In the concluding chapter of Ziauddin Sardar's recently published memoir Desperately Seeking Paradise - Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (Granta Books, London 2004), a friend lamented at the intellectual and moral paralysis gripping the Muslim world. In anger and despair, Muslims are reduced to meeting the challenges of the modern world by summoning people to die for Islam.

Ziauddin remarked "its time some of us demanded to live for Islam, unfashionable as that may sound. Martyrdom has its uses, but right now living for Islam takes more courage and more effort. You don't have to think to offer yourself for death... But to live, you're got to think all the unthinkable and face all the slings, arrows brickbats and siren songs of the entire gamut from the West to the Rest, from without and within, and then come up with a way forward worth traveling...".

If there is anyone who has suffered the most vulgar of abuses and vicious denunciations in the media and in public, it is Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, a scholarly figure widely regarded as the world's chief proponent of moderate Islam. At a time when the confused and despairing Muslims cheered the al-Qaeda suicide bombing of the Twin Towers, Qaradawi condemned the act as a heinous crime. When the Taliban leader Mullah Omar decreed that the Buddha statues of Bamiyan be destroyed, Qaradawi was among a delegation of scholars who went to Afghanistan and counseled them against that decree, suggesting that they should instead "focus on fighting poverty, diseases, unemployment and bloodshed on their soil".

During his recent visit to London for a series of conferences, the influential and well connected Zionist lobby and right-wing Islamophobes lobbied the government to bar his entry into Britain using over the top smear campaigns and media vilification, citing his endorsement of terrorism for his stand on Palestine. Sheikh Qaradawi has of course visited London on numerous occasions in the course of the past decades. His three daughters completed doctorates at British Universities and he is a trustee of the Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies. The Zionist lobby and friends of Israel, seeing that the Muslims are at their lowest ebb, with the popular perception among westerners that Islam equates terrorism, anti-west and incompatible with modernity, pounced on the affable and gentle old man to make sure that Muslims in Britain (and Europe) are prevented from integrating into and contributing meaningfully to mainstream society.