Reem Mohammed Al-Faisal, Special to Arab News

The attacks of last Saturday night came as a terrible reminder of all the horrors which have afflicted the world since the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Again we are faced with a battle that has no borders and is fought by an army which knows no remorse or reason. These criminals surely have to be brought to justice and tried and punished as severely as possible. However, the horror of terrorism is such that it is not enough to condemn the perpetrators of the crime. We have to cure the disease which produced such people, or else for every condemned terrorist there will be dozens waiting to take his place.

We as a society should not fall into the vortex of violence which America fell into after Sept. 11, responding to these attacks by lashing out at anyone and everyone. After capturing and trying those responsible for these terrors, we also have to address the ideology which produced them and drove them to go against everything the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) taught us.

If there are people in the Muslim world preaching ignorance and hatred, why are there those who listen to them? Why do they keep finding more and younger people willing to wreak such pain and horror?

The social and economic problems in the Islamic world have surely contributed to fermenting this ideology, as have the daily injustices they witness in Palestine and other Islamic nations. However, all these problems could have been dealt with or at least addressed reasonably if the Islamic world wasn’t already suffering from a very advanced state of fossilization which has been going on for centuries.

Maybe these terrible attacks in Saudi Arabia and other places will force us finally to face our own faults. Even though colonialism, both physical and cultural, did and still does exist in the Islamic world, it is not the only cause of the Al-Qaeda phenomenon. This phenomenon is a result of a combination of both external pressures and internal defeats.

I hope that we will not content ourselves with the capture and condemnation of these terrorists but extend this to a true and honest self-examination of our society and the causes that gave birth to the ideology of terror — else we will not get out of the cycle of violence and will eventually be consumed by it.

The American example since Sept. 11 has shown us and the rest of the world that increased security and violence have done nothing but engender more hatred and violence and give the terrorists more volunteers.

The question has to be asked why there are young boys willing to kill themselves and others? Why do we have Saudis willing to go against their tradition and all they have been taught to cause such chaos? And to what end? For decades we have been avoiding these questions and we have been evading those who hold such beliefs thinking that no one in his right mind could truly listen to them. We — and by we I mean not just the government but the people — never thought that these beliefs could one day take root in our country and the world and hold us all hostage to a monstrous vision of hate and destruction.

There has to be a concerted intellectual campaign accompanying the security effort or we will lose. Our intellectuals have to speak out with courage. The silent majority has left the terrain too long to an extreme minority which never represented Islam, and it is nobody’s fault but ours. Since when was Islam a religion of hatred, and since when were Christians or Jews our enemies, when we have lived side by side with both religions for centuries. How can we justify denying them the practice of their religion in our society?

Where in the Qur’an or the Prophet’s tradition did these people find the text that denies all dialogue and difference of interpretations in Islam? The Prophet warned us over zealotry in our religion. How can we justify these people denying the rights of other Muslims?

Since when are women considered beneath men or worse when Islam gave women equal rights and respect? Else the Prophet would not have enjoined his apostles to take half of their religion from a woman — his wife Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her). That adamant rejection of differences of thought and of dialogue has been the bane of Islam for many centuries and we are now seeing its most extreme manifestation.

However, it is not up to the governments but up to each individual to stand up for her or his rights. By asking for our rights in Islam we will save it from those who will seize on anything to justify their hatred and frustration.

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(Reem Al-Faisal is a Saudi photographer. She is based in Jeddah.)