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showed that 83 percent of Pakistanis sympathize with bin Laden’s al Qaeda group and oppose the United States’ military response. 6 Even the governments of Muslim countries that are allied with the U.S. in the war against terrorism have proved very reluctant to involve themselves in the fighting. Nor have the leading authorities of any Muslim country condemned the terrorists as acting in violation of the principles of Islam.
    The reason for such waffling is that our allies know that terrorism and anti-Americanism have substantial support among the population in the Islamic world, even in so-called moderate Arab countries. Virtually the entire Muslim world has, over the past few decades, experienced a religious resurgence—what we
may term the revival of Islamic fundamentalism. 7 The authority of the fundamentalists is not confined to a few countries, such as Iran and the Sudan. Of the twenty-two nations of the Muslim world, none is exempt from fundamentalist influence. This movement is powerful enough, in numbers and in political intensity, to threaten the stability of countries allied with the United States, like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the leadership of those countries is constantly on the defensive against the militants; it is they—not the terrorists or the militants—who are under suspicion for betraying Islam.
    The terrorists and their supporters don’t have to prove their bona fides. They do what they do in the name of jihad , a term that literally means “striving.” Some Muslims, especially in the modern era, understand jihad as a form of internal warfare in the soul against sin. But the Koran itself urges Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Seize them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” 8 In his classic work, The Muqaddimah , the influential Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun asserts, “In the Muslim community, holy war is a religious duty, because of the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” 9 These passages convey how Muslims themselves have usually understood their religious mission. Historian Bernard Lewis writes that the traditional Islamic view, upheld by the vast majority of jurists and commentators, is that jihad usually refers to an armed struggle against infidels and apostates. Lewis writes:
    In the Muslim worldview the basic division of mankind is into the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of
War (Dar al-Harb). Ideally the House of Islam is conceived as a single community. The logic of Islamic law, however, does not recognize the permanent existence of any other polity outside Islam. In time, in the Muslim view, all mankind will accept Islam or submit to Islamic rule. A treaty of peace between the Muslim state and a non-Muslim state was thus in theory impossible. Such a truce, according to the jurists, could only be provisional. The name given by the Muslim jurists to this struggle is jihad . 10
    The clear implication of Lewis’s remarks is that the terrorists who profess the name of Allah and proclaim jihad are operating squarely within the Islamic tradition. Indeed, they are performing what Islam has typically held to be a religious duty. Of course it could be pointed out that there are millions of Muslims who do not agree with this view of Islam. They prefer what may be termed the “ jihad of the heart” or perhaps the “ jihad of the pen” to the “ jihad of the sword.” But traditionally Islam has embraced all these forms of jihad as legitimate, so that the only reasonable conclusion is that many Muslims today, both in the West and in the Islamic world, no longer profess Islam in its traditional sense. 11 In a word, they are liberals, not in the Michael Dukakis connotation, but in the classic meaning of the term. From the point of view of the bin Ladens of the world, these people are apostates for diluting the faith and refusing