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Rowling is wrong, but she has a grain of truth.

Both Islam and Christianity have two faces. One is pretty much sweetness and light, people trying to connect with their maker. The other side is dark, coercive and dangerous.

Both will blame extremism in their ranks on “misinterpretation” of their doctrines. But that doesn’t matter to those who are oppressed by this “misinterpretation”.

What matters is the difference between how Muslims and Christians treat those among them who are dark, coercive and dangerous.

Christians will not support those in its ranks who commit violent acts and espouse repugnant interpretations of their religion. They can judge them, either from afar, or as a member of a jury, and give them NO benefit from sharing their religion. They will send violators to prison or even give them the death penalty, appropriate with their crimes, and not give the criminals religious beliefs a second thought.

Muslims, however, find it agonizingly hard to condemn those of their religion who offend. While they personally are offended by the primitive, even animalistic behavior of their fellow believers, they still hold them up as better than the best of the non-believers.

But there are similarities between the two religions as well. One such are those factions within the religions that hold the belief that hold the literal word of God in their respective holy book, and that it must be obeyed to the letter.

This in turn leads to disputes with everything else in the world, all other knowledge, and civility. Much credibility is lost over silliness such as insisting the value of pi is 3.0, because “the Bible says it is so”, as if that matters to spiritual truth, which it doesn’t.

Yet almost all Christians, long ago, discarded the idea that *only* the knowledge in the Bible was worth having, that all other knowledge should be ignored, and people should despise it. For ideas abound, and people must rely on their own judgment to determine if they are good or bad.

But there has long been factions in Islam that hold just this view, that the Koran holds all knowledge. This view is a thousand years old, and was espoused by a philosopher in Persia known as al-Ghazali (spelling is important, as there are others with similar names).

In a Xenophobic and paranoid time in Persian history, he tried to unify Muslims by despising all knowledge outside of the Koran. His success doomed the Muslim enlightenment, and stopped their scientific and technological progress ever since.

And this is why so many Muslims are Philistines, who destroy schools and libraries, and kill teachers and scholars.

So while there are a few similarities between fundamentalists, the differences are marked, and make all the difference in the world. Especially to those who are not admired by the fundamentalists.