As you are aware, that quote from Moshin Hamid was from one of four stories in the Post today summarized as "One Islam, Many Circles." For those who haven't read them, here are the four story links:

'Why Do They Hate Us?'

By Mohsin Hamid

LONDON Recently, I found myself in Dallas, a place I'd never been before. As a Muslim writer, I felt about going there pretty much the way an American writer might have felt about heading to the tribal areas of Pakistan: nervous, with the distinct suspicion that the locals carried guns and weren't too fond of folks who look like me.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001806.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

As American As You Are

By Mohja Kahf

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.

A certain Middle Eastern religion is much maligned in this country. Full of veils and mystery, it is widely seen as sexist. Often violent, sometimes manipulated by demagogues, it yet has sweetness at the core, and many people are turning to it in their search for meaning.

I'm talking about Christianity.

This Muslim squirms whenever secular friends -- tolerant toward believers in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Native American spirituality -- dismiss Christians with snorts of contempt. "It's because the Christian right wants to take over this country," they protest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001809.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Bush Still Doesn't Get It

By Akbar Ahmed

Here's a bit of modern-day heresy: President Bush actually has some rather sound instincts about the Muslim world. He has visited mosques more often than any of his predecessors, and he frequently talks of winning Muslim hearts and minds. So why are those hearts and minds so estranged today? What went wrong?

The problem is that Bush has relied on ill-informed advisers and out-of-touch experts. By substituting their false expertise for his own sensible intuitions, he has failed to understand the Muslim world -- which means he has failed to understand the arena in which the first post-9/11 presidency will be judged. Instead of seriously explaining Muslim societies that are profoundly split in complex ways, Bush's aides have offered a fatally flawed stereotype of Islam as monolithic and violent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001805.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Losing My Jihadism

By Mansour al-Nogaidan

BURAIDAH, Saudi Arabia Islam needs a Reformation. It needs someone with the courage of Martin Luther.

This is the belief I've arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey. It's not a popular conviction -- it has attracted angry criticism, including death threats, from many sides. But it was reinforced by Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, I've only become more convinced that it is critical to Islam's future.

Muslims are too rigid in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It's time for many verses -- especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions -- to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It's time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It's time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the prophet's words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace and of light.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001808.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Peter Galbraith in the August 16 issue of the New York Review of Books has an excellent article titled, “Iraq: The Way to Go.” This is a must read if you want a realistic rundown, minus all the neocon mantra propaganda, on the current political situation as well as his assessment of the best, of the worst, outcomes that could result. This short excerpt sums up some of his conclusions.

“Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today—a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.

Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete US withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the US to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish– Kurdish war; it provides US forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20470

Got the spelling right in my post not headline

For the last time it's Galbraith.