Muslims have just as much to fear from militant Islam

The veins of living humans show a blue tinge, characteristic of de-oxygenated blood coursing towards the heart. In life, all humans spill red blood and a lot is made out of this in literature. A lot less is made out of the fact that, when incinerated, all human beings turn into a grey-white ash, indistinguishable from that of incinerated buildings. That ash covered the pavements and the gardens - so carefully cultivated by the wife of the dead British Consul-General - around the British diplomatic mission in Istanbul last Thursday.

The single most important lesson to be learnt from the events in Turkey is the obvious one, and it is a lesson for Muslims. Namely, that they have as much to fear from militant Islam and its Islamist dictators and strongmen as does the West - if not more. Whether it is the depredations of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the murderous militants in Algeria, it is clear that the greatest enemy Muslim societies have are the extremists in their midst: Ba'athists, fundamentalists and the so-called "political Islamists". This is a battle for the soul of Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be fruit on the tree of hate, but it is not its trunk, nor its branches nor that "root" so often invoked.

I think it was the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis who first had the notion, but Daniel Pipes coined the sentence: "If the problem is militant Islam, the solution is moderate Islam." This plain insight is a lesson often pointed out, but so far not learnt. Even if the West does learn it, that alone would not prevent what happened in Istanbul. It is Muslim societies that have to learn and genuinely understand that virtually all the suffering they have endured over the past 30 years has come from the home-grown extremists within. Western societies can only protect themselves against militant Islam. They cannot provide a remedy for it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the poverty of Africa and the scourge of Aids are not the reasons for the bombings in Bali or the blowing up of churches by militant Islamists in Pakistan. The sufferings of the Middle East and Africa are not a flea in the ear of militant Islam.

Militant Islam has a number of strands, but it has a straightforward ideology. First, to turn all Muslim societies into Islamic theocracies and then to conquer the world. Blatantly wanting to conquer the world has been out of fashion for a while - unless you count the attempt of Karl Marx's followers to put the proletariat (in reality, the party's cadres) in charge of it. But for the Islamists, world domination is a perfectly real goal.

The notion that the ills of the Muslim world can be cured and the glory, dominance and power of the early Muslim caliphates can be recaptured by returning to Sharia law and some real or imagined past, puts the fundamentalists squarely up against Muslim reformists wanting to go forward. No doubt the reformists are the majority of Muslims in the West, but they seem intimidated or curiously passive.

The Muslim organisations in Britain are an example of this. Of the two main umbrella organisations, it is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) that is viewed as the home of moderate leadership. The MCB hosted a party attended by the Prime Minister and Cherie Blair, at which Cherie famously wore her "shalwar kameez". The British Board of Deputies, made up of Jewish leaders, chose the MCB as an ecumenical partner. And on September 29, 2001, the MCB "convened a special meeting of imams [leaders] and ulama [scholars] … to discuss the events of September 11 in the United States of America and their aftermath".

After the meeting, the MCB issued a statement deploring the attacks of September 11. This was widely greeted as a demonstration of domestic Muslim moderation. That statement bears reading. In fact, it condemns September 11 and the bombing of al-Qa'eda and the Taliban in Afghanistan equally and in the same terms - which translates into no condemnation of September 11 at all.

Essentially, the statement was an example of the verbal gymnastics of people trying to reconcile their emotional support of militant Islam with their own standing as respectable moderates.

Ultimately, the MCB is as ideological as the Muslim Association of Britain, which gets its inspiration from the radical Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Association of Britain co-sponsors the "Stop the War" marches and equates George W. Bush with Saddam Hussein. One never knows how representative these sorts of organisations are and I would hazard a totally unscientific guess that their extreme views represent less than 20 per cent of British Muslims, if that. But small comfort. I know of no recognised Muslim leader or Muslim organisation in Britain speaking out publicly on behalf of Western democracies or the war on terror - or, as importantly, against militant Islam in all its manifestations. Any statement has to be hedged with moral equivalence.

Perhaps the MCB means well and simply lacks courage or intelligence, or perhaps it has been hijacked. But no matter. Without any organised opposition to these views by moderate Muslims, the danger is apparent. A radical minority can take over a country or a faith. Minorities were more than sufficient to turn entire societies into Communist or Nazi tyrannies. The last free elections in eastern Europe after the war gave the communist party only between 10 and 20 per cent of the vote. Hitler took power with the support of one out of three Germans.

In Britain we have our own problems. We have created all sorts of human rights laws and regulators, busy making sure that racial jokes are prohibited and that people who use unpleasant adjectives that "poison" the workplace are hauled up before tribunals. But we seem unable to jail or deport people who incite terrorism - or who incite British people to disregard existing British laws when they conflict with Islamic law.

Compromising justice for even the best purpose is a route to be avoided, but if the laws to rid ourselves of radical Islamists such as Sheikh Bakri Muhammad or Abu Hamza are insufficient, surely we could amend them or promulgate new ones without compromising anything?

Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane was roundly censured last week by Muslim organisations when he told them to choose between the "British way" of political dialogue and Islamic terrorism. Some of that outrage, I suppose, comes from those who have a legitimate fear that, if you keep invoking a peril, such as the clash of civilisations, you will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But there is a parallel fallacy and it is that of closing one's eyes to the devil that has already been invoked. The question can be legitimately asked: how many British consuls need to be blown up in Turkey before Britain decides to stop appeasing the devil on its own doorstep?