Nayeefa shows guts in maintaining her own Muslim beliefs (the veil and all) while criticising how this religion is distorted by Muslim governments and movements.

An excellent piece both for the current issues its brings up eg. Islam and politically motivated violence and its background on Muslim political development. Its academic style shouldn’t be seen as diminishing the importance of the concepts it brings up.

One is that Islamic extremism is partly a reaction to the arch conservative Muslim kingdoms (eg Saudi Arabia). Hence bin Laden, a banished son of the Saudi aristocracy, fights the world of the Saudi’s and West. As an aside my theory that al-Quaida is running a protection racket in Saudi Arabia “we won’t damage your oil infrastructure if you give us more money” hasn’t yet been disproven!!).

The passage “Fringe groups among the separatist movements have employed extreme measures, justifying their violent actions with an ad hoc approach to interpreting the religious texts.” seems accurate to me and as Nayeefa adds, this has applied to other religions.

One could also add that a LITERAL interpretation of religious texts often also leads to violence through obtaining an excess of self perceived “morality credits” (patent pending..:)).

Nayeefa’s point - to identify and encourage moderate Muslim movements and governments - also seems sensible. I think revised security measures at home are also appropriate (against all those involved in violence motivated by religion or politics – not just several Muslims) due to more powerful weapons available(or potentially available) to terrorist

The difficulty for Islam is that it does not have a tradition that advocates the separation of church and state.

Of course that in inself should not mean that such a tradition can't be build during the current century. Of course such a notion would require a heightened level of tolerance.

The other problem with most of the Islamic nations of the world is that on economic matters they are also authoritarian. Oil plays a part in making this viable. Like other nations they will need to make a choice between "social democracy" and "liberal democracy". So far the socialists are winning everywhere.