Since three bombs exploded and murdered my neighbours, a big question has loomed in my mind. Can someone - perhaps an Islamic scholar - answer it please?

How is it that terrorists who claim to be followers of a faith which prohibits images of the human form are using the Internet to broadcast worldwide pictures of beheadings to encourage recruitment to their cause?

The Muslim sacred text, the Hadith, records that the Prophet Mahomet (blessings upon him!) forbade the depiction of human beings in art.

In fact the sacred text forbids the representation of any living creature. The reason for this seems very sound.

It is that to represent the form of created beings is to behave like God, the Maker of heaven and earth and of all that therein is. And to usurp the role of God is blasphemous.

By making videos of the infidels (that's the rest of us, by the way) the Muslim terrorists are disobeying their own fundamental teachings. It is a terrible thing to add the crime of hypocrisy to that of mass murder.

If we say that Muslims are terrorists, we risk causing damage to race and community relations - not quite as much damage, I admit, as that caused by slaughtering innocents on the tube.

As a priest I am worried about damage to interfaith relationships too. Nevertheless there is, as in all things, the need for clarity in this issue.

May I introduce the subject with delicacy and somewhat obliquely?

I was once a teacher of philosophical logic and I used to introduce students to the structure of valid and invalid argument with the following example: "All mice eat cheese/Peter Mullen eats cheese/Therefore Peter Mullen is a mouse". And of course everybody laughed. This argument is not valid. It involves what is technically called a non sequitur.

Now we can set up a similar argument: "All recent terrorist outrages were caused by Muslims/Ali is a Muslim/Therefore Ali is a terrorist". That also is a fallacious argument, for of course not all Muslims are terrorists.

People who say that all Muslims are terrorists are lying and they are defaming the Muslims who are not terrorists. So far so good. But it is important not to be misled by this conclusion. The fact that not ALL Muslims are terrorists does not allow us to proceed to the conclusion that NO Muslims are terrorists.

In fact, we can take this further. We know that ALL the terrorist outrages recently committed in London were perpetrated by Muslims.

The same is true of many other such outrages - in Madrid, New York, Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Chechnya and so on. It is fair to conclude from this that the world has good reason to be suspicious of Muslims. It follows that Muslims - because members of this faith have been responsible for ALL the recent terrorist slaughter - must expect to be put under particular scrutiny.

Anyone - Muslim or non-Muslim - who says Muslims should not be singled out for special surveillance must be told to shut up until they learn sense. That goes for the BBC and for those newspapers who are currently crying "Racism!".

Innocent people the world over should not be asked to die for the sake of political correctness.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.