When the dreadful news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon broke last Tuesday afternoon, families in towns and villages across Turkey spent the rest of the day, like people everywhere else in the world, watching the horrific pictures on their TV screens. And, so far as I can judge, almost everyone's reaction was sheer detestation of the terrorists and sympathy for the victims and their families.

The idea that people of Muslim background must be anti-western or anti-American is a dangerous myth. In my view, it has two causes. The first is a persistent failure in western public opinion to inform itself properly about Muslim countries and to rely instead on cliches and over-simplifications. The second, which grows out of the first, is excessive readiness to accept claims by marginal extremists and radicals to be legitimate leaders and spokesmen.

These twin errors can be seen again and again in the handling of international issues and, latterly, in attitudes to the burgeoning Muslim communities inside western countries. For most of the past 200 years, a set of tangled and brutal conflicts involving Islam and the western world has been played out from the Balkans, through the Caucasus and Middle East, to North Africa. Most of these disputes would have been resolved, with much less pain for everyone involved, if the legitimate claims of the Muslim population had been respected. In almost every case they were not.

There are many reasons for condemning cultural and religious prejudice. One of the strongest is that they lead to grave errors of judgment about the realities of a situation and the strengths of the forces involved. In the 19th century, many western liberals, who backed Christian insurgencies against Ottoman rule, deceived themselves into the belief that Muslims would disappear from the landscape. That was wrong, though in some cases it is exactly what happened. Along the edges of Europe there was appalling but unchronicled ethnic cleansing and loss of Muslim lives.

Another result of these prejudices was a sort of "Bantustan" approach to Muslims and their world. Time and again, one hears some in the west suggesting that Turkey ought to be "more Islamic in its colouration". Ataturk's successful attempt to build a unified modern nation state in Turkey, with the twin goals of democracy and modernisation, seems to be insufficiently appreciated in the western world, even though its own security rests to some extent on the existence of a strong, stable, and pro-western Turkey.

One hears many fewer remarks about giving the citizens of the Muslim world the blessings of democracy and economic prosperity taken for granted in the advanced industrialised countries. Why? One sus pects it can only be because, in spite of all that Ataturk and Turkey have achieved, some people in the west subliminally think that people in Muslim countries are just not up to such things. Perhaps it is because of this that the west has given faltering support to what one might call the "modernisation project" in the Muslim countries in all sorts of ways.

You might expect that the arrival of large numbers of Muslims in western Europe as migrants would have halted this process. But still internal "Bantustans" and ghettos are encouraged. Despite some happy exceptions to the rule, Turkish

Muslims in Germany and Asian Muslims in Britain are too often locked outside the mainstream of society.

Traditionalist religious figures, of course, are happy with this. Their allies, sometimes directly backed by hardline governments in the Middle East, become community spokesmen. Moderates and modernisers are too often marginalised by being stifled or intimidated.

This leads to a paradoxical situation in which extremism in Islamic countries is actually fuelled from within the western world. Turkey's Islamist movement, for example, is largely financed, and to some degree even organised, out of western Europe as are, incidentally, violent leftwing movements - to all of which the liberal western media turn something of a blind eye.

The climate of chronic mutual misunderstanding is most acute in Turkish-European relations but hardly touches Turkish-US relations. The Americans generally seem readier to accept Turkey on its own terms as a country constructing a modern democratic industrial society despite all our shortcomings. Twice in the past 12 months it has helped out generously in our worst-ever economic crisis. Europeans, by contrast, too often give the Turkish public the impression that anyone who is opposed to the existing order in Turkey will be given a friendly hearing.

How, in the light of the revolting cruelty of the terrorist attacks we saw last week in New York and Washington, should we try to remedy this situation? Perhaps we should begin by no longer shutting our eyes to the fact that the most numerous victims of the terrorists until then had been other Muslims. Those who want to punish the people of Kabul for fundamentalist extremism should remember that nearly half that unhappy city's population has already been killed by it. We should recall that the gruesomely butchered victims of Turkey's Hamas organisation were themselves moderate Islamic modernisers.

There must be no compromise with the terrorism eating away at legitimate government and stability in the Middle East. Terrorism must be confronted, overcome and eradicated. But equally, the normal democratic rights of Muslim populations, wherever they may be, must be recognised on an equal basis with those of others. In particular, that means the international community must make a serious and sustained effort to resuscitate the faltering peace process.

Above all, the "Bantustan" attitude to Muslims, the habit of seeing them as fundamentally different people who belong by mutual agreement outside the mainstream of western life whether they are in the Middle East or the north of England, must go before it does more damage.

The writer is director of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (www.tesev.org.tr) and former under-secretary at the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs