A number of American news outlets have been cheering Dr. Wafa Sultan's feisty appearance on Al-Jazeera a couple weeks back. The show featured Sultan opposite one Ibrahim Khouly, lecturer at the famous Egyptian Islamic university, Al-Azhar. Sultan characterized Islam as a medieval ideology pretending to compete with modern civilization. In America's imaginary Middle East, Sultan's performance caused a major disturbance in the Islamosphere. In the actual Middle East, it was barely noticed.

Sultan made important points about the roots of violence in the Islamic world, but swung so wide that her argument devolved into farce. The problem with self-styled anti-fundamentalists like Sultan mirrors the problem with the fundamentalists themselves: they thrive on the fiction that there is only one Islam, monolithic and unchanging.

Setting aside the confessional diversity within broader Islam, which includes Twelve-Imam Shiites, Zaydis, Nizari Ismailis, Bohras, Alawis, Alevis, Druze, Ahmadis, and other groups, Sunni Islam itself has seen constant change and development over the centuries. The legacy of Sufism, with its array of living and growing spiritual communities, demonstrates this kind of flexibility. From the US, it may appear that all the men in the Islamic world have foot-long beards and herd their multiple wives around from beheading to beheading on the backs of old Toyota pickup trucks. But for all its sound and fury, Islamic extremism holds the sway of a minority.

The prevalence of Evangelical Christianity in America, its overblown sense of apocalyptic nationalism, its support for aggressive war and its lack of tolerance for other faiths in no way indicts Christianity as a whole, and the same holds true for Islam. The myth of 'one Islam' plays best in fundamentalist strongholds like Saudi Arabia and the United States, where such an idea serves key power interests, and it is mainly in those places that Dr. Sultan's Fifteen Minutes will cause any kind of flap.