A bomb attack by Houthis in Ibb Governorate during Mawlid an-Nabi celebrations …

A bomb attack on a police station in Sana’a…

An armed attack on a magazine in France by terrorists claiming to have ties to Yemen…

ISIL beheading American and British captives…

Shiites killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shiites, Muslims mowing down atheists and beheading Christians.

These are the first things that come to people’s minds when Islam is mentioned in recent years.

In addition to Europeans being unwilling to go to Islamic lands, they don’t even want Muslims in their countries. They are now declaring that en masse out on the streets.

Six hundred years ago, places such as Andalusia and Baghdad were centers of civilization and highly attractive to Europeans. Visitors wrote letters back home to say how well educated, select, civilized, just and artistic Muslims were.

Jews fleeing persecution by Christian fanatics found safety by fleeing to Muslim Ottoman lands.

Now, however, many Muslim cities from Cairo to Sana’a, from Sana’a to Baghdad and from Baghdad to Kabul are in conflict and poverty. These cities that once inspired admiration are now in ruins. Even Muslims are fearful for their lives in these places that Christians once regarded as centers of justice.

This situation facing much of the Muslim world is very troubling to all people of good conscience. However, many people soon forget these facts they learn from watching television, in the papers or over the Internet. They forget the ruthless killing of guiltless people, the murder of innocent children, the burning of homes and the many refugees abandoned to live in poverty in refugee camps and go about their own daily affairs instead.

The whole Islamic world talks about the distress it feels over these sufferings and spends hours discussing it and writing about it, but when it comes to finding a solution to eliminate that suffering, they all hang back.

Some people seek a solution with the wrong means and imagine that they can resolve matters through violence and terror, even though these are incompatible with the moral values of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of our Prophet (saas). Other Muslims think the exact opposite.

Remember the imam who ran to the scene in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack. He condemned the incident and said it had no place in Islam.

Just like that imam, many other people say that this is not Islam but those who commit these bombings and killings claim to be doing it on the basis of the most authentic Islamic sources.

The secret of the change that has led to all the conflicts in Yemen and in the entire Islamic lands from Libya to Afghanistan, lies here. Hundreds of years ago, Islam encouraged science, art and justice, and Muslims stood up for these together. At that time, every Muslim watched out for his neighbor and treated non-Muslims with tolerance. But now almost all these fine virtues have been lost.

On the other hand, many Muslims hold the West responsible for the situation they are in. When the great European powers withdrew from the lands they had colonized, from Africa to the Middle East and to the Far East, they left behind them a vast impoverished and poorly educated mass of people. The descendants of those people who were treated as second-class citizens in their own lands are full of resentment. They blame the Europeans for their situation.

European countries and the U.S. are not producing policies to quell that resentment and demonstrate friendship and affection. Instead, bombs are rained down on Afghanistan and North Africans in Paris are condemned to the city outskirts, while in Germany people are shouting “Muslims out!” Muslims are now wondering, “Will the West now annihilate Yemen on the grounds the people who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office had ties to it?”

These things all lead to the emergence of harsher generations with stronger feelings of vengeance. If you look at the social media you will see that even moderate Muslims, be they from Africa or the Middle East, regard this as a squaring of accounts from the past. Even an ordinary Muslim with no links to terror regards the terrorist attack as an act of revenge for the past, saying, “The French slaughtered 1.5 million people in Algeria and never even apologized.”

How can this philosophy of mutual revenge, stemming from past errors and fed by blind fanaticism and ignorance be stopped?

First and foremost, European countries must stop engaging in military interventions and bombardments against an African or Middle East country in the wake of every death or bomb that goes off. They must gain the confidence of Muslims, in their own countries or abroad, by developing equal and humane social policies. In France, North Africans and Parisians must not be treated differently, even though both are French citizens. More importantly, countries such as Germany, France and Holland must bring extreme right-wing movements that increase tensions under control rather than secretly supporting them.

And what should Muslims do? Muslims must not be content with merely saying, “This is not the real Islam” after every incident. They must powerfully give voice to the inconsistencies in the ideas of people who espouse beliefs that are incompatible with the Qur’an. In the verses of the Qur’an, it is commanded that Muslims must call people to the moral values of Islam using gentle words alone, not with force and compulsion. Muslims everywhere in the world can call these people to the true path by telling them of the freedom of belief in Islamic moral values.

Muslims must declare to other Muslims - and the world - that violence is no way to seek one’s rights and that this is a flagrant violation of the moral values of Islam. They must explain that Islamic values cannot be espoused through acts of terror, that they will do nothing but increase the number of enemies of Islam and that they will just end up hurting Muslims. A major campaign can be started to express these messages to society in a powerful way. That campaign, which Western countries would also support, can make use of schools, books, the media and leading members of the community.

If that is done, the Islamic world will become a stable and prosperous civilization, a guide to the rest of the world in all spheres. To that end, all Muslims must act as one, as they did in the past, and must live by the tolerance and understanding that is compatible with the values of the Qur’an.

Adnan Oktar's piece on National Yemen