Isn’t Islam just a movement set on the destruction of America?” A middle-aged, apparently white man confronted me with this question. I was giving a talk on Islam in the winter of 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, at Colorado State University. Generally, the question and answer session had been going well, until this man delivered a charged political statement, accusing me of being a hypocrite and in denial of the real nature of my own religion, Islam.

Now, in promoting my second book, “Why I Am A Muslim: An American Odyssey,” I find that I am posed one question more often than not by the occasional upstart participant at my talks. How is it that a religion I find peace and comfort in can also be the source of extremism to so many young men? Many commentators have said that Islam has something in it that makes its followers violent. That “something” is rarely explained beyond vague references to Qur’anic passages. However, with the frequent suicide bombings perpetrated by Muslims and the news media’s failure to cover Muslims working towards peace, it would be nearly impossible for someone not to assume that these commentators are right.

In truth, nothing in Islam sets a young Muslim off toward a life of violence and bloodshed. Muslims are just as perplexed as non-Muslims at this violence – much in the same way many of us Coloradans were after the Columbine school shootings. But because we are all familiar with the Columbine community, none of us ever asked what it was about Columbine that drove two young men to kill and take their owns lives so brazenly.

An outside observer, though – someone from Europe, Asia, or anywhere else, when looking at all the school shootings plaguing America today – could say that something in American culture must drive young people to violence. Actually, Europeans and European press often describe America as a gun-loving culture. But we, as insiders to American culture know that this assessment is inaccurate. Surely if American culture drove the young men of America to violence, we would see more school shootings than we already do.

The same is true of the Islamic world. Of the world’s citizens, over a billion are Muslim -that’s roughly one-sixth of the entire world population and more than the entire U.S population of about 300 million. About 7 million Americans today are Muslim themselves. Of the world’sMuslims, only a handful are terrorists. If Islam caused its followers to be violent, wouldn’t we see terrorism happening on an hourly basis and all over the world? Some find it comforting to think that the problems of the world would be gone if Islam did not exist. We have to face the fact, though, that terrorism would not stop if all Muslims converted to Christianity.

The complaints cited by Muslim terrorists are not religious ones, but political. They want a homeland for the Palestinian people, many of whom are Christian. In fact, Yasser Arafat’s wife and daughter are Christian, as are many members of Palestinian leadership. If the Palestinians were all Christian or all Jewish, they would still want their own country. Their nationalistic feeling is based on their Palestinian ethnicity, not on being Muslim.

While many Palestinians are choosing peaceful means of political expression, a fraction, who happen to receive the most media coverage, regrettably choose terrorism and violence. The concept of a suicide mission is not unique to Muslims or Palestinians. The suicide mission was actually introduced to modern warfare by the Japanese “Kamikaze” World War II pilots. The Tamil Tigers, a group representing the Tamil minority in South Asia and who mostly follow the Hindu religion, have been behind as many as two-thirds of recent suicide bombings. Yet to argue that something in Japanese or Tamil culture precipitates suicidal terrorism would be grossly unfair and wrong.

As a Muslim, I condemn terrorism. Murder is a sin in Islam. Killing another person is only permissible in three, specific contexts: (1) in war, killing another combatant-opponent; (2) in self-defense, against an attacker, and (3) as capital punishment for the crime of murder, but only with the consent of the victim’s family. In a war specifically, Islamic law requires that women, children, the elderly, animals and plants should not be harmed. Some Muslim scholars argue that development of nuclear weapons by Islamic countries is against Islam, as their use would inevitably cause such loss of civilian, animal and plant life.

The terrorists’ commandeering the beautiful principles of my religion to their own uses disgusts me. They make excuses that the United States has declared war on the Islamic world, so their actions are then permissible as part of a war, or as self-defense in protecting Muslims. These reasons are ridiculous, though, and clearly out of line with Islamic law. In order for a terrorist’s actions to be covered, a just war must first be declared by an Islamic leader, who was chosen by 50 percent or more of Muslims. No such Islamic leader exists and likely never will. Furthermore, civilians are never to be attacked. Self-defense also is not valid. In the Islamic context, self-defense does not include indirect threats.

The only reason I know the terrorists have the wrong interpretation of Islam, though, is because I have educated myself on Islam. Even among Muslims, but especially among Americans, understanding of Islam is very limited. While Americans are generally literate and can read about Islam, Muslims suffer from widespread illiteracy. Figures like Osama bin Laden, who freely expound their own illogical, incorrect interpretations of Islam by videocassette and audiotape, take on a greater importance.

The Islamic world does have problems. Many of these problems are extrareligious, actually leftovers of tribal, Third World culture Muslims are still trying to move out of. To believe, though, that these problems would be solved if Islam did not exist is foolish. Religious vocabulary has been and may always be used by extremists to recruit alienated youth, be they Muslim or another religion. The best good people can do is to call these zealots on their misrepresentation of what is a fine religion.

Asma Gull Hasan, a Pueblo native, is an attorney and writer living in San Francisco. Her latest book is “Why I Am A Muslim: An American Odyssey” (Thorson/Element 2004).