Which Islam is the True Islam

In an excellent review of Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Stephen Prothero claims that Islam is not simply at war with the West but it as war with itself. Prothero traces the current political situation in radical Islam back to the Egyptian cleric Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966, who began calling all Muslims who didn’t believe as he did as apostates and idol-worshippers. In this way, killing women and children became acceptable, and even mandatory, since the Qur’an calls for true Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them.”

Not only are Jews and Christians under this sentence of death, but all Muslims who do not hold to the radical view of Islam found in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and other fundamentalist Islamic countries. While we might think that no true Muslim would fly an airplane into a skyscraper in order to kill thousands of innocent women and children, a radical Muslim would think that no true Muslim would refuse such an honor.


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