"Islam is Peace": A Rebuttal

By Fitzgerald, from Jihadwatch.org:

...Now let's all imagine that we are Muslims, Believers living in the West. Muslims are not "monolithic," we are told. No. You may come from Pakistan and I from Somalia, and someone is here from Algeria, and someone else from Yemen, and so on. But we all share the same faith, a faith that is a religion, a politics, an economics, a system of artistic censorship, a guide to personal hygiene, a manual of etiquette, a guide to Dealing With Non-Muslims, a clothing manual, a guide to what are the permissible limits of thought and especially of thought about Islam and Muhammad, and so on. It's a Total System. It is unrecognized as such by most Infidels because what they know of as religion, what they think of as religion, is not a Total System.

And while Christianity is the other faith that makes universalist claims, it has not always, and certainly does not now, push those claims incessantly everywhere there are Christians. It does not think it right and proper to use violence against all those who resist the complete domination of Christianity or who choose to leave the faith. It does not regulate every area of life. It does not contain a politics ("it renders unto Caeser what is Caesar's") or a geopolitics. As for other faiths, while in Hinduism and Judaism informed converts are welcome, there is no campaign equivalent to Da'wa, nor is there anything like the Total System or violence of Islam. Islam seeks the uninformed convert, the person who really doesn't know the full story of Islam, but who is inveigled into reciting the Shahada, told he is now a Muslim, and then by slow degrees is taken carefully in hand and made much of by Muslims who watch his every move and guide his every step.

So there you are, a Muslim living in New Jersey or Michigan. What kind of campaign would you offer? Well, you'd carry on such a campaign in your own way, wouldn't you? If Infidels at work, or the parents of your children's schoolmates, are bold enough to ask you about Islam, you would first tell them all about Ramadan, and then about prayers. The very word "prayers" implies, to Christians, that the same kind of prayers to the same kind of deity are being invoked. But the prostrations to a whimsical Allah who interferes with life at every turn are not the same. Everything depends, inshallah, on Allah. The effects of that attitude are many on, for example, Muslim economic performance, or on the ability within Islam to foster the free and skeptical inquiry required not for mere technology, but for the enterprise of pure science, and also for the development of human thought. [...]

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