LOS ANGELES

LITTLE MARIAM is a charming, All-American five-year-old. Watching the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, she was torn over whether to root for Michigan, the alma mater of her father (and first author of this article), or the University of Southern California, the alma mater of her favorite uncle (and second author). Yet given her addiction to Disney’s Princess mythology and its attendant merchandising, both father and uncle fret that she may be becoming passive and dainty.

But our own father has faith in Mariam. “You just watch,” he says proudly. “My granddaughter will someday be president of the United States.”

Not if Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode gets the last word. All-American Mariam happens to be part of a Muslim family. She attends a religious class in an Ohio mosque each week, learning about such concepts as compassion, self-restraint and service to others. She learns why she should avoid certain foods, but she is taught not to force her values on others who enjoy their bacon. Meanwhile, Goode will not back down from his warning that Americans must do more to keep Muslims from winning public office. And so little Mariam is being dragged into a clash of civilizations that is not of her choosing.

The problem encompasses more than windbag demagogues. It involves the many callers to Jerry Klein’s Washington radio show who argued that tattooing marks on American Muslims’ foreheads should be a prelude to deporting them en masse. It involves the 39 percent of Americans who recently told Gallup that Muslims should carry special identification. And it involves a conservative intelligentsia that refines redneckism and re-brands it as wisdom and prudence.

This “red-egghead” approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. “With every passing month,” Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It’s the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can’t afford.”

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam’s lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America’s leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

The Enlightenment, science and the American spirit of liberty helped tame the West’s own Talibanist impulses. These forces will do the same for modern Muslim society — if we are not all suckered into fighting positions chosen for us by hawks. Eric Hoffer, penning The True Believer amidst the embers of World War II’s crazed mass movements, noted how frustrated intellectuals helped incite frustrated publics. Today’s neo-conservative intellectuals are uberfrustrated.

As in Vietnam, hawkish intellectuals have been made to look like fools in their prognostications; unlike Vietnam, this conflict involves a great number of people on American soil who can be held up as scapegoats. Muslims must make choices. Moderates have broadly and regularly condemned terrorism; groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations should go further, perhaps by establishing philanthropies for communities and families hurt by extremists who have hijacked Islam.

We see the coming xenophobia, which is a defining feature of human communities under attack. We brace little Mariam for it, in the midst of her princess phase and well in advance of any politician phase. Mariam will grow up understanding that, in spite of its imperfections, America is more gloriously open than any other society. We will not kid her that our native Pakistan would be more tolerant if extremists from India were to bomb Lahore. She will be more pro-American than a Virgil Goode or Mark Steyn.

Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher — one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America ’s transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened. Mariam will be different. And, just maybe, should she decide that politics is her calling, that will help her to be elected president

Ferhan Asghar, a spinal surgeon in Cincinnati, and Rob Asgha, an occasional contributor who is a publicist and editor in Los Angeles, are Americans of Pakistani descent.