When Dalia Mogahed speaks in Missoula on Tuesday night, she will speak for a billion Muslims whose voices have been silenced by the faith's radical fringe.

"The problem in Islam is that the only people we are hearing from is a vocal minority," said Mogahed, a senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Mogahed will deliver her speech, "Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think," at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Montana Theater of the PAR/TV Building at the University of Montana. The speech is sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Montana.

Mogahed's vast knowledge of opinion in the Muslim world is born of a Gallup st udy that surveyed 1,000 people in each of 11 predominately Muslim countries.

"What we found is an overwhelming majority of people who feel like they have been silenced by a fringe movement that is seeking to monopolize the conversation between Muslims and the West," said Mogahed.

To the extent that Muslims find themselves in conflict with the United States, the schism is political rather than religious or cultural.

"Muslims would prefer to see the U.S. out of Iraq, but that's for particular political reasons," said Mogahed. "It's not based on anything deep-rooted."

That's a good thing, she said.

"These are transient issues, based on acute political situations," she said. "These are not fundamental, timeless things. It's not something that can't be avoided."

Healing the political rift is possible with education, Mogahed said, but that healing requires work from both sides. It takes wading through media reports on both sides that are unnecessarily divisive and, in some Muslim countries, actually perpetrated by governments.

"We need a way to get the facts out, the facts of what regular people think on both sides of the equation," she said. "The West needs to understand that the image of Muslims has been harmfully reshaped by the fringe.

In fact, Muslims are extremely concerned about fundamentalism within their faith.

"When we asked them what they admired least about their own society, they said extremism and fanaticism," she said. "Muslims are more likely to be afraid of being a victim of a terror attack than we are in the West."

Muslims generally decry the terrorist acts of Sept. 11, 2001, and they do so mostly on religious grounds.

"When asked to explain, they condemn it because innocent people died and that is because their religion says that's wrong," Mogahed said.

Muslims who condone the terrorist acts inevitably do so on political rather than religious grounds.

"They condone it for secular political reasons, and they cite nothing from the Koran in their reasoning," she said.

That divide in Muslim thinking is clearly evident in opinion about the meaning of the word "jihad."

The word has come to have a political meaning, as radical Muslims press for violence against the West. But most Muslims, Mogahed said, view jihad in other ways.

"For most people, jihad is either a way to represent the inner struggle to be better, to fight one's demons," said Mogahed, "or a struggle against those who threaten a livelihood or faith. In both cases, it's a positive thing. It's definitely not terrorism."

Mogahed said Muslims admire in the West much of what Westerners revere.

"What they admire is what we hold dear ourselves," she said. "Democracy and its freedoms, and technology."

But, she said, Muslims also worry that Americans don't practice what they preach when it comes to Islam.

"They believe that we don't follow our values, our reputation for tolerance, when it comes to Muslims," she said. "There are misperceptions on both sides here, and what's important is for both sides to learn more about one another."

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.