Political discourse about Islam in the United States and abroad too often resorts to a simplistic caricature that presumes all Muslims are the same, and tends to identify them all as seditious and anti-American. The reality is far more complicated, as Patrick J. Ryan, SJ, who holds the Laurence J. McGinley chair at Fordham, explains in the cover article in the current issue of Commonweal.

To understand Muslims today one needs to recognize three strands of faith -- in effect three different cultures -- among Sunni Muslims, who account for nearly nine-tenths of the worlds Muslims.... First is the relatively small but intense Sunni minority that advocates a radically countercultural understanding of Islam. These are the people characterized in the West as Islamists (formerly referred to as Muslim fundamentalists).... A second, larger population participates in the Islamic tradition but can be characterized as culturally secularized, often more influenced by socioeconomic and political forces than by the Quran.... But the largest bloc of Muslims are people of faith participating in a centrist tradition whose understanding of Islam engages with the many nonreligious factors in their world; they can best be described as inculturating their faith in a world that is only partly Islamic. These are Muslims for whom faith and culture are not completely coextensive.

Fr. Ryan explains the origins of these three strands and how they manifest themselves today, as a way of illuminating "the richness of that religious tradition." Read his article, "Islam & Modernity," here.

Concluding his article, Fr. Ryan writes, "Jews and Christians, in particular, must learn how to interact creatively with all three types of Muslims." That interaction was the subject of a segment on NPR's Talk of the Nation this weekend, with Fr. Ryan and Eliza Griswold (author of the new book The Tenth Parallel) as guests. You can listen to their conversation on "Bridging the Christian-Muslim Divide" or read a transcript here.