Howard Jacobson: We are all suckers for an ascetic - albeit one with a fleshy mouth and a Rolex

On balance I'd say it's unlikely Osama bin Laden is going to get his own TV series when this is all over. Good in front of the camera, I grant you, and reads autocue well in unfavourable conditions. But I doubt he has the joky youth appeal which Channel 4 would be looking for, and I don't see the finger-wagging going down well with either BBC channel. Myself, I think viewers aren't averse to a little didacticism, particularly in religious programmes, but it's been out of favour with BBC schedulers for a long time, especially in its more masculinist manifestations.

It would be nice, I agree, to think of something else. Beckham's goal against Greece, Christmas shopping, the Booker prize. Nothing will adhere, though. For the first two weeks after the topless towers of Manhattan collapsed in fire I stood on my balcony, looking eastwards, and watched it happen all over again to London. Down they came, as through a transparency, the NatWest building, Canary Wharf, St Paul's. Of a skyline that had previously seemed immutable, not a single shape could hold its substance. It was like losing confidence in a parent. Once that happens, nothing is secure. So I screwed up my eyes and watched the city melt.

Now I'm more rational. Now I address Muslims from a platform erected in my mind. "Brothers," I begin. I must be doing this in the street, moving my lips in agitation and maybe even waving my arms about, because passers-by are taking notice of me and nudging one another. And this at a time when it is common to see people apparently raving to themselves in public places, their hands-free mobile phone mikes clipped invisibly to their lapels. "Brothers," I appeal, "see reason..."

In fact I'm not sure it's reason I want them to see. I think it might just be me I want them to hear. If they hear me, I am convinced – I am still speaking from that platform erected in my mind, you understand – they will grasp something about equivalence. As for example, that I am as upset and afraid as they are, and that the insults to which they believe they have been subjected for centuries are insults I believe I have been subjected to as well.

The West is warned constantly that it must not be seen to be waging war against Islam, neither with weapons nor with words, as a consequence of which our Prime Minister makes an ass of himself offering to be conversant with the Koran. Patronising, I have heard Muslims call this. But it is more pathetic than it is patronising, impelled by a desire to please so urgent that it won't let even ignorance stand in its way.

Meanwhile extremist Muslims, with whom many moderate Muslims sympathise in their hearts – if only to the degree of ascribing rational causes to their irrational hate – do not scruple to lambast the West as infidels, sinners in the house of unbelief, subscribers to inferior faiths, barbarians. Is that not an insult to me?

There was a time when Jews fared far better in the Islamic world than in the Christian. This is not forgotten. Muslims understood that Islam and Judaism were related, scions of the same family tree, and therefore they acknowledged a sort of kinship. We were tolerated and often welcomed, not least because we were clean, chaste in our monotheism and dietarily compatible; but that we were on a short lease of acceptance, that ours was a lesser faith, and that we too were infidels at the last, was not in doubt.

Equivalence, my brothers. Look into your hearts. It will make you stronger, not weaker, to accept that what you consider is done unto you, you have, in your time, done unto others. "Wallowing in the sense of one's own victimhood," the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya has written, leads ineluctably to loss of that "universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility."

It gets trickier now, Jew to Muslim. I want to speak about the Jewish crisis of victimhood, post- pogroms and post-Auschwitz, and how, in a sense, a confident Israeli is a consequence of that. But how do Jew and Muslim discuss Israel? Would the concept of brutalisation help? Muslims turn violent, we are told, because they have been frustrated into violence. Could we not say the same, my brothers, about Israel? You are our making, we are yours. Equivalence.

And there's another. Holy men. Killers with long beards who believe that there is only one truth and that they possess it. The Jewish world I grew up in half a century ago supposed it had got rid of holy men. But they have crept back, demoniacal anachronisms subtly blackmailing us into supporting them on the grounds that they are our spiritual consciences, the dogsbodies of the faith we have grown forgetful of but without which we wouldn't exist. I don't know if it is so with Islam, but some version of that blackmail must surely explain the appeal of a bin Laden. The blackmail of asceticism in a luxurious world.

There is even grudging admiration of it in the West. We are all suckers for an ascetic, no matter that his mouth is fleshly and he wears a Rolex watch. The terrible seduction of simplicity. Can we at least agree on this, my brothers – that our longing for the rhetoric of simplicity will destroy us all?

From the platform erected in my dinning mind I hear assent. I would prefer cheering – for I too have a fanatic heart – but I will settle for assent.