The Muslim people I know would never think it right to kill someone for drawing Muhammad, and thinking that it’s right to kill someone for drawing Muhammad is one of the necessary (but not sufficient) beliefs that motivated the two recent attacks in Europe. Given that, it’s hard to see how someone could blame ‘Islam’ or people who call themselves Muslims in general.

I don’t think it makes sense to think of belief as being social practices. Beliefs are things you have in your brain about the world; combined with desires, they motivate – and, according to the classical theory of action (see eg Davidson, Dennett) cause – actions. If you think it’s evil to draw Muhammad, then that belief will motivate certain actions. Take any given human action and you can interpret it in terms of the ascription of plausible beliefs and desires, and that interpretation will amount to a tentative causal explanation of the action.

Calling yourself a ‘Muslim’ doesn’t necessarily say very much about what your actual beliefs are. A lot of tourists visit Morocco, but many more litres of beer are drunk in Morocco than the combined population of tourists and resident non-Muslims could possibly drink: it seems many Muslims drink alcohol now and then. From their actions we can see that the vast majority of self-proclaimed Muslims don’t seem to believe that drawing Muhammad is so wrong that it justifies killing people.

It all starts to get a bit Abrahamic if you think of belief as something out there in groups instead of something specific and physical inside the skull.