Time Bomb:Islamaniacs!

Islamaniacs!
originally published in Time Bomb #5.

(check out lyrics to the theme song Here.)

Islamaiacs!

In thirteenth-century Baghdad, Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna published a book called Examination of the Three Faiths. It was a reasoned critique of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and as such provoked insane anger amongst the faithful who then gathered outside Kammuna's home and called loudly for his death. Kammuna was sentenced to immolation, but managed to escape the city and live nearby in hiding until his death.

In April 1967, Ibrahim Khalas published an article in a Syrian army magazine that labeled all gods and religions as "mummies which should be transferred to the museums of historical remains." Once again, hysterical mobs filled the streets, consumed with righteous rage. Khalas and two editors of the magazine were court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Also in the 1960s, Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese theologian, attempted to reform the heavily Islamic laws of his country. Religious authorities prosecuted Taha, finding him guilty of apostasy - punishable by death. Taha temporarily escaped that death sentence long enough to see his works destroyed by the holy men of Allah. In 1985 his sentence was finally carried out when he was publicly hanged in Khartoum. Taha was seventy-six.

In 1986, Rachid Boudjedra wrote in a collection of essays by Arab writers that "Islam is absolutely incompatible with a modern state" and that he didn't "see how Islam could be a system of government." Boudjedra has had a death sentence (death fatwa) pronounced against him since 1983 for his views. An Algerian himself, Boudjedra attacked the Algerian Islamicist Party in a 1992 article, demonstrating its undemocratic practices and comparing it to the Nazi Party of the 1930s.

In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death fatwa on Salman Rushdie after publication of Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses. To this day, despite pleas from human rights organizations and the global community, good Muslims seek Rushdie's death.

In September of 1992, Sadek Abdel-Kerim Malallah was beheaded by the Saudi Arabian government after he was convicted of slandering God, the holy book of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. "This is not mere apostasy ... it is a sacrilegious crime punishable by death irrespective of repentance," declared the interior ministry. = Frequently when we hear of terrorist attacks or barbarous acts committed by followers of the Muslim faith, we also hear the terrorists or barbarians described as "Muslim fundamentalists," as if there are Muslims who do not believe that the entirety of the Koran is literally true. One of the major tenets of the Islamic faith is that the Koran was written by God through Mohammed and is therefore without error and infallible. Heretics who suggest that the Koran may not be wholly true or erroneous are subject to all sorts of punishment, persecution and prosecution. There is no Muslim tradition of religious freedom or "live and let live," unless you count the brief time that Muslims were a minority people in an unfriendly country.

Islam began in 610 CE when a successful trader named Mohammed, living in Mecca, experienced visions and announced that he had been anointed by God. The pagan leaders of Mecca ignored Mohammed until he started attacking their gods publicly. Wealthy merchants were intimidated by Mohammed's power and therefore plotted to decrease his influence. As hostility rose, Mohammed found it convenient to preach tolerance for all religions so that his own could thrive.

As the climate grew worse, Mohammed decided that it was time for an emigration. In 622, he met some people from Medina who invited him to move to their city and offered to protect him while he preached God's word. At the time, Medina was inhabited by eight large clans of Arabs and three major clans of Jews, all of whom had been feuding for years. Mohammed sought to establish himself as a political leader by mediating between the various clans; through his efforts he arranged it so that all grievances and problems would be laid before him, Allah's representative on Earth. He continued to preach religious tolerance between the pagans, Jews and Muslims, although the Jews openly disputed his claims to prophethood. A new Constitution of Medina was written which guaranteed rights and duties to the Jews of Medina. It also granted the powers of war to Mohammed, who was eager to use them against his Meccan enemies.

After only six months in this new city, Mohammed sent out groups of raiders to attack Meccan trading caravans. His attacks succeeded only when he scheduled them during the Meccan sacred month, which shocked his supporters and detractors alike. Mohammed's relationship with Jews became more strained as he became more powerful. They criticized his teachings, calling them self-contradictory. Realizing that the existence of Jews in Medina threatened his goal of total power, he threw his claims of religious tolerance out the door and had all Jews in Medina killed or exiled, at one point declaring, "Kill any Jew who falls into your power." The sole exception was the tribe of Qurayza, supporters of the Prophet.

In 624, the Prophet Mohammed learned that a rich Meccan caravan was going to pass by Medina and accordingly sent out a large raiding party. The Meccans knew of Mohammed's plans in advance and had sent along a vastly superior army to teach the Prophet and his Muslims a lesson. Unfortunately for the Meccans, and for the rest of the world, the Muslims found great inspiration in Allah and won the battle decisively. Mohammed continued such raids for years, winning several battles, until the Meccans besieged Medina in 627. The siege was unsuccessful and when the Meccans withdrew, Mohammed had the remaining Jewish clan of Qurayza destroyed -- the men slaughtered and thrown in ditches, the women sold into slavery, and property divvied up.

