The bombs went off on Tuesday morning but the full story of the terrorist attacks did not end there. Days later, it continues to unfold.

I don’t just mean the suspect shot in the leg by the police at a bus stop, or the sudden police swoop that cordoned off an entire section of the bustling Waterloo Road, or the conspicuous presence of the army in the commercial districts and open markets. Unfolding, too, have been the story’s elements of hope – a rebuke to the racist and anti-Muslim sentiment given fresh oxygen by the attacks.

I know because I arrived in Brussels a couple of days before the bombing. It’s where I’m writing this column. The metro bomb went off at a station I have frequently passed through at that very hour. Since then, I’ve been searched before entering the city’s Ikea and eyed by armed police officers as I ventured to buy tulips from the market at the Place du Châtelain.

But I’ve also witnessed other things.

The international press photos of the city protest against the terrorist killings showed a number of Muslim women present, identifiable by their Islamic scarf. As the dead were mourned, some were weeping. But I have also seen crèche workers of north African background, working alongside their colleagues of Flemish and French roots, feeding and cooing at the infants in their charge, while the crèche itself, run by another woman of north African background, hung out the Belgian flag in solidarity with the victims and in defiance of the attackers.

These women are a rebuke to all those who say that Muslim immigrants can never identify with a European host State’s flag and values.

Then there was the late middle-aged taxi driver who drove us home on Easter Sunday. He spoke fluent French but rolled his Rs and his default pronunciation resembled mine: another north African, probably Moroccan. As he told us of the dangers of the late-night shift – the unruly characters, the passed-out drunks, the perils of not getting paid – I noticed that he had a printed Koranic verse hanging from his rear-view mirror like an amulet.

It was the Ayat al-Kursi, the ‘throne verse’, which speaks of God as the always vigilant lord of everything. According to some Islamic sources, it is the greatest of all the Koranic verses. It is enough to recite it for Satan to flee the room and for the believer to escape danger, even in his sleep.

It struck me that the throne verse was an essential if unspoken part of the most vivid story that the taxi driver told us: of the time a drunken young man passed out just after he gave him the street name but before he could mumble the door number. Miraculously, the driver stopped exactly beside the right door. Struggling under the dead weight of his passenger, he carried him to the doorway and rested his head against the door, resigned to not getting paid. Fortunately, the door had only one bell, and the young man’s mother paid him the 300 Belgian francs.

This courteous taxi driver is a rebuke to all those instant Islamologists who declare that the only good Muslims are the non-observant, non-practising ones, since the observant ones are obliged by their religion to hate the rest of us infidels. In truth, for this taxi driver, the Koran provides the protective hand that gives him the courage to go beyond the call of duty in helping an ‘infidel’ literally get home to bed.

Left-wing political correctness polices the mind. It’s the thought police. Right-wing political correctness polices gut instincts. It’s the emotion police

And, rebuking all those self-made sociologists who say that Muslims can never be integrated into European society, there were the very many Muslim families, with mothers identifiable from their head scarves, at Ikea on the weekend, looking at the kitchen and living room furniture, hoping to build a comfortable home of their own.

Then, on the train back – indeed, on any train or tram or bus on any day of the week – there are their children, speaking to each other in French or Flemish, even when they sometimes pause to speak to one of their parents in Arabic.

These anecdotes are not just fortuitous impressions. They are borne out by the statistics and supported by the real anti-terrorism experts.

Is Islam the problem? It doesn’t explain why, in Belgium, with a large Turkish community, virtually no one on the watch list has a Turkish background. The suspects all come, essentially, from the Moroccan community.

Is being an observant Muslim the problem? It doesn’t explain why two of the Paris bombers were running bars and smoking cannabis up to a short while before their involvement in terrorism. It doesn’t explain the two brothers involved in the Brussels bombings, who were known to the police as carjackers and bank robbers, not as Islamists.

It doesn’t explain the 19-year-old Anis, son of the Muslim convert Geraldine (who asked The Guardian to withhold her surname), and who was recruited to fight with Daesh in Syria. His parents both fasted and prayed; he did not until shortly before he left for Syria.

When his mother realised what he meant to do, she reported him to the police. (Ah, those disloyal Muslims.) They didn’t stop him from travelling because a judge decided that an adult who had not committed a crime could not be stopped.

Such stories are often told to illustrate the madness of political correctness. But the fact is that there is a right-wing political correctness as well as a left-wing one. Left-wing political correctness polices the mind. It’s the thought police. Right-wing political correctness polices gut instincts. It’s the emotion police.

The gut is supposed to intuit the facts. But unless our intuition has been trained, it’s useless in dealing with situations beyond our experience.

Here are the facts as given by top experts on the subject. In Belgium, with a Moroccan minority of some 500,000, the people who need watching number no more than 1,000. That’s 1,000 too many but, at 0.2 per cent, hardly representative of the whole community.

According to a recent Oxford University study by Scott Atran, Daesh recruitment from Europe is to be accounted for mainly by reference to peers and friends (75 per cent), then by family (20 per cent) and not by mosques (five per cent). Some of the fiercest Daesh fighters have come from Christian families.

There are no pat answers to why some people are attracted by Daesh and others are not. Some are violent criminals before their recruitment and then give an Islamist meaning to their murderousness. Others are drawn by ideology.

Didier Leroy, a leading terrorism researcher whose interview with Joost Hiltermann is published in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books, thinks more research is needed on the family structure of the Belgian recruits.

Left-wing political correctness has some part to play in the mistakes committed by the security forces, particularly when terrorist suspects are treated as ordinary criminals. But right-wing political correctness – the ‘emotion police’ – plays its own part, particularly when it incites us to ostracise people on the basis of race or religion, even though they abhor terrorism as much as the rest of us do.

ranierfsadni@europe.com