Was Mukhtar Sunni or Shia?

Reading a book or even a dozen, may be by even the greatest scholar in the world in a particular subject, will not give anyone a full picture of the reality, and sometimes what is left out, even the tiniest, most apparently insignificant detail, may turn out to be more important than the whole rest of the picture just like in an Holbein painting.

The matter of fact is that there's no such thing as a "Muslim world" just like there's never really been such thing as a "Christian world", these are just cliche' terms like East and West: definitions created purely to make simpler, logical associations within a multi-layered discourse.
A system of beliefs however strong and comprehensive cannot reduce the condition of hundreds of millions of people of different languages, traditions, environment and economic reality to a unified purpouse: the Muslims living in Morocco, Albania, Indonesia, Oman or Russia have so little to do with each other it would hardly make any difference if they where actually living on different planets and hardly anyone knows this better than Islamic fundamentalists, their tactics are no different than those of most other radical groups of any credo all over time and places: forcibly try to unite the factions by encouraging fight against a "common enemy" and kill those within the same faith who are not fit for purpouse.

You said right that liberalism and globalization might be the cure for better... or worse! Infact I see no reason to be very much positive about the future: while in the Middle East they might be locked in a physical power struggle here in the west we are locked into a bogus economical system that has created very few "Czars" controlling the market while the rest of the population wonders where the next sh*tstorm it's going to come from, and I see no reason why it shouldn't come, it's just a matter of time.
So will have to see wether it's not too early to get "physical" again, and in all frankness religious, racial or ethnic differences hardly played any part in European warfare from the Napoleonic wars right down to WWII.

Napoleon had no racial or religious issues in his agenda apart from a "globalizing" one (under his own idea of globalization that is), altough he did get his bottom licked by few cardinals and the Pope on the way to the top I doubt it would have made much difference if they had been there or not at all to the overall picture.

I get increasingly fed up with so many internet morons that, apart from falling into the usual "Godwin law" trap, can't find a better a argument for the explantion of the rise of Nazism than to either blame atheists or religions: in truth both sides are absolutely full of scheisse.
The matter of fact is that Germany was in a catastrophical economic downwards spiral by the early 30s and when a population is gripped by fear, famine and uncertainty, they become much more vulnerable and willing to listen to whoever charismatic "preacher" of turn can give them a convincing way out of their misery: this is true for Germany as it's true absolutely anywhere in the world, in 1933 as it will be still true in 2933.

Antisemitism might have had its old roots in Christian bigotry but by then many far more convinging and "pragmatic" damning arguments had been created to fuel the hate, social, economic, scientific.. you name it: "Jews have created communism", "Jews are spreading immorality", "Jews own the central banks", "Jews have caused the 1929 crash", "Jews are social leeches", "Jews are an inferior race" (there where scores of "serious" scientists backing up this argument under the flag of Social Darwinism, which was a very serious and respected, and somewhat not entirely forgotten now, secular science).
Ultimately the argument that Jews where evil because "they killed Jesus" wasn't really flying very high in the Jew-bashing field back then and the exact same thing is going on right now, there's a simple Google task to do to prove that.

Even if Judaism and Christianity would have not existed in the first place are we sure that people would have just stuck together in a warm embrace like in a John Lennon song? I honestly don't think so, not by a long mile, certainly not while "flags" of all kind exist to keep the world apart and you don't need to be Noam Chomsky to see that.