NOT in our name.

That was the message countless Muslims around the world strived to make clear in the wake of the Islamist-inspired ­terrorist attacks in Paris.

Today in that great city, people of many faiths and creeds will march together to express both their sadness over the deaths of innocents and solidarity in rejecting such violence and hatred.

This is the valued measure of how people react whenever the gunmen and bombers seek to provoke the discord, suspicion and conflict that serves their ends.

Today's march is the right way to shun the bloody medievalism and criminality that lies at the root of Islamist extremism. As with the attacks in New York, London and Madrid before, there are those who insist events in Paris are another episode in a clash of civilisations pitching Western democracies against extreme Islam.

Such an assessment is not only misguided but plays precisely towards the strategy the terrorists seek to implement. Nothing would please the violent extremists of Islamic State (IS) or al-Qaeda more than for the West to say it is at war with Islam. What's more, those that claim such a civilisational struggle is under way are guilty of failing to recognise that the vast majority of victims of Islamist terror are themselves Muslim.

Every day, in places like Syria and Iraq, Muslims die at the hands of IS and other jihadist fanatics. While it would be wrong to compare loss for loss between Paris and other places, last month saw 141 people, all but nine of them children, die in the ­Taliban attack on the Army Public school in Peshawar, Pakistan. Over the last few days as our foreign news coverage today reveals, perhaps as many as 2000 innocent civilians -mostly women and children - were massacred by the extremist Boko Haram group around the town of Baga in Nigeria.

Muslims in Paris, too, were victims and heroes, not just villains of the piece. Ahmed Merabet, the policeman shot dead, was a Muslim. Lassana Bathily, a young Muslim man from Mali, saved several hostages during the kosher market siege.

Right now across Europe there is a pernicious anti-immigrant sentiment epitomised by the so-called "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the West" (Pegida) demonstrations in Dresden, Germany.

Yesterday, that same city saw even larger rallies countering that ­insidious political sentiment as Germans took to streets to show their rejection of racism and xenophobia.

Today, Paris will see tens of ­thousands do the same. Yes, we must condemn what happened in Paris.

No, this was not an act of war as some claim, and to see it that way is to go down the route of creating dangerous divisions within our society.

We must above all desist from seeing the Paris killers as representatives of a religion and instead recognise them for the criminals exploiting Islam that they really are.

As the brother of Ahmed Merabet poignantly summed it up yesterday: "My brother was Muslim and he was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims. They are terrorists, that's it".