“I think religious belief makes people behave better,” he {a Muslim taxi driver driving Dalrymple somewhere in Britain} said. “Provided no one tries to compel anyone else or uses violence.”

Amen to that: I agreed with him, though secretly I thought the chances slender of a religious revival among debauched British youth. {Dalrymple has elsewhere described himself as either an atheist or agnostic.} The driver was a kindly, well-mannered man, and the classic immigrant success story: His children had progressed without difficulty into the professional middle class. He was, then, the archetypal moderate Muslim, whose public representatives Mr. BlairÂ’s government so persistently seeks, in the forlorn hope that they will do the security servicesÂ’ work for them.

Despite my liking for the driver as an individual, whom I adjudged sincere in his moderation, I could not entirely disembarrass myself of a residual prejudice against him: He was, after all, a Muslim, and I recognized in myself something discreditable that has become visceral, not under fully conscious control, namely a distrust of more than a billion people because of their religion.

non-Muslims begin to grow suspicious of even the most decent of the Ummah. And this feeling of mistrust is bound to have grown because so many of the bombers and would-be bombers appeared for a long time to be perfectly integrated into British society. A man with a friendly manner and a pleasant expression, a conscientious teaching assistant by day, turns out to be a suicide bomber by night, ready to die so long as he takes as many complete strangers with him as he can. If he could not be trusted, if he was harboring such murderous hatred in his heart despite all outward appearances, which Muslim can be trusted? ...

{the Islamist movement} will destroy the possibility of normal human contact of the kind that inhibits prejudice and mollifies hatred, and sow only suspicion and violence in the hope of attaining a total and final victory after some kind of {Islamist-inspired} apocalypse. In the end, however, I don’t think the strategy will work — in the modern world, Islam itself is too much of an intellectual nullity, just as Marxism was, for it to triumph. Moreover, diseases tend to decline in virulence as epidemics wane. Short-term, I am pessimistic; long-term, which is perhaps to say after my death, I am optimistic.