JMM

Your presentation is good until you reach your conclusions and question my thesis.

My thesis (remains) that all of Islam, regardless of which camp, is driven and based on a total way of life wherein Islam guides and directs the philosophy and actions of the actors (Muslims).

I respect your and everyone else's scholarship, but have myself relied on dialogue directly for the past two years on a variety of website and interpersonal e-mails with those who are younger (but some are older) Sunni and Shia Muslims. The interpersonal e-mails are not allowed on this website but I have started in recent weeks to share "some" of the Hujra Online comments, but far from all of them.

Thus, I would agree that we are coming from two different "data bases" and mine is from modern day (but not modern to me as individuals in many cases) Muslims who tolerate and enable both (my opinion) their cultural kinsmen, fellow Pukhtuns [fellow Sunnis), who people the Taliban terrorist groups. Al Qaida (Sunnis) are largely Arabs and not "trusted" by the non-Taliban Pukhtuns, on the other hand.

Do appreciate your very courteous and carefully laid out logic, and it went well with me...until your conclusion.

You and I, or "we Westerners" are very able to separate our religion from our politics in our style of thinking. The Muslims, of all stripes, are not so enabled nor brought up that way, at all, unfortunately, in my view, but who said my views should or do run the way the rest of mankind thinks and reasons?