President Obama declared in his recent address to the nation that ISIL is not Islamic. But how does he know? On what basis did the president of the United States declare the a group of Muslims that calls itself Islamic State not Islamic? Has he studied Islam and Islamic history and concluded that ISIL, Boko Haram, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group that slaughtered 166 people in Mumbai, most especially guests at the Taj Hotel,and which tortured to death a rabbi and his wife), the various Palestinian terrorist groups (all of which have been Muslim, even though there are many Christian Palestinians), and the Muslim terror groups in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere are also all not Islamic? Has he concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood, which won Egypts most open election ever, is not Islamic? And what about Saudi Arabia? Is that country not Islamic, too? Oh, and what about Iran? Also not Islamic? Isnt that a lot of Muslims, Muslim groups, and even nations -- all of whom claim Islam as their religion -- to dismiss as not Islamic? To be fair, these baseless generalizations about what is and what is not Islamic started with his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who regularly announced that Islam is a religion of peace. And it is equally unlikely that his assertion came from a study of Islam and Islamic history. The fact is that a study of Islamic history could not lead any fair-minded individual to conclude that all these Muslims and Islamic groups are not Islamic. Neither Islamic history, which, from its origins, offered vast numbers of people a choice between Islam and death, nor Islam as reflected in its greatest works, would lead one to draw that conclusion. Killing unbelievers has been part of -- of course not all of -- Islam since its inception. Within 10 years of Muhammads death Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 19:03:37 +0000
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