Last weekend’s Sunday Times featured a compelling article by the Afghan journalist Sami Yousafzai, originally published in Newsweek.

For Yousafzai, the trauma of fleeing his adopted homeland of Pakistan after being grievously shot three times by suspected Taliban gunmen has been compounded by the rampant popularity of Islamic fundamentalism amongst British Muslim youth.

Led by an ominous, yet oddly young, man by the nickname Talib Jan, second generation Afghans are becoming more enamoured by the Taliban than their parents, for whom the brutality of war and oppression prompts caution and a longing for the tranquility of Islam.

Some might say that this is the reality that needs to be promoted: Islam is ultimately a faith of peace, and that the older generation dislikes the negative and garish connotations promulgated by the likes of Talib Jan, favouring to worship quietly, is saddening.

Which is why the recent expostulations of the Indian Muslim writer Sadia Dehlvi on the blog indianmuslims.in are so true:

Muslims have a moral responsibility to engage in the social, political and economic development of the societies they live in. Global Muslim societies would do well in following the exceptional efforts of the Indian clerics in denouncing terrorism and de-linking it with Islam.

Sincere moral outrage needs to be expressed at Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, political kidnappings and assassinations, militancy in Kashmir, Shi’ite-Sunni killings in Iraq and Pakistan, fatwas that condone suicide bombings in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and other such atrocities that [a]ffect innocent lives. Muslims require an international consensus in combating extremism but our credibility is lost when we demonstrate selective outrage – as in the aftermath of the Danish cartoons.

Political Islam draws its lifeblood from the ideology of fighting the oppressor, but has clearly become the oppressor [itself]. Even though some Islamist groups have renounced violence and accepted the principles of democracy, and have marginally improved their stand on women and minority rights – they remain socially conservative.

In Jordan, the Islamist party does not support the rights of women to file for divorce. In Kuwait, the Islamists fought against the right of women to vote. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will not allow a woman or a person from a minority community to become the head of state.

Muslims must stop blaming the problem of extremism on foreign policies, for two wrongs simply do not make a right. Islamism is primarily a Muslim problem, threatening both Muslim and non-Muslim societies. We need to acknowledge [that] there is a problem of theology when extremists talk of going straight to heaven after taking innocent lives.

This new face of Islam has nothing to do with Sufis, music, poetry, miracles or the countless devotional customs of Muslim cultures across the world.

It is time for the devout, silent, peace-loving Muslim majority to speak for Islam. Let us become louder than the radical [Islamist] voices that claim to represent us.

It is then, time to reclaim Islam from the clutches of men such as Talib Jan and remind the world that it is a faith not to be feared, but to be admired and accepted as a valuable member of the kaleidoscope of faiths that characterizes contemporary society.