It is easy to see how this got overlooked when originally written (the day before the 2000 election).
Here is my personal experience. I lived an worked in an Arab country and wanted to learn Arabic. My teacher was an Egyptian engineer, who I soon learned was also an advisor and teacher of English to many natives, with a reputation for wisdom and devotion to Islam.
I was asked about my religion many times by people who seemed to know a great deal about it. One cannot learn Arabic without learning a great deal about Islam. Just as I imagine someone learning Latin in 9th Century Sweden would probably have been pressured to be baptized in the faith, I was asked to convert many times as I studied Arabic. I was even offered a sizable monetary bonus!
Islam is an Old Testament religion, which is well known. However, it also reveres the New, which may not be so well known. In addition to Abraham, Muslims also revere Christ as a Prophet and some, especially in Egypt and Syria, revere Mary as His Virgin Mother. Mohammed was first recognized as The Prophet by a Christian Monk. Like Christ, Mohammed lived in his youth as an exile in Egypt. (Unlike Christ, it is said he fathered children with a Christian woman there, named Mary!) The paralells between Judaism, Christianity,and Islam would surprise many Americans.
The incredibly vague and wandering Koran and the commentaries upon it, are where Islam and the two older faiths part company. I constantly brought up the Muslim attitude toward Infidels (us). And here is what I was told,"We all pray to the same God.Jews and Christians pray in the wrong way,which dishonors Allah. But Allah the Merciful is willing to accept you as converts. But to be against Islam is to be against Allah. Allah is patient and we realize that many must come to Islam through study."
"However, if one is given many chances to come to Allah, but persists in obdurately refusing the opportunity, the patience of Allah wears out, and those who harden their hearts against Him must be punished."
A moderate Muslim is one whose patience with us has not yet worn out!
There is no one great central authority in Islam, but many. Although practices among the Sunni, Shia, and among the non-Arab Muslims are quite different, basic beliefs don't vary much amongst them: Among some of their beliefs is that those whom they kill in a holy war, the JIHAD will serve them as slaves forever in Paradise.
We Ecumenical American Christians are "live-and-let-live" crowd. The doctrinal differences over which our ancestors killed each other in centuries of battle, are now forgotten to the point where we share communion and each other's churches. It's gotten to the point where even the Pope has acknowledged that the Jews are our spiritual fathers, apologized to the Orthodox, admitted that Luther had a valid doctrinal point, and regulary ordains Anglican priests into the Roman church!
Islam is completely separate from all this fellowship stuff. In all fairness, as in any religion, there is a range of interpretation. But, at its core, Islam is not a tolerant religion as an American would understand the term. To protest otherwise, as all these American Muslims are now doing, is patent nonsense. (Prove me wrong, fellow Americans of the Muslim persuasion. Start a committee to end slavery and the slaughter of Christians in the Sudan.)
The collective mind of Islam, which in many ways, seems curiously stuck around the 12th Century, may just be now turning to its version of the Crusades. Or perhaps, unlike us, they simply never fogot.