I've got to be nice to Jon Snow - he's my university Chancellor for a start and I always enjoy his annual lectures here. He often speaks about what one might call opinions below the political radar. On Monday night he presented a heavily trailed documentary about "What Muslims Want" - drawing on recent research and opinion polls amongst British Muslims about their attitudes to British society and their world view.

I was left not quite clear about whether it was intended to show how different some Muslims' attitudes are, or how similar, to the "rest of us". But it felt as if it was tending towards highlighting supposed differences, and left me feeling slightly uncomfortable as a result knowing that I felt the same on many issues. As if those differences were somehow sinister.

I am a Christian (most would probably say not a very good one but that's not for them to judge in my creed anyway). I've been on a faith journey that has taken me to what one might call "separatism" - from childhood Scottish style non-conformism to Roman Catholicism and I nearly became a monk about twelve years ago in my mid-late twenties. Just about the time when the young Muslims Jon Snow's research was looking at were at their most radical or separate. But I don't think I am particularly extraordinary - it was a part of me forming my opinions and locating myself in the world.

Nowadays, if anything, I have at least as much sympathy with what I understand of Islam as I do of Christianity. Indeed I do feel a lot of the time that Christianity has "lost it", particularly in the area of social and economic justice. The very fact that it has over centuries become a faith of empire builders and rulers is a problem for me - that it has conspired to entrench some hierarchies and inequalities rather than level them as it promised.

But you know, I didn't see much that was "extreme". Taxi drivers, just like me as a hall warden of a Friday or Saturday night, have every right to feel that British society is losing its way, that women are treated appallingly by some young men, young men who should know better, educated young men, often with plenty of money. We see it week in, week out. But I've also heard girls lolling around drunk demanding to be screwed over the bonnet of some stranger's car in a university car park by the multiple drunk lads they staggered out with.

Nor am I alone. It was Tony Blair that blamed everything on the sixties not so long ago (in which I think he was wrong), and there are many, many more in sympathy with the view that there is a malaise of some kind afflicting in particular the generation of an age with the Muslims who scored most highly on the "extremist scale". Tony's answer is ASBOs and the "Respect Agenda", they see theirs as an international agenda of divine laws that will not only put decency back into society but also equity for the Umma around the world.

Tony Blair in his speech last week on a "war of values" said, for example, that Islamic extremism is not about poverty. Let's look at that. There can be no doubt that Islam is a religion of the overwhelmingly poor and dispossessed. In the second half of the twentieth century in particular while individual families and oligarchies have become fantastically wealthy supplying the western world with the fuel for the engines of its vast economic advances - oil - well over a billion more Muslims around the world have not benefitted from that in any significant way.

Out of so many excluded and oppressed, given a faith that tells them, rightly, that they have as much right as any to share in the wealth God has bestowed on us through nature, is it a surprise that a few, a tiny few, are taken in by the most extreme interpretations. Just as some people in the UK find solace for their anger over apparent injustice and exclusion in extremist nationalist groups. And globalisation, particularly of travel and information has made those inequities more visible to more people (remember for many in relatively well developed South Africa and India, 1985's Live Aid beamed into football stadia was the first time they had seen people the other side of the world partying live for their plight). And they have, sometimes, a right to be angry about it.

Islam is a faith of economic and social justice if nothing else. One of the main roles of the Caliphate as I understand it is to ensure the equitable division of God's gifts in nature throughout mankind (even if it would be romantic nonsense to say there's some golden age in the past when any Caliphate ever achieved that). The faith retains, albeit on occasion only through lip service, the ancient Abrahamic controls on usury for example which both Judaism and Christianity have long since all but abandoned. Did you know that "Hallelujah!" was the cry of the slaves, freed from their debts at the fifty year Jubilee when all debts were cancelled and all lands returned to the common wealth for redistribution? But in that it also shares elements of the radical liberalism of centuries, of Locke, Cobden, Hobhouse and many others. Christianity too remember looks to a day when the nations of the world will be one, that power will not be wielded by men over men, but the birthright of us all adminstered for all our benefit.

So where do I differ from the "separatists" or "extremists"? Well, I've moved on slightly from my own "radical extremist" days. I've found in the fusion of my faith with liberalism the ability to strive to be a better person, to carry out the little Jihad if you like, and encourage others to do likewise in their own ways, but not to impose on them unless they are materially or objectively harming someone else. I did disagree, for example, with the condemnation of the Danish cartoons and the circumscribing of free speech. Those of us with a faith have to be more robust in our own defense but not allow ourselves the luxury of special protection from people who may not agree with us.

My faith teaches too that people have the free will to decide for ourselves - the essential element that makes us human. To make mistakes and learn from them. But that's my faith and people are free to share it or not, to make their own way so long as they don't hurt others in the process. But the way we live does hurt others, from destroying the planet to raping whole continents of their resources to make our lives comfortable. And it does have roots in our apparently growing devil may care decadent lifestyles. The simple fact is that most people mature and learn from their more wild escapades and do become better functioning members of society as a result. So I don't see that we need someone imposing their idea of the divine will on us all. Encouraging and challenging us to think about our behaviour, yes, but imposing and punishing - not as a rule.

If we can relight that radical liberal flame, I do believe there is the makings of a fusion that can bring the essential elements of social and economic justice from all the world's major faiths, including the ones, like some forms of Christianity which have slightly lost that focus, and others, like Islam which are growing as a reaction to the inequity in the world, and still allow us to live our lives largely as we choose, have more respect for others, and take more responsibility for ourselves. But like many Muslims and not a few Christians, I am not entirely sure that that radical liberalism is evident in today's more cynical "politics of power". Reclaim it and there's a chance we can enjoin many of these to our cause, the greater cause of humanity as a whole. Go on as we are, and we can expect more polarisation, more resentment, and yes, more desperately hopeless individuals for whom it may be tempting to think that they can make their point through violence.

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