to avoid an eternity of burning torture) plays no part in
prompting Muslims to kill unbelievers. All this in a book on
war and peace in Islam, produced by an American military
publisher, a book supposed to serve as an intellectual guide
to military and political leaders in the wake of the most
shocking act of mass murder in the history of the United
States! The ideology is not to blame; the cause is random
bad people. An amazingly vacuous and unhelpful analysis.
But then perhaps his military publisher would have refused
a book that told the truth.
Given that academics and military publishers are
providing this kind of misleading explanation concerning
the role of war in Islam, is it any wonder that the more
terrorist attacks there are by Muslims, the less impact the
violence has on stopping the importation of Muslims?
Serious academic works have addressed political leaders
telling them that there is no connection between the
doctrines of Islam and the acts of terrorist violence carried
out by a variety of people; people whose only common
feature was that they subscribed to the same doctrines. It
seems that even after traumatic terrorist attacks in their own
country, some of the toughest soldiers in our society find it
inconceivable that a religion could motivate people to mass-
murder. This seems to be an impossibility because people in
the West are assuming Islam must be a religion like
Buddhism or Christianity. This kind of assumption was
precisely what Professor Bernard Lewis was warning against
decades ago. Instead, when we turn to what the Muslim
scholars have said about Islam throughout history and what
our own historical texts show us of Islam, what we should
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(Dana P.)
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