I don't know.
Lets say that someone, anyone, anywhere, wants to badmouth "Christianity" based on stuff that happened long before any of us were born. So, it boggled my mind to find, on just a cursory check, the shear enormity of of Christian sects - almost 40k.
Wow.
And presumably every one of them with a "I'm right and you're wrong" mouth piece for God mentality as they go about proselytizing one another and anyone else they can corner.
So, which one gets to be the poster boy for the purpose of reviling?
And I believe it, to a certain extent, to be the same with Islam. Brief example
http://www.rickross.com/reference/is...islamic27.html.
Yesterday afternoon I had a conversation with a Persian woman who described herself as a believer of Bahai, she would love to talk to me about it. A brief internet search informed me that Bahai is descended from Shiite Islam, but it has quite a difference from my understanding of Mohammedism. It seems to be a hybrid of religions - a little from here and a little from there. I would like to see how her story as a minority religion believer in Iran corresponds with that of my Persian Jew friend.
Generally I despise the middle Eastern (yes and maybe hypocritically I'll use the words) rag head proprietors of liquor stores in America. And I hate with a passion those assholes down the road who ran out out of their store into the street cheering and dancing immediately after the planes crashed into the towers. I'm surprised their store didn't mysteriously catch fire or that they actually still have business.
However, there is a Palestinian liquor store owner I know (who is a believer of Islam, but not radicalized) with whom I've had several very interesting conversations with - he related that his mother once told him that Israelis and Palestinians are like brothers who hate each other, and with the story of Jacob and Esau perhaps that's true in a fashion.
And I believe that behind all the rhetoric, that is what the "Great Satan America" of Muslim extremist expression (such as extreme interpretation of Sunni derived Wahhabism) is all about - a family fight which is thousands of years old exploited by outsiders as a means to an end.
It's a political conflict cloaked in religion using on one side as pawns people with a culturally medieval mindset - quite a number of whom have neither running water nor education (and perhaps "Christianity" could also be perceived as a sect of Judaism) and on the other people who are bewildered and offended by such cultivated venom.
What is radicalization of belief? It can be a very powerful manipulative tool, something we have to beware of right here in the United States with extreme Fundamentalist Christianity as well as deal with in the form of international extreme Fundamentalist Mohammedanism.
Extremism is not exclusive to any creed, it is just as comfortable waving the cross as it is displaying the crescent, and extremism needs an enemy.