THE Western world has expended a great deal of effort in trying to convince the Muslim world that the current War Against Terror is not in fact a war being waged against Islam. Yet even if you do not include the two Gulf Wars, most of the world's hot spots in recent years have seen Islamic peoples in armed confrontation against non-Muslims ? Bosnia, Chechnya, Central Asia, the Middle East (specifically the Israeli/Palestinian war of attrition), Kashmir, the Muslim-led civil war in the Philippines and now the genocide taking place in Darfur in western Sudan (a spin-off of the age-old conflict between the Islamist Arab/Africans in the north of that vast country and the black animist and Christian Africans in the south).

Given all of these conflicts in addition to the US-led War Against Terror, is it fair to ask if we are not indeed entering a period of history in which the West is embarking on a culture-wide backlash against the Islamic world, particularly the Arab countries in the Mid-East?

An Islamic scholar, in response to international accusations that the Muslim world is somehow collectively at fault for the rise in terrorism around the globe, made this statement: "The vast majority of Islamic peoples, some one billion adherents to the Muslim faith, do not agree with all of the violence that is being committed in their name. But it is a fact that most of the terrorism that has been committed in recent times has been committed by those who call themselves Muslim."

This was a brave statement to make on the part of a Muslim true believer. The Muslim world is in fact the epicentre of all of the recent seismic upheavals in international terror and although such acts are committed by a ruthless minority, the overwhelming majority of Muslims have been reluctant to speak out on this matter. They seem to be in a state of collective denial.

Although author Salman Rushdie had a fatwa ? a death sentence ? placed on him by Iranian clerics for alleged blasphemy against Islam, no major spiritual leaders in the Muslim world have seen fit to issue similar decrees against the Islamic practitioners of international terrorism.

In the West this has certainly led to unofficial backlashes against Islamic peoples ? airport security guards in the US and Europe, for instance, will likely employ far more stringent screening methods against Muslims than they will for non-Muslims.

Recently, in the wake of the horrendous school massacre in Russia carried out by Muslim terrorists from the breakaway Chechnyan province, a Russian airliner was prevented from taking off on a scheduled flight to Egypt. Panicky passengers on board were suspicious of two Egyptian women who boarded the flight late and appealed to the pilot to stay on the ground. Ironically, the women were late because they had already been subjected to additional security checks because two Russian airliners had been bombed out of the skies by Chechnyan women suicide bombers in the days leading up to the school massacre.

Chechnya has been fighting a long running and extremely bitter war for Independence from Russia for more than a decade now. Moscow has always claimed it is not fighting a war against nationalist Chechnyans, but rather a religious war, since the rebel leaders in that province have appealed to seasoned Muslim fighters from the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and even Iraq to join their cause.

This has now linked the Chechnyan war of Independence to Islamic terror in the public's mind not only in Russia but now in the rest of the world. For the fact is that following the downing of the two Russian airliners and the unprecedented school massacre, any sympathy or support the Chechnyans had in the West has evaporated completely.

Various Islamic communities living in the West are now beginning to feel the consequences of what amounts to an international anti-Muslim backlash. Even in tiny Bermuda, which is generally tolerant of religious minorities. This was borne out for me when I recently listened to the Bermudian Muslim progamme, Islamic Focus, and a local Imam was discussing both the US Homeland Security laws and similar legislation recently put into place in South Africa.

In discussing these laws, which can temporarily suspend a terror suspect's civil rights in the name of protecting national security, the Imam touched on the case of Cat Stevens, the former folk singer who converted to Islam and is now known as Yusuf Islam. The British-born former singer was taken off a London to Washington flight because him name had appeared on a US Homeland Security list as a likely supporter of terrorism, no matter how implausible that allegation (Yusuf Islam held a number of charity concerts, the proceeds of which were funnelled to schools in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank; it has been charged ? but never proved ? by US security agencies that some of these funds were in fact diverted by Palestinians to the militant wings of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But even the US security officials don't claim that Yusuf Islam was aware of this).

The Imam made clear that in his view it was a nonsense for Yusuf Islam's name to appear on the Homeland Security list. But a caller to his show disagreed. Violently.

The caller said unless people like Yusuf Islam were included on such lists, what was to prevent another commercial airliner being hijacked and crashed into a symbolic or commercial target on the ground like the Pentagon or the World Trade Centre?

this caller blamed the September 11 terrorist attacks on the entire Muslim world. Cat Stevens was as likely an aggressor as the cadre of 9/11 hijackers who seized four commercial jetliners and turned them into makeshift but very effective missiles.

It took some considerable time for the Imam to persuade this caller that he should not blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny criminal minority. And even after the Imam had finished his comments, I am not sure the caller was entirely convinced.

The caller's mindset has likely been created by a Western media that focuses obsessively on links between terrorism and the Islamic world. With each beheading or car-bombing in Iraq, the stronger this link becomes in the public's mind ? and the darker the image of Islam in the West grows.

Such is the saturation coverage, the terms "terror" and "terrorism" have now even entered the vernacular and are being used to label situations and individuals where they quite patently do not apply. Even in Bermuda Sports Minister Dale Butler recently described the leadership of the Bermuda Track & Field Association as "sports terrorists" and said he would not be held to ransom by some of their demands and actions.

None of this is to say that there is not a legitimate terrorist threat to the West in Islamic countries. But it should be looked at in its proper perspective. Rather than blame untold millions of innocent adherents of the Islamic faith, the West should be concentrating on the actual manufacturers and distributors of terrorism ? a very tiny minority of Muslims.

The militant cadres and shock troops of Islamic international terror appear to be intellectuals and former Koran students. They were in the forefront of the revolution that overthrew the pro-Western Shah of Iran in the 1970s and a similar group of fundamentalists comprising the Taliban later seized power in Afghanistan.

Those who have tried to analyse the social dynamics of Islamic fundamentalism tend to agree that the so-called scholars of the movement are lashing out at the West in part because Islam has lost its greatness as a world culture.

Indeed, many Muslims do seem to have an ancestral memory of sorts. They remember when Islam was a major player in world affairs up until World War One, when the Muslim Ottoman Empire was considered an equal of the Christian European Great Powers ? Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Islam had been a leader and pioneer in science, architecture and medicine and had dominated the world's eastern trade routes for centuries.

Certainly the military coalition led by the US that invaded Iraq has stirred and agitated some of these memories among Islamic zealots. They have compared the current military actions of the West to those of the Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages who attempted to wrest the Holy Land from its Muslim rulers. The parallel is certainly not an exact one but it does excite rage and fury among the Islamic fundamentalists' followers. And it likely does draw new recruits into their armies of terror.

The fundamentalists are convinced that they will win what we call the War on Terror, that they will drive the infidels from Muslim lands. But they are not including the fact that the Islamic world is also home to some of the world's largest oil reserves ? oil that fuels the West's economy.

So it's likely that the Islamic world will remain an international flashpoint for years to come, an area where the West and the East will confront one another over commerce and religion and culture.