It's hard not to sympathize with Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-American doctor who made international headlines after denouncing her former religion, Islam, on al-Jazeera last month. Sultan lost her faith after witnessing members of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into her medical school classroom and kill her professor in front of the class. Making matters worse, they did so while screaming "Allahu Akbar," a phrase of religious piety that has seemingly been hijacked by Islam's most violent adherents.

I too have seen the results of Islamist terrorism, in Israel and Iraq, and they have scarred me for life. Yet I have also seen the results of American/Christian and Israeli/Jewish terror. Unlike Dr. Sultan, however, these experiences did not lead me to abandon my identity (more accurately, identities), although I don't blame her for making that choice. Whether witnessing such acts of violence leads a person to abandon or fight to reclaim one's faith is an intensely personal decision, one that can only be made by the person experiencing such a crisis.

Which is probably why many Muslims have quietly lauded Sultan for her forthright critique of her (former) religion. More supportive have been conservative Christian and Jewish groups in the United States. Regardless of its reception, however, what is troubling about this phenomenon is that Sultan's comments in fact betray an incredible ignorance of contemporary Islam and Muslim cultures, one that feeds into the most negative stereotypes of Islam in American culture and the West more broadly.

At base, Dr. Sultan believes that "the clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century... between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

It is hard to overstate both how inaccurate yet entrenched this line of reasoning has been in our own cultures (which is precisely why for almost a week, stories about her have remained among the most emailed on the web). It continues a centuries-long discourse that justified European conquest and rule of the Muslim and larger non-Western world and the incredible violence that came with it. Whether it was James Mill discussing India, Lord Cromer writing about Egypt, or George Bush extolling the United States' mission in Iraq, Europeans and today Americans have seen themselves as possessing a uniquely civilized and rational culture that stands in stark contrast to the primitive and barbaric customs of the natives whom we seem always, against our will of course, to wind up ruling--always with the expressed intention of helping them achieve even greater liberty.

Such a claim is wrong on two very fundamental counts. First, it assumes that there are clearly definable civilizations (or at least “mentalities”) called the “West” or “Islam” that evolved separately and largely in isolation from each other, and do not interact except through the proverbial clashes between them. Only with such a view can one be understood to be advancing towards the highest forms of development while the other remains mired in a dim past.

The reality is that the West and Islam emerged together, if in conflict with each other. They remain historically, politically, economically and even sociologically inseparable, however much they define themselves against the other. It might make us feel good to believe that al-Qa'ed aor Muslime extremism more broadly is an atavistic phenomenon that cannot reflect negatively on our own self-image, but in fact they are quintessentially modern, and even globalized (as John Gray demonstrates in his 2005 book “Al-Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern”). And they are such precisely because of the Muslim world's long and troubling experience of modernity, first through European colonialism and then through forms of secular nationalism—Nasserism, Baathism—that also failed on their promises for reform.

Perhaps more dangerous is her belief that the civilization and rationality on the one hand, and so-called barbarism and primitivism on the other, are necessarily opposed to each other, so that if only Muslims could become more civilized and less primitive and barbaric medical school professors and their co-religionists would no longer have to fear being slaughtered without reason. But the history of the last century—two world wars, a Holocaust, horrifically bloody repression sponsored by the guiding lights of the modern world—should have warned her as to the shakiness of such a proposition.

In fact, as the great German Holocaust scholar Zybmunt Bauman has so brilliantly argued in his “Modernity and the Holocaust,” science and rationality have often been put at the service of brutality and exploitation, and the most advanced civilizations can be the authors of the most advanced and efficient methods of mass murder imaginable. And such developments are in no way aberrations away from modern, rational civilization, but rather are a logical and even “normal” outcome of the drives and processes that are indispensable to its development.

For the United States, this particular dynamic allowed us to kill between two to three millions South Asians to make Vietnam safe for democracy, and now well over 100,000 Iraqis to do the same in that country; all in the name of the very civilization Sultan rightly cherishes. Yet if Americans were to judge ourselves by the same harsh logic that Dr. Sultan judges her heritage, then we'd all put away our stars and stripes and speaking Esperanto. Of course, we won't do that, nor should we.

But Americans are flocking to Dr. Sultan's comments because they allow us harshly to critique Islam in a manner guaranteed (like the Cartoon controversy of last month) to provoke the “medieval mentality” that she first witnessed in medical school. They also allow us to continue to believe that despite all our policy failures in Iraq and elsewhere and the incredible financial and human sacrifices they have entailed, our self- (or according to President Bush, divinely) appointed mission is morally correct and worthwhile. As important, the reason for their failures is ultimately because the Muslim world, as Sultan specifically argues, is irredeemable. In other words, it's not our fault, it's theirs, and her arguments just serve to prove the point in spades.

Yet whatever the failings of the West or Islam, ultimately the worth of a civilization, culture, or country is not to be judged by its failures, but rather by its potential to inspire and motivate its members to achieve peace, justice and at least some measure of prosperity. In that context, and just like Judaism and Christianity, at the same time Islam advocates violence and domination it also advocate peace, justice and brotherhood. It's up to us to determine which message we choose to hear. Jihadi Islam, Crusader Christianity, Settler Judaism--all are logical and rational expressions of the three Abrahamic traditions; but they don't have to be the only ones.