Islam started about 600AD or thereabouts, Modern Christianity, in so much as that taught by Jesus Christ & the new testatment started when he came of age roughly around 30-20BC.
What Christianity sorted out about 500 yrs ago in Europe is what Islam is sorting out now, its just that with modern electronic media such as the internet, everyone gets to see it's ugly turmoil today.
That is how I broadly see this fiasco that we see today..

How is Islam to be reconciled with the modern world?

It can't be whilst it keeps Muhammad and without Muhammad it isn't Islam.

Therefore....

Quote: Most Muslims have managed to reconcile their faith with the modern world.

No they haven’t! Most muslims think it is right to kill those who criticize Islam and Mohammed.

Quote: Hopefully the religious extremists will eventually be defeated by the more moderate Moslems .

Not going to happen -- the so-called religious extremists have the Quran and hadith on their side. They always win an argument with the so-called moderates.

Quote: the west needs to be more careful how it gets involved in the affairs of the Islamic world.

The West should not ever get involved in the Islamic world, even for the best of intentions, especially for the worst reasons. Western involvement will not change anything, and it only gives Muslims another excuse to hate us.

Quote: This is going to be a long war.

It is going to be an unending evermore war, and the results are in doubt giving the stupidity of our leaders, who certainly will continue to bring more Muslims to add to our misery.

It beats me how everyone seems to know what most Muslims think.
That's a lot of people!
No one can know what they all think.

Violent people are going to be violent, whatever God they follow.

Susie says it all for me!
Rhrosty.

Isnt it about time that people who presume to make comments on this perplexing unsolvable issue stop promoting the furphy that the Sept 11 attack on the twin towers in New York was an act of islamic terrorism. There is ample evidence that proves that it was an inside false flag operation.
Meanwhile all of what is now promoted as religion all over the world is essentially pop (comic book) religion. Such religion is mis-informed by the conventions of street "wisdom" combined with bits and pieces of inherited tribalistic cultism and/or the allowable entirely exoteric ideas of all the righteous State religions and their cultic idols.

All these street wars of religion against religion, dull idea against dull idea, are nothing but the muscle of individual and collective stupidity, sheeplike ego clashes socking macho horn-heads as if competing for a rut, the separate junk piles of the past all hurled at one another for the sake of angry power and frustration, whizzing between minds that are mucked in self, hardened by fear, defined by the inherited provincial passions of birth, and utterly oblivious to the Truth and the Wide Wise significance of our bleeding worried lives.

The primary purpose of such pop religion is to ensure that each generation is mechanically reproduced in the form of millions of people in each generation, much in the same manner, and for the same basic purpose, as worker bees in a hive.