The AP has an interesting story about some vandalism of convenience stores in California owned by Muslims. The vandals are... Muslims. Sort of.

Dressed in bow ties and dark suits, the group of nearly a dozen men entered a corner store and smashed bottles of liquor, wine and beer with metal pipes, shattering refrigerator cases and leaving behind a terrified clerk along with piles of broken glass.

No one was held up. Nothing was stolen. The vandals just wanted to leave a message: Stop selling booze to fellow Muslims.

In urban America, friction between poor residents and the immigrant merchants who sell cigarettes, bread and alcoholic beverages from neighborhood markets is nothing new. But the recent attack at San Pablo Liquor has injected religion into the old debate over whether a glut of such stores contributes to violent crime, vagrancy and other social ills.

Followed by an identical attack at another West Oakland store the same evening, the episode highlighted tensions _ and different interpretations of doctrine _ between black Muslims hoping to reclaim troubled parts of the city and Middle Eastern shop owners, many of them also of Muslim faith.

The story is interesting, though the article is awfully written. I don't know how one can talk about "bowtied Muslims" and "black Muslims" with outlining the peculiarity that is the Nation of Islam.

Then there's this bit which just takes the cake:

While black and Middle Eastern Muslims may pray at the same mosques on weekends, their worlds do not tend to overlap much beyond that, said Hatem Bazian, professor of Near East and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

That's about as close as the article gets to pointing out the real issue, and even that it gets wrong. Black Muslims in general do not, generally, pray at the same mosques. Black Muslims are generally members of the Nation of Islam, which is roughly to Islam what Mormonism is to Christianity. Both are largely an American spin of a worldwide religion (LDS founded in New York, NOI founded in Michigan). Both consider themselves part of the larger religion but are viewed by suspicion by most other splinters of the faith. It's members of the Nation of Islam that wear the bowties, are African-American, and whatnot. As for the mosques, well no, they're not the same either. Among other things, Nation of Islam mosques have church-like pews.

Obviously not every article that discusses the Nation of Islam does not need to go into its history and its differences from traditional Islam, but it seems to me that one that is specifically talking about the conflict between the two ought to at least provide a little context.