U.S. failed to build Muslim bridges: philosopher

By Paul Majendie

LONDON (Reuters) - The United States missed an important opportunity to build bridges with Muslim moderates after 9/11 and now the Iraq war is a daily recruitment poster for militants, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor said.

Taylor, in London to receive one of the world's richest prizes for his belief that spirituality can help to fight bigotry and violence, said: "If we persist in this way we could produce the nightmare of a real clash of civilizations."

"We can't stop doing the things that are making us lose hearts and minds," said Taylor, 75, who is to be given the $1.5 million Templeton prize at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday.

The prize, first awarded in 1973 to Mother Teresa and later to U.S. evangelist Billy Graham and Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was set up by British entrepreneur John Templeton to advance understanding of spirituality.

Taylor, an influential thinker, author of more than a dozen books and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, said the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 were a double tragedy.

"America missed a valuable opportunity after 9/11 to strengthen moderate Muslims in their own countries and to build bridges," the soft-spoken but impassioned philosopher told Reuters in an interview to mark the prize-giving.

"The war in Iraq has been a recruitment poster for violent Jihadists. Constant violence in Palestine is another recruitment poster," he said.

HUNGER FOR MEANING

He argues that it is vital to understand the hunger for meaning, the desire for a bigger cause that fires up young idealists to become extremists.

Taylor, now a holder of professorships at McGill University in Montreal and Northwestern University, Illinois, pinpointed two sharply different types of extremism.

He argued that young children turn to violence in Gaza City and disillusioned immigrants go on the rampage in the Paris suburbs because their lives lack any purpose. "There is extreme anger, a powerful sense of alienation," he said.

On the other side of the coin are the quartet of British Islamist suicide bombers who killed 52 people on London's transport system on July 7, 2001.

"One guy whose video I saw really gave me the creeps. He spoke with a (north of England) Yorkshire accent. He was totally integrated in British society," Taylor said.

Islamophobia, he warned, is an ever present threat.

"When we give in too easily to Islamophobia in the media and in speeches we are heading for polarization. We in the West have done a lot of stupid things to increase this."

"In Western secularized society and the media there is a dumbing down about understanding the spirituality of people's lives, how complex they are."