a valuable learning experience but some questions

Submitted by Anwar Wagdy (United States), Apr 30, 2002

I'd like to thank Prof. Alexander and Mr. Pipes as well as all those who shared their opinions on this board. I personally attended Mr. Pipes' lecture at the University of Washington, and I have to admit it was a valuable learning experience as it was my first encounter with Mr. Pipes' thoughts.
The lecture was a bit surprising though. I thought Mr. Pipes would focus on the different fundamental Islamic movements, and actually he started by mentioning some of them. However, as we were reaching the conclusion, it turned out that Mr. Pipes has been discussing Islam, not just radical movements.
Being an Egyptian Muslim I assume I know much about radical Islam. Egypt was one of the countries that suffered from those same radical groups. Mr. Pipes though puts me, as well as millions of Muslims, in the same basket with those groups. His moderate version of Islam doesn’t only separate the church from the state, but also separates faith from everyday life. Although I respect his opinion, disagreeing with it would again put me on the same side of terrorists, which means I have to either agree or to shut up.
More importantly, in his lecture Mr. Pipes promotes racial profiling as one way of protecting the US from potential dangers. Accordingly, if I was one of those innocent victims on the 4 hijacked planes on September 11th, and even if I was one of those who tried to resist the hijackers, my name would have still been added to that famous list of 19 Arabic names, only because I was unfortunate enough (but proud) to be Egyptian.
As many people do, I encourage Mr. Pipes to keep going with his lectures, articles and books. It’s sometimes easy to dupe everyone, it may be easy to keep duping some of them forever, but believe me, human beings will never be all dupes.

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