The truth about Islam

Islam

Imagine

Imagine you're sitting in the food court of your local mall. it's crowded and strangers are having to share tables. Just as you're biting in to your stir fry, a woman asks you if she can sit across from you. While you consider yourself to be friendly and courteous and don't like to eat alone, you hesitate. The woman is wearing a headscarf and you realize that you don't want to eat with someone like her. A woman who isn't even trying to fit in to American society. One of them. A Muslim. Probably not a terrorist herself, although you've read stories about women blowing themselves up along with innocent bystanders too. But certainly someone who thinks that the only problem with 9/11 is that not enough Americans died.

But then you notice that under her arm she has a copy of the latest mystery by Jonathan Kellerman. Your favorite author. And before you even think about it, you're asking her to sit down and discussing whether the author's latest installment in the series is as good as the previous ones, and whether she finds the protagonist's girlfriend as annoying as you do. And when the two of you leave after lunch she's invited you to her book group, when you plan to convince her that the girlfriend really is annoying.

If more Americans had experiences like the one above -- an encounter that actually happened to a friend of mine from high school -- then there would no doubt be far less antagonism felt toward Muslims by the many Americans whose primary idea of what Muslims are like is that they are terrorists, the bogeymen of the post-Cold War world. But because of the distrust that now exists in our post-9/11 world, few non-Muslim Americans feel the desire to reach out to their fellow Muslim Americans to learn about the richness of Muslim culture and the real and important distinctions between different groups of Muslims.

While few Americans of any religious affiliation (or no affiliation) are ignorant of the fact that there are different sects of Christianity with very different beliefs and philosophies, many seem not to be aware of the fundamental divisions within Islam. Most of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are Sunni Muslims. In Arabic the word as-Sunnah means "the path" and so those who practice Sunni Islam believe that they are following in the path laid down for them by the prophet Mohammad. Sunni Muslims derive this right path through reading the Koran (or Qur'an), which is the primary religious text of Islam, and descriptions of Mohammad's life called the hadith.

Sunni Muslims are encouraged to follow the example of Mohammad's life in their own life in much the same way that Christians are supposed to emulate Christ in their behavior. And just as different divisions of Christianity are more or less fundamentalist in their interpretation of religious texts and traditions, different divisions of Islam are more or less strict. The most fundamentalist version of Islam, one that is primarily associated with Saudi Arabia, is Wahhabism. Muslims who follow this minority version of Sunni believe that they are the only true Muslims and that other branches of Islam are illegitimate (Cleveland, 2004, p.123). In some ways, the division between Wahhabism is like that between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation and Counter-reformation or that between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. All major religions have internal divisions, and all major religions -- including also Hinduism and Buddhism -- can be organized along a spectrum from most conservative to most liberal.

Some followers of Wahhabi Islam have been responsible for horrific violence. There is no justification for their actions. It is true that -- despite the fact that every Islamist terrorist attack seems to be followed by experts saying that Islam is an entirely peaceful religion -- that there are sections in the Koran that can be read as justifications for violence. However, there are far more passages in the Bible that advocate violence, something that Christians are likely either to ignore or deny.

The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. The Koran often urges believers to fight, yet it also commands that enemies be shown mercy when they surrender. Some frightful portions of the Bible, by contrast, go much further in ordering the total extermination of enemies, of whole families and races - of men, women, and children, and even their livestock, with no quarter granted (Jenkins, 2009).