It is interesting, yet an irony, to see how 'various problems' were gradually and suddenly discovered in Muslim societies and Muslims were 'problematized' and constructed with various negative images, and how one-fifth of the world population was put under the regime of control and intervention by discursive practices.

It is also remarkable to see how Muslims were treated as a homogeneous mass or a monolithic entity despite their political, religious and cultural diversity, and how the horrific actions of a handful of fundamentalists, a tiny deviated fraction of whole Muslim spectrum, are made a representation of the whole community, in other words, how Muslims are often judged en masse by the standards of their worst representatives.

In the Western media and academia, Muslims are discursively constructed as 'other'. Many of these constructions equate Islam with evil through portrayals of Muslims as an irrational, uncivilized, threatening and uniquely fndamentalist "other". "Islam Has Attacked Us", said Franklin Graham in North Carolina shortly after the September 11 attacks (NBC Nightly News, 16 November 2001). Like his father, the Revered Billy Graham, Franklin Graham is one of America's most powerful evangelical leaders. He delivered the benediction at George W. Bush's inauguration, and is heir to his father's extensive ministry. Americans of all faiths were asked to embrace one another and unite against terrorism. Mr. Graham's words, however, dismiss any interfaith dialogue: "The God of Islam is not the same God", he alleged. "Islam", Mr. Graham concluded, "is a very evil and wicked religion".
Mr. Graham's perception of Islam as an "evil" religion strikes a familiar tone in the United States. Here, hostilities with elements within the Muslim world are commonly constructed and presented as a conflict between good and evil. President Bush responded to the September 11 attacks by launching a "crusade" against terrorism (Washington DC, 16 September 2001). He promises to "rid the world of evil" (Washington, DC, 14 September 2001), to "fight the evil ones" (New York, 6 February 2002), and has inventoried an "axis of evil" (Washington, DC, 19 January 2002) constituted primarily of Muslim nations. His rhetoric fits a pattern. His father, in the crisis leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, implored Americans to "confront evil for the sake of good" (Washington, DC, 29 January 1991). Their predecessor, President Reagan, in 1986 referred to Libya's Colonel Gaddafi as an "evil man" (Slevin 2002) before bombing his country.

The discursive construction of Muslims in the imperial discourse is very painful, yet interesting. Muslims have been constructed with negativity as opposed to the positivity of the West. "America was targeted for attack", said President Bush, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world" (Televised Address to the Nation, 11 September, 2001). "This conflict", he continues, "is a fight to save the civilized world", because the terrorists hate freedom and democracy (In China, 20 October 2001). He is joined by other politicians. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of the House of Representatives, insists that "civilization must win" in this conflict (The Observer, 28 October 2001). US Secretary of State Collin Powel adds that the terrorists hate "civilization" (PBS, 13 September 2001).
From the outset, we were told that this is a war in defence of freedom, democracy and civilization itself, even before we knew who the terrorists were or what motivated them to act. The rhetoric is vague and obscure. All that is clear in this haze of ambiguity is that it is something to do with Islam and the Middle East that we are fighting. The President's declaration, "you are with us or you are with the terrorists" (Financial Crime Enforcement Network, Vienna, VA, 7 November 2001) implies a binary construction of spaces. The social production of space implicit in these terms is bound with the production of difference, subjectivities, and social order. This distance, which is not a simple marker of cultural diversity, is branded with inferiority and negativity (terrorist, evil, militant, backward, underdeveloped, poor, lacking, traditional and so forth). When these kinds of negative images are constructed on a group of people, they automatically become preamble to certain treatments and interventions, and thus, the former justifies the latter.

The construction does not stop there; rather, permeates in the arena of psychology. One example of a negative construction of Muslim comes from Ann Coulter, a best-selling author, prominent political analyst and columnist. One of her recent articles (6 September 2002) recounts an incident where a 'Muslim' passenger en route from Germany to Kosovo attacked a stewardess on the flight. In it, Ms Coulter bitterly complains about how few newspapers reported the story and how 'not one mentioned that the attacker was a Muslim'. At first glance, the basis for her complaint is confusing. It seems nonsensical that we should strive to identify the religion of any given criminal when reporting stories about their criminal acts. How is Islam relevant to this story? The relevance, sadly, is found in the minds of people like Ms Coulter who seem to believe that only Islam can serve as the motive for a Muslim's actions. For this reason, they find it necessary to condemn newspapers that do not identify this erroneous connection between Islam and violence, and that do not thereby further isolate Muslim communities and further instil dangerous anti-Muslim stereotypes among their readership.

Ms Coulter's views resurface in a subsequent article she wrote following the revelation that one of the suspects in the 2002 DC area sniper shootings was a Muslim convert. She ridicules attempts that were made to find psychological or other non- Islamic causes for the sniper's violent behaviour. 'He's a Muslim', Ms Coulter implores. 'That's his condition and his diagnosis' (31 October 2002).  In this way, Ms Coulter presents Islam as a disease responsible for the alleged sniper's violence and the violence of countless other 'Muslim' criminals. There is no sense in blaming anything else. Not the US army, where the sniper developed his marksmanship skills, nor his chronic unemployment, nor any mental delusions he might be suffering from. As Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress put it: 'It should not be strange news to suggest that Muslims are prone to the same psychological conditions as the rest of humanity; that they aren't immune to mental breakdown under stress or, for that matter, to psychopathic and other antisocial tendencies' (4 November 2002).

Even where the motives of these criminals have religious elements, why are their actions automatically attributed to Islam rather than to distortions of it? Other popular figures have joined in the attacks. Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's most renowned journalists who has lectured at such respected institutions as Harvard, Columbia and Yale, published a book shortly after September 11 entitled Rage and Pride (2002). It quickly became a best-seller in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. In it, Ms Fallaci refers to Muslims as the peculiar 'sons of Allah'. She describes them as 'vile creatures' that like to 'urinate on baptisteries' and 'multiply like rats'. Freedom of expression arguments aside, one is left to question whether the publication of such hateful words about Jewish or other vulnerable religious minorities would today be tolerated in the West, let alone render an author a best-seller. Asks one commentator, Reza Ebrahimi (20 June 2002), 'does a cause need a Holocaust to be intellectualized?'

Debasing the holy Qur'an in the Guantanamo Bay as well as in the Abu Gharib prison and recently constructing lampoons on the holy prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) via caricatured images in the Denise newspaper and their reappearance in other European papers show the same genealogy of hate crime against Muslims which subvert the possibility of interfaith dialogue and a peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, reacting to the hate crime in the form of violence by a quarter of Muslim fanatics is in no way better than the crime itself. It's not a "clash of civilizations" but rather a "clash of ignorance" as Edward Said once said.