A response based on hope, not fear

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Pakistani who suggested to bin Laden the idea of flying planes into the World Trade Centre, appears more influenced by images of James Bond than piety and religiosity. After the bombing of a Philippines Airline plane in 1994 he spent a week at a five-star beach resort south of Manila, and on one occasion set out to impress a lady dentist by hiring a helicopter and talking to her on his mobile phone while flying over her clinic.

A key dimension of contemporary terror is the theme of martyrdom, and this is linked to forms of violence that are less and less defined in terms of a rationality of calculation.

We can see this transformation at work in Palestinian violence. At the beginning the Palestine Liberation Organisation was the product of Arab states, its action focusing exclusively outside Israel and the occupied territories. The first intifada pointed to a new type of violence within the territories, aimed at building up confidence and civil society, shaped by a conviction that violence could bring about a new society. The symbol of this violence was a youth throwing stones at a tank.

The violence of the second intifada is radically different. Palestinian society is experienced as corrupt and flawed, the hoped-for national community cannot be achieved, and violence is increasingly turned inwards. The new world can only be brought about through dying, not through living.

In the second intifada we see the development of the suicide bomber. This is violence no longer linked to any vision of social transformation. Only death makes it possible to build a nation that cannot be built by the living.

Here death takes on a religious meaning. Service to God overcomes pain, it challenges the seductive power of symbols of Western pleasure - cafes and bars. Through death, the person can once again become a symbol of the purity of struggle. Religion does not cause this violence, but it is constructed using religious themes.

This type of violence collapses eschatological time (the end of days) and the present into one. There is no medium term, which is the time of social, cultural and political change.

This form of violence is increasingly globalising, to the point that different sociologists now suggest that the jihad is best understood as a global movement. It stands outside the Islamic tradition but it pulls fractured and disconnected bits from this tradition: holy war, martyrdom, diet, dress.

The jihadi movement is not interested in the state, but what it understands are global forms of power. This is why bin Laden initially had little interest in the Palestinians and their struggle.

Bin Laden's agenda is global: he attacks the US for its corporations, for its failure to sign the Kyoto protocol, for its pornography.

Today anyone can be a martyr: this has been democratised. In religious traditions, the martyr is chosen by God. The word itself comes from the Greek: "deaths that are seen". Martyrs kill themselves in public, and the death is an event that creates a public.

But killing is not a means to an end, it is the end itself. This is why this form of violence is catastrophic. It is outside a logic of graduation and calculation. The aim of such violence is to kill as many people as possible.