The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States followed by a string of unconventional violent incidents have rocked the foundation of global and personal security raising concerns of the real prospect of a new civilisational war and the emergence of a world without peace. No country nor region has been spared and no one seems safe. Just to recapitulate, on the night of Friday, Nov 13 last year, gunmen and suicide bombers simultaneously attacked a major stadium, restaurants and bars in Paris, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds others.

Almost a year earlier, on Jan 7 last year, the office of the weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked, killing 12 people. Recently, Brussels Airport and a metro station were attacked, resulting in scores of deaths. Earlier, in the US, in San Bernardino, it was an ordinary couple, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot and killed 14 innocent people on Dec 2 last year.

Halfway across the world in Charsadda, Pakistan, on Jan 20 this year, gunmen attacked students and staff at Bacha Khan University, killing 22 people and injuring at least 20. In Jakarta, Indonesia, on Jan 14 this year, seven people were killed and many more were wounded in a brazen terrorist attack on civilians in an upscale shopping district. In Burkina Faso, on Jan 18 this year, a luxury hotel in Ouagadougou, popular with foreigners was raided by the al-Qaeda terrorist group, resulting in the deaths of 29 people with scores more maimed. In the Iraqi city of Iskandariyah, at least 29 people were killed at a football field while watching a trophy-giving ceremony.

In neighbouring Thailand, a hospital in Narathiwat was occupied to stage terrorist attacks. Malaysia may appear lucky so far but the government has admitted that the threat of terrorism is real and that pre-emptive measures need to be undertaken to eliminate it…..Dr. Omar Farouk Sheikh Ahmad cannot bear to believe that Islam, normative Islam, could possibly prompt these acts, and he worries about the damage being done to the image of Islam from “the perception of ultimate accountability [of Muslims for these terrorist acts].

What should we make of the more-in-sorrow views of Dr. Omar Farouk Sheikh Ahmad? Some part of me – and of you, no doubt — wants to believe that he actually believes what he says, that he has found a way to substitute his own version of peaceable-kingdom Islam, a version that allows a decent man like himself to dreamily hew to this make-believe faith, and to convince other Muslims to misunderstand that faith in the same reassuring way.

Wouldn’t it be nice if more than a billion Muslims could be persuaded to willfully misunderstand their own faith? In fact, isn’t what Muslims like Dr. Ahmad do exactly what so many non-Muslim leaders in the West — Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel all come to mind — have done, constructed a false but hopeful “Islam,” and asked us to follow their example and accept this comforting fiction, in order to avoid having to deal with an unpleasant and frightening reality?

But there is no textual basis for the Islam Dr. Omar Ahmad and Barack Obama have allowed themselves to believe. All the Islamic texts are with the jihadis. He quotes not a single Qur’anic passage, not a single Hadith, in support of his assertions. And Islam’s 1350-year history of conquest fits the Jihad of the Sword, not Dr. Ahmad’s treacly “Jihad of the heart.” As much as we would like to participate, along with so many others, in Dr. Ahmad’s game of make-believe, in the long run, as Samuel Johnson once said in another connection, the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.