HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- About 2,000 Muslim volunteers helped victims of Hurricane Katrina at the city's downtown convention center Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"We're not trying to prove anything, other than what our faith requires us to do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society. "What goes with our faith is to help others, to respond and show compassion when people need it, and I'm glad we can do it."

I remember sitting in my office at work on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Natalie had IM'd from London to see if I was okay, employees were clustered in the break room watching flames and horror on CNN, O'Hare airport was closing down a few minutes from my building, and the world stopped making sense for several hours.

In the days following the attacks, I remember the strange chill and the awareness that things were changing. Rumors spread about Muslims being beaten, mosques being defaced. Thankfully, there was no major backlask in the streets of American cities. Still, in the years since the attacks, the othering of Muslims has become a common thread. In many ways its easy: every day brings images of violence in Muslim countries, sometimes involving our military, sometimes involving Israel, sometimes between various factions of Muslim political groups... Sometimes, it's just inexplicable. We don't have time to sort it all out, but the message often comes through: When there's bad stuff going on, Muslims are often at the center of it.

The problem becomes more serious when it's combined with the minimal knowledge of Islam most Americans have. Most of Joe Average's knowledge about Islam's theology comes from two sources: terrorists and their extremist leaders, and Muslim apologists trying to patch up the PR damage. A word like 'Jihad' gets thrown around by a guy who blows up children. A talking head appears on TV, saying that 'jihad' really just means some sort of personal struggle to overcome evil, and it smells of excuse-making, neh? Then, compare and contrast assorted passages from the Koran that call for infidel-killing, and the case for Islam is starting to look pretty bad.

I know a number of people who've come to the conclusion that "real Muslims" are morally obligated -- compelled by their beliefs -- to reign death and destruction on anyone who doesn't convert. The folks who live peacefully with us -- the guy down the street who goes to his mosque and prays and fasts, or Amir, who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, or the aid workers in the article cited above -- they might be a nice people, but only because they're willing to abandoned the true tenets of their faith.

The Quran certainly does say some grim things about those who don't follow Allah. So does the Bible about those who don't serve Yaweh. Our reasons for taking some commands quite literally while ignoring the command to, say, stone blasphemers to death, are certainly well developed. But we can't say that the Bible, taken as a free-standing work of literature, doesn't promote, advocate, and even command violence of believers.

Christianity has evolved a lot over the past 2000 years or so. We've left behind The Crusades, the Inquisitions, and so on. But doing so required -- at the time at least -- rethinking our understanding of Scripture and stepping out of a lot of preconceptions. I believe that Islam is also evolving in similar ways -- it's 700 years younger than Christianity, and unlike our faith, theirs doesn't have the luxury of a New World to colonize in its agressive teenage years.

I think it's fair to assume that the Muslims in the CNN article above aren't from the same theological camp as Bin Ladin -- as an outsider looking into Islam, I think it's tricky for me to say that Bin Ladin is 'the real thing.' After all, an outsider could say that I'm not a *real Christian* because I help friends when they are down, even if they're atheists, wiccans, or technopagans. People like those volunteers believe, honestly and truly, that their faith demands service, charity, and kindness of them rather than anger and murder. They act on this belief, and it's a good thing.

Islam has many different communities and theological 'schools.' The radical violent Islamic theologies, like those influential in Saudi Arabia, have shaped Bin Ladin and other terrorists considerably. The challenge for us in the coming years and decades is to learn how to combat those violent strains while embracing the less radical, less reactionary schools of theology.