Salon's take on Islam
[link|http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/10/11/sword/index_np.html|Multiculturalists won't like this]
Excerpt:
Oct. 11, 2001 | Since the terror attacks, great care has been taken to emphasize that Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaida terrorist network do not represent Islam or the concept of jihad as presented in the Koran. Everybody certainly wishes that this were true, that Islam is a religion of peace, as the president said, and that the bin Ladens of the world are nothing more than aberrations in the history of religion.
Yet there is reason to believe that there is something inherent in the history and texts of the religion that leads to this behavior.
At the core of Islamic history is the fact of the unification of the tribes of Arabia into a powerful medieval military force, one that overran the waning power of the Byzantine Empire and the Persians in the Levant. Islam, from its inception, is a political as well as a religious movement, and the themes of religion, politics and law are inseparable in the Koran and in Islam as a whole. In short, Islam does not have a religious history apart from its political history.
This is in distinction from Judaism and Christianity, in which the religious community both pre-dates and post-dates the existence of a Jewish or Christian political state.
Looked at this way, jihad is not a secondary concept in the development of Islam -- something grafted on to the original religious message -- rather it is the very origin of Islam, the sine qua non of the faith.
