The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 served as a wake-up call for moderate Muslims, Asani says. The attacks encouraged those with "more progressive and pluralistic interpretations of Islam" to challenge those leaders whose "exclusive interpretations of Koranic verses are promoting this 'clash of civilizations' perspective." Unfortunately, Asani says, "all those dialogues have now been sidelined and those exclusive voices that look at the world in a good vs. evil kind of categorization are actually seeming to get the upper hand now."

But it's clear that the war in Iraq will be used by all sorts of Islamist groups -- and others. In some countries, both Islamist organizations and those who oppose them -- sometimes oppressively -- are using the pending war for political purposes. Last week National Security Service spokeswoman Chinara Asanova of Kyrgyzstan reported that a local extremist organization, the Hizb-ut-Tahrir movement, was calling for jihad should the U.S. attack Iraq. The governments of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which are allied with Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, have been criticized for using the war on terror to justify their various methods of silencing Islamic dissidents.

While some imams said similar things in 1991, Murphy points out that Desert Storm was much simpler to negotiate. "It was so much easier for Bush 41 than it is for Bush 43 to avoid this charge because clearly a Muslim state had aggressed on a fellow Muslim state." The weaker state, Kuwait, asked for help, as did Saudi Arabia, which also felt threatened by Saddam's invasion, so the U.S. could justify its presence. "This president Bush has a much more complicated job," Murphy says, "to get through this minefield of accusations that he's leading an anti-Islamic war."

Ironically, says professor Deeb of Johns Hopkins, in many ways it is the Bush administration's diplomatic stumbling that has made these calls for jihad, in his view, "not very strongly voiced."

Because so much of Europe opposes this military campaign, as does the Vatican and the Anglican Church, many Muslims around the world "don't see the West in terms of all of Christiandom as against them. People know that the vast majority of Europeans -- even the people in Britain, Spain, and Italy -- are against the war, that it doesn't reflect what the people want. And that gives a good message to the Muslims, that not all the West are against them. Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham are against them, but I don't think they mind that."

Anecdotally, there seems to be some truth to Deeb's theory. Habib Rizieq, the Indonesian Islamist who pledged "thousands of new Osama bin Ladens" after the Iraq attack, told a reporter that he was aware of the recent British parliamentarian Robin Cook's resignation from Tony Blair's Cabinet in protest of the pending war, as well as antiwar gatherings in Australia. "Not all [Western] citizens are bad," he said. Thus, before his group goes on a killing spree of Westerners in Jakarta, "we will give them warning for their safety to leave Indonesia immediately."

"I know President Bush will not thank all of them for being against the war, but in a way they did him a service, making it less of a 'civilization war,'" Deeb chuckles.

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