richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

WHAT'S W R O N G WITH RELIGION? 307
Ten years ago, Ibn Warraq, in his excellent book Why I Am Not
a Muslim, made a similar point from the standpoint of a deeply
knowledgeable scholar of Islam. Indeed, a good alternative title for
Warraq's book might have been The Myth of Moderate Islam,
which is the actual title of a more recent article in the (London)
Spectator (30 July 2005) by another scholar, Patrick Sookhdeo,
director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. 'By
far the majority of Muslims today live their lives without recourse
to violence, for the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you
want peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can
find bellicose verses.'
Sookhdeo goes on to explain how Islamic scholars, in order to
cope with the many contradictions that they found in the Qur'an,
developed the principle of abrogation, whereby later texts trump
earlier ones. Unfortunately, the peaceable passages in the Qur'an
are mostly early, dating from Muhammad's time in Mecca. The
more belligerent verses tend to date from later, after his flight to
Medina. The result is that
the mantra 'Islam is peace' is almost 1,400 years out of
date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace
and nothing but peace . . . For today's radical Muslims -
just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical
Islam - it would be truer to say 'Islam is war'. One of the
most radical Islamic groups in Britain, al-Ghurabaa,
stated in the wake of the two London bombings, 'Any
Muslim that denies that terror is a part of Islam is kafir.'
A kafir is an unbeliever (i.e. a non-Muslim), a term of
gross insult.. .
Could it be that the young men who committed suicide
were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain,
nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of
their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of
the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream
interpretation of Islam?
More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to
Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children