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This takes us into murky waters indeed. You can try to make a case that the particular origins of Islam, as a persecuted faith led by a warrior prophet, might predispose it to a certain militancy, or that certain passages of the Koran seem to endorse the use of violence against unbelievers and apostates, but you very soon run up against the reality that the practice of Islam, the tenets of the faith, its demands upon its followers and its place in society, differs markedly from country to country, if not from mosque to mosque. Certainly a belief in the legitimacy of violence as an aid to proselytizing would not apply to more than a tiny minority of Muslims in this country.

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Given this diversity, it is simply not possible to state with finality what “Islam is…” or “Islam means…,” certainly not on such a vexed question as whether the religion itself has something to do with the willingness of some of its followers to commit mass murder on its behalf. Much of what are commonly described as Islamic teachings, by followers and critics alike, turns out to be more related to the particular culture of a given locale, and while there is undoubtedly some causal interchange between religion and culture, it is exceedingly difficult to sort out which is the chicken and which the egg.

But then, we do not need to. It is not necessary to know whether there is “something about Islam” that explains Islamist terrorism. All we really need to know, as a practical matter, is that the terrorists themselves believe there is: that they are commanded by their faith to take up arms in its defence. Of this there can be no doubt: they have said so, on a hundred different occasions, and we would be wise to take them at their word. They wish to establish a caliphate, an Islamic dictatorship based on seventh-century legal principles, and while that is usually confined to a relatively circumscribed area stretching from Spain to Western Russia, in their more ambitious pronouncements it extends to the whole world.