Islam obliges its followers to pray five times a day – every day; does that make Islam a “spiritual religion”? Muslims are required to abstain from food, drink and sex, from dawn to dusk, every day, for an entire month, every year; does that make Islam an “ascetic religion”? Most people, myself included, would answer these questions in the negative, insisting that Islam is simply a religion with spiritual and ascetic elements.

But if Islam sanctions the use of organized violence in response to perceived threats to its integrity, it is deemed “a violent religion” that holds violence to be both an absolute good and the preferred means of propagation. In the present atmosphere, many Muslims will feel pressured not only to refute this erroneous conclusion but to preclude its very possibility, by making what are often desperate and facile counter-claims, such as “Islam is a religion of peace,” by which they mean that any time a Muslim engages in violence s/he is acting contrary to “true Islam.”

The fact is that Islam holds neither violence nor peace to be absolute values. Both are conditioned by geopolitical reality and the Muslim assessment of which is most consistent with a dignified existence. Many in the West have been misled to believe that this “dignified existence” can only obtain when the world is emptied of all non-Muslims. This makes for good fear-mongering and sells lots of books. But we should remind ourselves that at the height of Muslim power -- with no United Nations and no Amnesty International! – Jews thrived in Morocco, Christians in Cairo and even Zoroastrians in Shiraz. Meanwhile, one could not be a Muslim in Paris, London or the Chesapeake Bay before the 19th century!

In the interest of honest communication and meaningful global dialogue, I think that all of us should abandon our hypocritical claims to passivism and honestly lay out the circumstances under which we will sanction violence and those under which we will accept peace. At the very least, this could provide us with an opportunity to recognize our respective contributions to peace and violence in the world, instead of always seeing our violence as noble and justified and our enemy’s violence as gratuitous and barbaric.

Of course, many will see this as a veiled indictment of American action in the world. In point of fact, however, I see Muslims as being just as guilty of high-handed arrogance and blatant disregard for both the sanctity of human life and the teachings of the religion they profess. I am actually writing this missive from the gulf state of Qatar, where I have spoken with numerous Muslims who bemoan what they describe as a frightening and deep-seated sickness that seems to have gripped a segment of the Muslim population. They recognize the horrific political, social and economic conditions under which this segment lives. But they do not condone their wanton, publicly directed violence and terror; and they do not recognize it as part of their religion.

In fact, just a few days ago, the top cleric in Qatar, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, gave a sermon at the Friday Congregational Prayer in which he condemned the recent bombings in Morocco as “brutal crimes and un-Islamic acts.” He went on to say, “I would like to ask those suicide bombers to show me a single ruling from the Holy Qur’an or the Prophet’s tradition which condones such violent acts… It is very strange that they kill innocent people and then describe themselves as jihadists. They make themselves into a deity who grants life and takes it away. It seems that these people see humans as flies and mosquitoes.”

And yet violence -- senseless, gratuitous, mean-spirited violence -- continues to haunt us, in the East and in the West. Perhaps it is time we expand our investigation beyond Islam and ask if there is something about Modernity that pushes so many of us to seek redemption in publicly directed violence.

And God knows best.

P.S. Interested parties might want to consult a couple of scholarly articles of mine, “Domestic Terrorism in the Islamic Legal Tradition” and “Jihad and the Modern World,” both of which are available on-line if you just google my name and scroll down a page or two.