.
Earlier this week, Islamic religious affairs ministers stressed the need for the world to dispel notions of a link between Muslims and terrorism after the events of September 11th. However, the notion that Islam and terrorism are inextricably linked in some ideological bind continues in the West.
The prevalence of this view may have prompted many observers who normally are firm defenders of human rights to remain silent in the face of Israeli action in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And it has fuelled the rise and the rhetoric of the far-right in Europe.
Before his murder this week, Pim Fortuyn had set the tone for the election campaign in the Netherlands with his strident attacks on the country's Muslims, and his description of Islam as a "backward" culture.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen argued September 11th vindicated his belief that Islam and immigration pose a danger for western civilisation. He claimed: "Islam is characterised by ethics which . . . are not compatible with our civilisation, our concept of mankind, our legal traditions."
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, bookshops reported a rush on books on Islam and the Islamic world. Yet, in the months that followed, it appears Western ignorance of Islamic beliefs, practices and culture has increased and been hardened.
Although fighting against the Taliban and the last al-Qaeda Arabs continues in pockets in eastern Afghanistan, the French scholar Gilles Kepel, in his recent book, Jihad: The Trial of Political Islam, notes a popular confidence in the West that "the world \ witnessed . . . the rise and fall of the most extreme version of Islamism".
A popular coupling of Islam and extremism has allowed President Bush to take a hard line against Iran, branding it a source of terror and evil.
It is a tough policy against a country that has a reforming and democratically elected president, and a stance that cannot help President Khatami in his battle with the conservative clergy for a more open society.
Who remembers today that even the clergy in Iran were among the most vocal critics of the Taliban and its interpretation of Islam while western countries continued to refuse entry to refugees from Afghanistan?
Islam can only continue to be used as a political tool in the West so long as it remains linked in popular western imagery with terrorism, and so long as it is seem as an unassailable, unitary and monolithic system.
Mahmoud Zahar, a spokesman for Hamas, attempted to justify the latest suicide bombing in Israel when he told an interviewer: "Our Islamic scholars are describing [the attack] as the highest degree of martyrdom." But in Kuala Lumpur, the Islamic ministers were at pains to emphasise that Islam does not tolerate terrorism or extremism.
"If these acts are carried out by Muslims, they will have to bear the sins of their actions, and they should not link the actions to religion," they said.
Indeed, Muslim scholars themselves are often the victims of terror. Earlier this week in Pakistan, a noted Islamic scholar, Ghulam Murtaza Malik, was shot dead in Lahore in the latest round of violence between rival Sunni and Shia groups. There is no one Islamic "world view". Nor is Islamic society a unitary, monolithic system. The differences between Shia and Sunni Islam are many and nuanced.
In a recent paper, Robert Gleave, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Bristol, points out that those differences include how the two communities understand and accept textual variations in the Quran.
Coupling the Taliban and the current wave of terror in Chechnya and Dagestan with the Iranian revolution shows a failure to understand the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam.
Shia Islam, particularly in Iran, has always had the potential for openness, tolerance and pluralism.
On the other hand, the Wahabi school of Islam, which has spawned the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the terrorists in Dagestan and Chechnya, has its roots in a dour and deeply conservative theology that continues to dominate Saudi thinking and continues to be propagated with official support from Saudi Arabia. But so long as economic priorities continue to prevent the West, and the US in particular, from criticising the Saudi system and demanding reforms, there is a potent threat of new groups arising and replicating the ideology of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Perhaps September 11th was the excuse many in the West needed to confirm their prejudices against the Islamic world. Those prejudices had been fuelled earlier by the Iranian revolution, the controversy over the Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. But western prejudice against Islam has a long history that even predates the Crusades.
It is still difficult to counter views that first appeared in mediaeval propaganda, associating Islam with idolatry and sexual perversions. Surviving prejudices ignore the Islamic contribution to Western culture, art, architecture, philosophy and science. But there is also been a long and honourable, if less-noticed, tradition in the West of trying to understand appreciate Islam.
In the aftermath of the Crusades, one of the early pioneers of Muslim-Christian dialogue was the Dundalk-born theologian Richard Fitz-Ralph, Archbishop of Armagh (1346-1360).
His study of the Quran was marked by scholarly care and scrupulous attention to the text, and he formed an idea of the Islamic Christ as "a pure and blessed one" - a concept that must compel Christians to accept Muslims as partners in dialogue rather than enemies in the world. And only dialogue can end the image of Islam as natural enemy of the West.
As Seamus Heaney addressed the Irish-Hellenic Society this week, I was reminded of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and his Waiting for the Barbarians.
The political leaders gather in the square each day, dressed in their finery, but refusing to do anything about their own city or to speak out "because the barbarians are coming". But when night falls, some arrive from the frontiers and explain that the barbarians have not come because there are no barbarians any more. The politicians wonder: "What will become of us now without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution."
An imagined external enemy provides excuses for not wrestling with real social and political problems. On the other hand, real dialogue with the Islamic world is the only way of removing prejudice and fears of an imaginary threat.