I appreciate your kindness

Submitted by Nabil Ahmad (United States), Dec 9, 2006 at 07:41

Thanks, Chole.

I'm not sure I would class myself as a "moderate" Muslim, although I am definitely not a fundamentalist or an extremist. I see myself as someone with deep religious convictions as a Muslim, but I rarely conform to "popular" views among my "co-religionists".

I see myself as something of an originalist. The Muslims of the time when Muhammad was alive are nothing like today's extremists and fundamentalists. They did not hate music or poetry. They were not driven to murderous frenzies and engage in acts of terrorism, rape, loot and mass murder. They did not mind going through hardships in their lives and were willing to sacrifice for the sake of others. They were not closed to new ideas. They remained loyal to whichever country they lived in. They were willing to tell the truth, even at the risk of harm to themselves. They kept the treaties that they made. And although their treatment of non-Muslims may be seen as discriminatory by today's standards, they were far more progressive by the standards back then.

The spirit of the early Muslims was one defined by strength of faith, compassion, mercy and open-mindedness. This allowed them to build a vast empire and a highly advanced civilization 1300 years ago. That spirit is strongly lacking in today's Muslims and totally non-existent in today's extremist Muslims. Many Muslims today don't seem to understand their own religion and tend to follow each other and their so-called leaders like sheep and would rather follow the writings of some scholar without questioning anything that he or she wrote. There is little or no debate with regard to the central question in Islam: What does God really expect of us?

The only way that extremist Muslims will be able to dominate the world is if the Western world is not willing to defend itself from their depredations, and if Muslims like myself are not willing to take a stand against them. The War on Terrorism is also a war for the soul of Islam. It is important the the West gets it right and not kowtow to the demands of a few extremists. At the same time, non-Muslims must aso realize that attacking the religion of Islam and Muhammad will only add fuel to the fire and give credence to the claim of the extremists: That the West is waging a war against Islam.

I just happen to know better. My family is Muslim but strongly anti-extremist. I know what the agenda of the extremist Muslims is. They will only highlight attacks of the West and Israel against Muslims as it makes for good propaganda. But extremist Muslims have killed far more many of their own fellow Muslims than the West has in the last 100 years, and yet they conveniently ignore and even deny this, often claiming that Muslims can't kill other Muslims. Their goal has been to dominate Muslims first, and then the rest of the world.

Extremist Muslims today are the barbarians of the world. No quarter can be given to them. No mercy can be shown to them. They will honor no treaty that they make with the West. The war against them is a war to the death: It's going to be either us or them.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".