[Professor S]

To answer your question, I first got interested after 9/11, because I wanted to know more about fundamentalist muslims and their motivations. The more I learned, the more shocked I've become. I was looking for some commonality, something within the society that gave hope for a future without such hatred and violence, and I've only found one answer: Reformation.

The key problem with Islam today, and not just extremist sects, is that it is still considered the absolute literal word of God. There is no interpretation. It is what it is, and everything else is heretical and will come to Allah either willingly or by force.

The problem with this view is that there ARE different interpretations of Islam, and so we have Suni's and Shites at each other's throats for a thousand years. To give you an western allegory; it would be like Methodists and Lutherans shooting RPG'as at each other.

Cristianity USED to be like this, and there is a long sad history of horror caused by the Catholic church, but after the reformation much of this changed. All Christian faiths became much more tolerant of each other in time, and in turn other religions as well, and the Western world has benefitted greatly from this.

In the same time period, the Middle East has essentially remained in the dark ages, relying on Western technology and know how to even get their own oil out of the ground. It is a sad history of a sado-masochistic culture that is in desperate need of change. There are some that want to change it, but unfortunately the "no interpretations" clause still gets in the way. Too many moderates refuse to publicly denounce and work towards global islamic reform because they completely separate their form of Islam from all others, not realizing that the worst makes the good seem bad.