But it has grown beyond its origins, physically and spiritually. In countries around the world, it has been adopted in strikingly different ways. That leaves Americans unable to analyze critical world events, Amjad-Ali said. It also leaves the Muslim world unable to abide the secularism of the United States, according to Yale University professor Lamin Sanneh. America's government is not anti-Muslim, Sanneh said, but it is among the most secular, and for fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden, that amounts to roughly the same thing.
Individualism is the essence of America.
In the communal emphasis of Islam, such individualism borders on amoral and unethical. To compound matters, the Islamic world has viewed the course of world events as a constant threat. In recent decades, fundamentalism has arisen in every religion in the world, be it Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism. The term originated with early 20th-century Christianity and is often rejected by Islam as irrelevant, inaccurate, redundant or pejorative. Therefore, Sanneh suggests the current world conflict is not so much the entanglement of Islam vs. Christianity or Judaism, but rather an intense reaction to the West's insistence that a nation-state must be secular to be legitimate.