About the only place I can disagree immediately is this: for the most part we have been dealing with Islam most successfully on its perimeter and that is to a very great degree what has alarmed the fanatics in the homelands. They are running out of excuses. The financial windfall that has fallen into their hands is only comparable to one other that I can think of offhand - the influx of precious metals from the New World that so shook the very foundations of Europe in the sixteenth century. This influx has fallen from their hands like the sand, leaving a grinding poverty, senseless authoritarianism, and none of the ingredients of the modern industrial state that serve to increase the wealth of a people once the extraction economy has passed its peak. Which is is beginning to do - the relative monopoly in oil has long since departed and only a very vigorous diplomacy has kept the price of it controlled, and only then very imperfectly. The power that that control conferred in the 1970's has likewise fallen through grasping fingers like sand.
One can see the roots of an incredible frustration here, on the part of self-righteous men thoroughly convinced that God is on their side, and again and again thwarted by circumstances they dare not look into too closely for fear they must conclude that God isn't on their side after all. A scapegoat must be found. That, of course, is us.
I agree whole-heartedly with the author that the reason fundamentalist Islam is utterly doomed culturally is its stubborn rejection of the emancipation of its women. One does not cut off one-half of one's population (in many ways the cleverer half) and expect to compete with a population not so encumbered.
I am intrigued by the author's suggestion that Afghanistan might become a beacon of reason in a Moslem world of intolerance. That is certainly not indicated by much of its history, and yet many of the ingredients are, in fact, there. That people has escaped the difficulties and challenges other Islamic populations have encountered largely due to the lack of natural resources that engendered them. It has a disparate, clannish society and relative geographic isolation, but then so did the United States in its early going. I'd love him to expand on this topic.
I'm going to have to buy this fellow's books, and I thank you again for the introduction.