The Palestinians are fighting for a homeland. The Iraqis are fighting against the U.S. occupation. The United States is fighting against terrorism. These are political issues fanned out of religious proportions. There is no holy war. The valiant forces of a new faith are not marching on the old world. Instead, people are fighting for worldly reasons, religion supplementing their rallying cry for political freedom.

The winding road of history has run through turns and twists of religious tensions. There have been deadly battles, destructive wars and ruthless carnage as the mental space of the faithful contended for equal space in the physical world. History is characterised with conflicts between Mamluks and Mongols, between Buddhists and Hindus, Hindus and Muslims, amongst the Ottomans, Safavids, Uzbeks and Mughals. But the conflict between the Muslims and the Christians goes back a long way, 1300 years.

The first wave came, when the Arabs and the Moors marched west and north ending at Tours in 732. It revived between 11th and 13th centuries when the Crusaders attempted to bring Christian rule to the Holy Land. The Ottoman Turks reversed the balance again in the 14th century, extending sway over the Middle East and the Balkans until the 17th century, capturing Constantinople, and twice laying siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ottoman power declined. Britain, France, and Italy established control over most of North Africa and the Middle East.

But if religion created divisions, politics often created unions. Suleyman the Magnificent co-operated with the French against the Habsburgs in the 1530s. When the Portuguese were driven from Hormuz, Abbas I benefited from English co-operation. As imperialists, both the British, in India and Nigeria, and the Russians, in Central Asia, co-operated with some Muslim rulers and interests at the same time as they fought others.

A civilization is political gloss over religious fault lines, and political tolerance fades away quickly in the face of religious excess. The bow of patience has broken even in the cradle of freedom and tolerance. Polls conducted in the US suggest that while 38 per cent Americans hold very negative views about Islam and Muslims, only 2 per cent have anything nice to say about them and over 44 per cent of Americans are willing to deprive Muslims of freedoms and rights available to other Americans.

Samuel Huntington writes in The Clash of Civilizations, "A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim." Young men, who were born and brought up in UK, blew up themselves in London last July to prove his point. Huntington further says that the conflict of civilizations happens at two levels. One is the differences in power; hence struggle at military, economic and institutional level. Another is the differences in culture, that is, basic values and beliefs, between people, nations and other elements.

Islam and the West are clashing at both levels. The cultural tensions escalated to a military showdown on 9/11, which led the Westerners to believe that terrorism is rooted in Muslim extremism, and therefore, an attack on terrorism is same thing as an attack on Islam. Although counting by the number of deaths and devastations, the Muslim militancy has not surpassed the havoc of U.S. diplomacy--the assassinations, political upheavals, genocides, starvation and dislocations of life wrought upon nations of the third world in the name of democracy and freedom.

The bad news is that this is where things are coming to a head. The militant Islam is a concern for the West, and the West is hurting the Muslims shoving its version of democracy down their throat. Democracy is a political solution for secular minds. It can't work in an environment heavily charged with religious sentiments.

The West created that environment when it pushed a fairly political crisis into religious contention. If a bunch of Muslim men went down with the Twin Towers it wasn't fault of Islam as much as the Mai Lai massacre or the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't fault of Christianity. Political crisis, rightly or wrongly, often culminate in military actions, because it is a struggle of faith in power at all cost.

Whereas religious crisis is a struggle of power in faith and for the Muslims around the world that struggle is obvious in the Western criticism of Islam. But there is growing discontent even within the Islamic ranks whether time has come for moderation in their leap of faith. "The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities", Salman Rushdie wrote in The Washington Post on 07 August 2005. Arguing that the Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, he asked, "Why would the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?"

Many Muslims are not comfortable with suicide bombings. When a young mother of two blew herself up at the Israeli checkpoint, Dr. Hasan May al-Nurani, a prominent Palestinian who was also a candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, demanded an apology from Hamas because the true place for jihad for that woman was to raise her two children, one of whom still needed her milk. Ziyad Abu al-Hija, a Palestinian intellectual, decried it in even stronger terms.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Shanqiti, an Islamic scholar, went on record to distance themselves from those who attack innocents, because one of the rules of conduct of jihad is not to kill women, children, old men and monks in their monasteries. Sheikh Yusif al-Qaradawi looks at this subject from a different angle. In his book Islamic Awakening between Rejection and Extremism, he quotes a hadith: "When two Muslims draw weapons against each other, they are at the brink of hell. If one of them kills the other, they both enter it together."

Power and faith. Each has its kingdom, one in politics and another in religion. It is dangerous to fight over politics with religious sentiments and fight over religion with political instincts. To keep them separate, the Christian West underwent reformation in the Middle Ages. The power of church was diminished to transform the relationship between man and God.

A devout man can't be bifurcated in his faith and freedom, because he finds his freedom only in his faith. The Western democracy takes care of freedom, but ignores the faith. On the other hand, religious extremism takes care of faith but ignores freedom.

Two weeks ago 500 bomb blasts rocked the country within an hour, and it was shocking to find that devout Muslims might have orchestrated that terror. We don't know what was on their minds. But they are extreme men, hell-bent to bring us the Kingdom of Heaven.

It is difficult to identify them with either faith or freedom, whereas Islam is both.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.