While a suspected suicide-bomber blew up a car bomb outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad on Monday, hundreds were marching the streets of Multan to condemn the reprint of a controversial cartoon of the Prophet in Denmark. The simultaneity of these two events is too sinister to be merely coincidental, in the same way as the area affected by the blast is too strategic for it not to be a deliberate choice. The residence of the Indian high commissioner is a stone’s throw away, while UN agencies and other foreign embassies are all in the vicinity. This is the Enemy, in a microcosm, that Islamic fundamentalists wish to wipe out. Earlier this year, before the government led by the Pakistan People’s Party was elected, another attack in an Italian restaurant in the same neighbourhood left foreigners injured. Back then, the jihadis had rebelled against Pervez Musharraf’s compliance with George W. Bush’s global war on terror. This time they have become plainly audacious. The new government is rather cautious in its approach to extremism. Although the administration has signed peace treaties with militants in the Swat valley, its response to terrorism remains far from forthright.

This dilly-dallying is particularly unfortunate in the wake of a series of fatwas on terrorism issued by prominent sections of the Muslim world. The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind last week, and the Dar-ul Uloom (the influential Deoband seminary) in April, declared all forms of terrorism as “un-Islamic”. The botched-up theology used by al Qaida to justify its working principles is being resisted from within. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (‘Dr Fadl’), former al Qaida strongman, publicly denounced the bin Laden brand of Islamism. Increasingly sceptical of violence, the Islamic Right is struggling to find a new way. In Denmark, where the ‘blasphemous’ cartoons first appeared in 2006, the State broadcaster, Damarks Radio, has organized a beauty pageant for headscarf-wearing women — in the name of equitable treatment of the Muslim population. The gesture has already had a positive impact, chiefly because it goes to the heart of the problem that has fostered the clash between Islam and the West. “Terrorism thrives on discrimination,” as Q.M. Usman, the Jamiat president put it, “The best way to root out terrorism is to end discrimination.”