1. Statement of faith: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is His Prophet."

2. Performance of ritual prayer five times a day, if possible facing Mecca.

3. Giving alms to the poor, the widowed and the orphans.

4. Fasting during the Muslim month of Ramadan.

5. Making a pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca at least once in one's life, if physically and financially possible.

In order to be a good Muslim, this is all that's necessary. There's nothing bloodthirsty in any of them.

The rest is civic and cultural interpretation of things found in the Koran and the Hadith, a collection of traditions about Muhammed gathered after his death which are accepted by most, but not all, Muslims. The Hadith were gathered into six collections called the Sunna (source of the word "Sunni"), and were accepted as legitimate sources of Islamic law two hundred years after Muhammed died.

Islam, like Christianity, is as different as its many followers. It's alien to European cultures because, though Muslims have used, preserved and built upon the knowledge of the Classical period, Islam itself never internalized the humanist spirit that animated Classical thought and reanimated Western civilization during the Renaissance.

Islam is a religion of peace when practiced by peaceful people. Christianity is a violent religion when practiced by violent people. (I was raised to belong to the Church Militant, a warlike metaphor that speaks to an earlier, more violent time.) I have participated in discussions of jihad with Muslims who define "jihad" as the struggle to become a better human being so common in the other great religions. The Muslims who look at jihad as a personal commitment of this kind consider it to be the natural evolution from a political expression of religion (such as the Holy Roman Empire) to a personal and socially engaged expression.

When people assume the worst about others' beliefs, they only encourage the worst among the others. Islam can be more, and is more than fundamentalist raving, something also true of Christianity. Islam's clearest path to peace is to embrace the humanism that fundamentalist Christians denounce.