We have failed to teach true message

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What motivates young British Muslims to go and fight for the Taliban? Who is responsible for their willingness to die in a foreign land? Four have already been killed. If we are to believe the fanatical cult Al-Muhajiroun, which has been recruiting in Luton and Crawley, scores more are ready to lay down their life for "al Islam".

Al-Muhajiroun's creed is based explicitly on hatred and violence - in line with every stripe of fascism the world has ever produced. It calls for total opposition not only to Christians, Jews, Hindus, secularists and the West, but also to any Muslim who interprets Islam differently. As we read on the T-shirt of Yasir Khan, the young man from Crawley killed in Kabul, he accepted the doctrine of Al-Muhajiroun that "al Islam" is "the final revelation", "the final message", "the final system " and "the final conquest".

In its self-righteousness and utter intolerance, this doctrine reflects that of plenty of other fanatics of our time, from the Simbionese Liberation Army to the Minutemen, Bader Meinhof and the Red Brigade, the Provisional IRA, ETA and now al Qaeda. Al-Muhajiroun, and its sister organisation Hizb-e-Tahrir, are the Muslim Bader Meinhof of Britain. They share a common seductive thread of simple certainties, a wildly simplistic view of the world that generates its own amorality.

Impressionable young men of many faiths, who embrace the notion of victimhood, often look at the world's injustices and say "something must be done". They look at injustice done to others, the abundant ranks of the poor and wretched. They allow themselves to be persuaded that the answer is to inflict their own injustices on others in retaliation. In their uncompassionate compassion, they take up their cause on behalf of and in the name of God, the oppressed, the working classes, or whomever.

So we should not be surprised that these young Muslim fanatics see the West's "war against terrorism" as a war against Islam. If you believe that the world is divided only into "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of infidels", there is little room for argument. The rest of the world is against you by definition. Relative ethics and morality are irrelevant. The forces gathering under the bombing in Afghanistan are confident that they are engaged in a war with the West, and that the West is pursuing a campaign against Islam. Disgruntled Muslim youth, strong on emotion and gut reaction, eager to "serve Islam", is handed a ready-made cause.

I challenge anyone of my generation who ever pinned a poster of Che Guevara on his bedroom wall to deny the resonance of this impulse. It is the lure of a simple view about responsibility for all injustice, corruption and disparities of power and wealth. We, the majority of mature, peaceful democrats, think we have learnt that such utopian idealism is not quite so straightforward. But we should not deny its seductiveness.

But - and the "but" is important - the young Muslims whose simple puritanism leads them to take up arms on behalf of the Taliban are not alone. It is not only the fanatics and madmen who goad them to their deaths. There are many siren voices, comfortable Muslim armchair warriors of all kinds.

In Western society, prejudice and ignorant distortion aimed at Islam abounds. Young Muslims' dissatisfaction is fuelled by racism, social exclusion and marginalisation, little-Englander jingoism that fulminates against immigrants and asylum seekers. Politicians such as William Hague incite anti-Muslim sentiment.

And the moderate Muslim community must bear its own share of responsibility. We tell our children that Islam stands for peace and submission. But what are we teaching them, in Muslim Sunday schools across the land? An absurd list of do's and don'ts, most of which make little sense in contemporary Britain.

Our kids learn to memorise the Koran parrot-fashion, without any appreciation of its message or spirit. We teach the story of Prophet Muhammad as though this had been a lifelong military campaign. In reality, the Prophet spent less than a week at war, and 23 years seeking to build a community dedicated to justice, tolerance and moral endeavour for human betterment. The Islam we teach our kids is stripped to pious bare bones, denied its cultural elegance. It is reduced to a strident, militant call to remake the whole world in simple faith and total opposition to everyone who resists this impossible vision.

Those who seek to take up arms against the West are guilty and culpable, deluded, misguided and wrong. But a crescendo of impotent Muslim fury speeds these lads on their way to the front. All Muslims, by acquiescing in emotive rhetoric, in some degree share responsibility for raising young men who would rather kill and die than live with the real world with all its moral doubts and uncertainties, its intractable constraints. We share blame, because we fail our young people by not offering them a better way.

Most moderate Muslims share with the militants a dream of a utopian "Islamic state" where all wrongs are corrected by divine providence. Instead, we should be teaching our young that flawed humanity must do its best by its own imperfect efforts, peacefully to achieve some approximation of what is right and just. In that task, the contemporary "Islamic states" present us with salutary cautionary tales.

In autocratic Saudi Arabia and theocratic Iran, there is no distinction between state and religion. Apostasy and treachery are one. In Iran or Afghanistan, both earn death by judicial execution. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, threatens legal action against those who fight for the Taliban, then seek to return to Britain. By their own reductive notions of Islam, a far worse fate awaits them if they survive US bombing.

? Ziauddin Sardar's Introducing Islam is published by Icon Books, £9.99.