But the methods they use -- suicide bombings, mass killings, executions and hijacking -- draw immediate attention. And since they do so in the name of Islam, what they do also makes their faith look bad.

Muslim and Western scholars of Islam, however, warn that it would be a mistake to equate Islam with violence.

"Political disputes and not religion, beget violence," says John Esposito, a widely respected American professor and author on the Islamic world, known for his moderate views on Islam.

"If you had Palestines and Northern Irelands in other places, you would have violence in those places as well," said Esposito, who now teaches at Georgetown University in Washington.

But what ordinary people across the world see -- from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States to the July 7, 2005, London bombings to violent clashes at Islamabad's Red Mosque last month -- influences their opinion about Islam.

And obviously, it is not the peaceful, Sufi version of Islam that these violent groups present.

While Esposito's argument that political disputes and not religion beget violence is correct, the inability of political Islam to provide an intellectual base for Muslims allows these violent groups to occupy the central stage in the Islamic world.

The lack of an intellectual base has created a vacuum in the Islamic world that extremists like the Taliban and al-Qaida try to fill.

But it is also true that almost all those groups that use violence as a weapon were born in the areas where Muslims are engaged in violent political struggles. None of them has a coherent ideological base, though they often recruit volunteers from organizations set up by Islamic thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

No event made a greater contribution to the creation of terrorist groups than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which soon became a war between two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The United States and its Western and Muslim allies took immediate steps to counter the Soviets.

As the war in Afghanistan grew in intensity and the Soviet occupation forces made it obvious they had come to stay, Washington and its allies began to search for an ideology to counter the communism that the Soviets had brought with them to Afghanistan. They did not have to look far. Political Islam was the ideology they needed, and madrassas provided them with thousands of volunteers willing to die for their faith.

Most madrassas are not great centers of learning. They provide rudimentary knowledge of Islam to mainly rural youths who have nowhere else to go.

Most madrassa students, when they graduate, cannot compete in the job market with students from secular schools. So they work as teachers of the Koran and other Islamic books, making meager incomes.

When U.S.-backed recruiters arrived at their doors to take them to Afghanistan, they found these youths keen to join a jihad that not only gave them the opportunity to fight "Godless Russians," as they were told by their recruiters, but also gave them a steady income.

The war in Afghanistan also changed the mullahs' status in countries like Pakistan, where they were never part of the ruling elite. But the Afghan war suddenly brought a lot of funds from the backers of the jihad in Saudi Arabia and the United States.

A good example of how the money pumped into Pakistan for the war altered the country's social fabric is that of the priests of the Red Mosque.

Before the war, the entire family -- parents, two brothers and two sisters -- lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house near the mosque. The father, Maulana Abdullah, had one bicycle, and his sons, Ghazi Abdur Rashid and Abdul Aziz, did not even have enough warm clothes to protect them from Islamabad's cold winter.

Soon after the war, when the Red Mosque priests joined the efforts to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, they had a four-wheel drive vehicle, a big house and armed bodyguards.

After the war, the Americans pulled out of the region so rapidly it created a vacuum. The Pakistani government did not have the resources to disarm thousands of battle-hardened extremists brought not only from the madrassas but from all over the Islamic world to join the jihad.

The mullahs obviously were unwilling to revert to their previous social status, living once again in relative poverty. This created a new conflict by pitching the mullah against the traditional, English-speaking elite unwilling to treat the mullah as an equal.

What happened at the Red Mosque last month -- a major military operation in which hundreds of madrassa students are believed to have died -- was a logical consequence of this larger conflict between two social classes.

Pakistani troops did succeed in destroying the radical madrassa attached to the Red Mosque, but the conflict is far from over.

Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for the 2008 presidential elections, rightly summarized the situation: "Pakistan is on a knife's edge," she said. "It is easily, unfortunately, a target for the jihadists. And, therefore, you've got to be very careful about what it is you say with respect to Pakistan."

This problem cannot be resolved by military means alone. There's an immediate need for providing secular education and job opportunities to the rural unemployed, who often go to these madrassas because they have nowhere else to go.

The United States has committed $750 million for creating job opportunities in the tribal belt separating Pakistan and Afghanistan. While this is a step in the right direction, the problem requires a long-term political and economic commitment of both the Pakistani government and its backers. And so far, it is not forthcoming.

But more than anything else, the Muslim societies need to develop an intellectual base to counter extremism, and that does not seem to be happening.

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