With Sunni insurgents battling Shiite militias in Iraq, you would think Islamic college students in America would be at war. Far from it, whether they are Sunni or Shiite, students in this country are as people-friendly as iMacs are with PCs. If minor rifts occur between Muslims, they are as likely to be resolved as they were during Saddam's regime, mainly without violence.

Nour Akkad's brief primer about Islam stresses that the initial split between the Sunni and Shiite branches of the faith was political, not religious. No matter whether you revered the prophet Muhammad or his brother-in-law and cousin Ali, you were a Muslim who believed in Allah and the Koran. Ever since the American occupation of Iraq, sectarian differences have grown into a religious schism, which has pitted Sunnis against Shiites in a civil war that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Christians and others.

In her conversations with four George Mason University Islamic students, Akkad finds an all-American stability and an era of good feelings absent in Baghdad today. Irrespective of whether they care about Sunni imams or Shiite ayatollahs, students work and play together in the DC area. They pray together at the campus's main meditation center -- interesting that it's called a "meditation center," rather than, say, a chapel or a mosque.

Neither Akkad nor any of her four respondents speaks English with the trace of a foreign accent. They sound as native-born as Dick Cheney. Yet one of Akkad's male interviewees, who seems as though he could hail from Hamtramck, refers to "Americans" wanting to know whether he's Sunni or Shiite. "I tell them," he says, "I'm either both or I'm just Muslim. There's no difference."

Is this young man an American? an Arab-American? an Islamic-American?

For that matter, is Dick Cheney a Christian-American? a British-American?

Amid the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air above Iraq, this uplifting Next Generation Radio drop-in brings up a disturbing question we need to ask from DC to Damascus and beyond: ultimately, who's who?