ON Sept 17, 2001, George Bush paid a visit to the Islamic Centre of Washington. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” declared the US president. “Islam is peace.” Muslims might have been its biggest victims, but the war on terror wasn’t conceived as a war on Islam.

In recent years, however, a growing number of right-wing ideologues have exploited the terror threat to push the argument that Islam is as at war with the West. Backed by well-funded think tanks, these individuals are no longer ‘fringe’ voices.

Take Patrick Sookhdeo, a Christian pastor who reinvented himself as a terrorism expert after 9/11. He is quoted approvingly four times in the 1,500-page “manifesto” of the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik. Why? Sookhdeo has dismissed the “myth of moderate Islam”, says Islam is a “religion and political ideology that puts our British way of life in grave danger” and believes “everything about the West is inimical to Islam”.

The ravings of a crank? In fact, Sookhdeo’s book, Global Jihad, is on a recommended reading list for the UK Defence Academy’s higher command and staff course 2011. The pastor himself has been used by the MoD to give “higher level training” to British military commanders preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Then there is Robert Spencer, the co-founder ofthe EDL (English Defence League)-linked organisation Stop the Islamicisation of America which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda”. Breivik’s manifesto cited Spencer 64 times. Yet the latter has been invited to advise the FBI on counter-terrorism and his book, The Truth About Muhammad, has featured on the FBI’s reading list for new recruits.

The real question is why have the US and UK governments given such influence to preachers of hate and division? Western Muslims have been seen exclusively through the prism of counter-terrorism. Sensitive issues of integration and community cohesion have become entangled in the securitised discourse of the war on terror.

In the UK, the effect has been a chilling of speech inside Muslim communities. I have lost count of the number of British Muslim students, activists and imams who have told me of their fear of being labelled as extremists or terrorists if they dare take an unconventional, unorthodox or radical position on a political or religious issue.

It is ironic, if depressing, that a doubling of the number of Muslim MPs and the appointment of a Muslim woman to the cabinet has been matched by a narrowing of the range of opinions and views expressed by ordinary British Muslims in public.

For example, many Muslims have melted away from the antiwar movement. — The Guardian, London