When teaching Islam to Muslim students in the University of Hawaii, I put the best face on their religion and then invited them to compare my description with their own knowledge and experience of it. I (an orthodox Christian) taught them; then they taught me. Every religion has hypocrites, but no religion is hypocritical: every religion's ideals are necessarily higher than its on-the-ground actualities.

Now for a few statements I hope you will consider worth thinking about.

1. The large hole in the human head is not a wound but a word-weapon against wounding. Yes, words can wound as well as heal; but the enemies of words are other words, not human flesh. Yes, word-wars (logomachies) can become sword-wars, but they need not. And “moderate,” orthodox Muslim leaders whose words deprive Islamists and their suicide bombers of Islamic justification are warriors the world now desperately needs. Jihad means “resistance,” and the world is dependent on Islam to be the primary resister of Islamism.

2. While the world may avoid a violent “clash of civilizations,” Islam and the West, both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions, so competition for converts will continue and should be viewed as normal. The Qur’anic and Biblical ways of seeing and living in the world are irreconcilable. The heart of the Christian creeds is “Jesus is Lord"--and that is as blasphemous to Muslims as Islam’s affirmation of Muhammad as the "seal" of the prophets is blasphemous to Christians.

3. Hellenistic Judaism, by incorporating the Greek mind, prepared the way for Christianity’s further incorporating of the Greek mind—as, for example, in the doctrine of the Trinity. The marriage of the Jewish and Greek minds was productive of the West’s distinctive civilization, including the Bible-+-Enlightenment mind of America’s Founders. Islam did not have this advantage: there was no Hellenistic Arabism preceding it. Young Muhammad was turned off by the intellectual debates among Christians. A few centuries after his death, Muslim scholars became competent in Greek; but it was too late for Greek to be a formative factor in the making of the Muslim mind. Frank recognition of this cultural difference is essential to non-violent, creative confrontation of Islam and the West.

4. No human tradition is free of violence, but I must mention a fundamental difference in the Muslim and Christian perspectives on violence. Muhammad killed (i.e., assumed military responsibilities); Jesus was killed (having rejected the military option). Pacifism was as natural to the earliest Christians as militarism was to the earliest Muslims, though Christian pacifism subsided as political responsibilities devolved upon Christians. Mature, realistic intercultural and interfaith conversation does not obscure this origin-contrast.

5. Islamophobia is a dangerous, debilitating overreaction to 9/11 and sequels. The Pew Forum-- in its 23 July 07 “On Faith” post--provides light against that paranoid darkness: “the majorities of Muslims throughout the world denounce violence, value their religious freedom, and advocate providing opportunities for women.” But one of the Muslim contributors last week—a former president of the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, a democracy—is surely correct in saying that the engendering of hate and the spread of violent Islamism is, now, the world’s greatest danger.