What is the rationalist to do? Atheists, feminists and anti-racists are paralysed by Islam. Whichever way they turn, they find themselves at risk of alliances with undesirables of every nasty hue.

Last month, the website of an organisation called the Islamic Human Rights Commission made me the "winner" of their "Most Islamophobic media personality" award. It has caused me a bombardment of emails of both extreme pro- and anti-Islamic poison, each one more luridly threatening than the last. The occasional note of reason from moderate Islamic groups is so weak it hardly makes itself heard. I had challenged the legitimacy of the idea of Islamophobia and warned of the danger to free speech of trying to make criticism of a religion a crime akin to racism. I pointed out yet again that theocracy is lethal. Wherever religion controls politics it drives out tolerance and basic human rights. The history of Christianity has been the perfect exemplar, a force for repression whenever it holds any political sway. It only turns peace-loving when it is powerless.

People led by some unalterable revealed voice of God cannot be tolerant of the godless. At present it is Islamic states that head the danger list - though the dread power of southern Baptists in US politics endangers world peace, as do extreme Jewish sects holding power in Israel. Women are always the main victims, since extreme religions express their identities through male priestly supremacy and disgust of women.

To give a flavour of the Islamic Human Rights Commission awards, Nick Griffin of the BNP won the most Islamophobic British politician award, Jacques Chirac and Ariel Sharon shared the international Islamophobic politician award and Islamophobe of the year was George Bush. That's the company I found myself in.

When Griffin was interviewed on Newsnight after he was filmed saying disgusting things about Muslims, bizarrely accusing Islam of encouraging the rape of non-Muslim girls, he quoted my name in general support. So these days criticising any aspect of Islam risks landing you down among the worst racists.

Other voices claim you for their cause. There is a particularly virulent swirl of extreme Hindu emails spreading fear and loathing of Muslims. But it's not all one-sided. A dangerous stream of Muslim anti-semitic venom also billows out on to the airways, inciting maximum hatred against Jews and sometimes Christians.

The government wants to make incitement to religious hatred a crime, caving in to a vociferous Muslim campaign, although it is unlikely to make a spit of difference to these rabid religious enmities. (If the government really wants to foster religious harmony, it should abolish all religious schools, not build more.) To reassure outraged rationalists, ministers say that only a couple of people a year are expected to be prosecuted under it. So, why bother? That will inflame the religious even more as they refer case after case, expecting the law to protect their right not to be offended by mockery or criticism. They want religion placed in a realm beyond ordinary argument - and it is beginning to happen.

Fear of offending the religious is gathering ground on all sides. It is getting harder to argue against the hijab and the Koran's edict that a woman's place is one step behind. It is beginning to be racist for teachers or social workers to object to autocratic patriarchy and submission of women within many Muslim communities. Islamic ideas that find the very notion of democracy incompatible with faith are beginning to be taken seriously by those who should defend liberal democracy.

Of course most Muslims are not extremists. They speak of the peacefulness of their faith - as most religious people do. But they still too rarely speak out against terror when they should be combating their own extremists and being seen to do it. Moderate groups protest often against arrests of Muslim terror suspects, while the Muslim Council of Britain has sent out just one tepid call to mosques to cooperate with the police. Moderates excuse, rather than refute, the many ferocious verses calling for the blood of infidels in their holy book, verses that justify terror. Both the Koran and the Bible ought to be banned under the new law, since both are full of God's incitements to smite unbelievers.

It is bizarre how the left has espoused the extreme Islamist cause: as "my enemy's enemy", Muslims are the best America-haters around. The hard left relishes terrorism: a fondness for explosions and the smell of martyrs' blood excites their revolutionary zeal, without sharing a jot of religious belief.

More alarming is the softening of the brain of liberals and progressives. They increasingly find it easier to go with the flow that wants to mollify Muslim sentiment, for fear of joining the anti-immigration thugs who want to drive them from the land.

The liberal dilemma over Islam is not unlike the prevarications of some over communism in the cold war. To attack the atrocities of the reds put you in bed with the anti-socialist Thatcher/Reagan red-baiters. What would George Orwell write about Islam now? He would probably ignore what others said about the company he kept, shrug off those claiming him for their own ends and plough his own furrow, speaking out against both the danger of religious fanaticism and the Muslim-hating racists - the polite ones in Times immigration panic articles or those with steel-toed boots on the streets of northern towns.

There is a coherent non-Islamophobic position and Turkey holds the key. Here is a democratic Islamic society, where the radical secularising reforms of Kemal Ataturk make it a model for states needing to escape a theocratic past. It is progressing fast to meet human rights and economic criteria for joining the EU and should be welcomed with open arms, as a symbolic embrace for moderate secular Islam. Giscard d'Estaing's claim that the EU is "Christendom" was sheer racism, the same deranged clash-of-civilisations thinking that led to the disastrous Iraq war.

Expecting a terrorist attack on Britain soon, this week the Muslim Council of Britain and chief police officers are preparing a booklet for Muslim households, warning them to prepare for a backlash. If these grim events happen, it will be more important than ever to keep a rational perspective on both the Muslim community and its back-lashers. Fellow-travelling with terrorism, either within the Muslim community, or by the left and woolly minded progressives, will not serve.

It will be more important than ever to stand like Voltaire, ready to defend Muslims, their right to be here and to practise their beliefs against the growing swamped-by-aliens talk that Anas Altikriti warned against on these pages last week. But if he wants to stop the right "smearing and demonising" Islam, it would be wise to be more outspoken against its deformed branch that fosters terror. Muslims must also accept the right of others to criticise religions without smearing any critic as a racist.

polly.toynbee@theguardian.com