By 630, Mohammed's enemies had had enough of the skirmishes and battles. That year, they signed a treaty with him that permitted the Muslims to make pilgrimages to Mecca. At first he went along with the treaty, but Mohammed was soon powerful enough to break the treaty and conquer Mecca. Shortly after this he commanded the allegiances of all the Arab tribes of Central Arabia and envisioned conquering Rome itself before his death in 632.

Mohammed sounds more like a successful warlord than a Prophet -- more like a Napoleon or Hitler than a holy man on a mission from God. His method of government did not rely on bureaucracy, secular ideology or police powers, but rather a cruel new religion that, like many young faiths, borrowed heavily from existing traditions and slapped a fresh coat of gibberish on it. Like Christianity, Islam expanded from a minor local phenomenon to a transcontinental death machine. Unlike Christianity, Islam is not on the wane. It is on the rise.

Islam as Totalitarianism

The religion of Muslims reeks of undemocratic fascism; indeed, every country run by Muslim theocrats is a totalitarian state. Islamic law regulates every aspect of public and private life: it does not differentiate between rituals, legal codes, ethics, and good manners. Islam legislates everything, such as the proper use of toothpicks, the hand with which you wipe yourself after a bowel movement, the sexual habits of married couples, the treatment of slaves, and wedding invitations. Religious duties, such as prayer and pilgrimage, are made into national law; affairs of state such as taxes and warfare are written into the Koran. From the beginning, Mohammed was a religious leader as well as a political force. His breathtaking victories in battle convinced the Muslims that Allah was truly on their side. Early Muslims never suffered the amount of persecution that ancient Christians and Jews underwent, and so Muslims as a whole were never at the receiving end of the corruption and cruelty inherent in a church-state alliance. Come to think of it, many Christians have yet to learn that lesson, despite the brutal repression of Christians at the hands of other religious authorities.

Just as Catholicism has its doctrines of papal infallibility (along with the various embarrassing clarifications, corrections and outright cancellations of papal decrees over the centuries), Islam has its own source for unarguable interpretation of the will of God: the theologians who dedicate their lives to studying the intricacies of Islam. When leading scholars of the various schools of Islamic thought came to a final agreement on an issue, large or small, that agreement was then inviolable. No further interpretation was possible. In fact, around 1100 years ago, the scholars decided that all the essential issues of Islamic study had been settled once and for all. They established a kind of agreement that no one else could possibly interpret Islamic law differently, and that all discussion about the laws would henceforth revolve around the explanation and application of the law. Thus, all possible dissent or alternative interpretations were done away with for good. In fact, the crime of heresy is still punishable by death in Islamic nations. The Koran specifically states:

22.9: "As for the unbelievers, for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skins shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods."

47.4: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives."

9.29,30: "Declare war upon those to whom the Scriptures were revealed but believe neither in God nor the Last Day, and who do not forbid that which God and His Apostles have forbidden, and who refuse to acknowledge the true religion until they pay the poll-tax without reservation and are totally subjugated. The Jews claim that Ezra is a son of God, and the Christians say, 'the Messiah is a son of God.' Those are their claims which do indeed resemble the sayings of the Infidels of Old. May God do battle with them! How they are deluded!"

It's not just stuffy fundamentalist overlords that interpret the Koran so strictly. Average citizens become blind with rage when they learn of blasphemy, heresy or progressive ideas in their midst. For example, on May 2, 1996, women cyclists at the Chitgar sports complex in Teheran were attacked by militant Muslims because of the shameful display created by their bicycle-riding. Sports officials at the scene were also assaulted and the complex was ransacked. Scholars said that women on bicycles were "indecent" and "provocative." Last January, the Malaysian government ordered all supermarkets to create separate checkouts lanes for men and women, explaining that this would prevent excessive mingling between the sexes, an issue of great importance to Muslims. And in Cincinnati, Ohio, Carlos Sanders was recently convicted of instigating a riot in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Sanders asserted that mandatory tuberculosis tests were a violation of his Muslim beliefs, so he and his fellow Muslim prisoners killed a guard to show that they were serious about their moral values.

The case of Carlos Sanders is a small example in Islam's long history of using murder as a means of dealing with unbelievers, a history it shares with Christianity. Under Muslim law, atheism is the greatest sin of all - more heinous than murder, theft, rape or adultery - and is therefore punishable by death. The law also demands execution of any Muslim man or woman who decides to convert to another religion. An Islamic scholar of the thirteenth century states: "Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever you find him, like any other infidel." Non-Muslims are forbidden to express their religious beliefs in Muslim nations, and even members of minority Muslim sects are tortured and even executed. Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyya movement have been harassed and slain for their beliefs by fellow Muslims. Muslim thought police regularly detain citizens for minor infractions of Islamic law - if the infuriated citizenry doesn't first tear the transgressor limb from limb. Ibn Warraq cites two shocking examples of religiously driven hysteria in Pakistan: a mob in Karachi stones an abandoned infant to death "on the presumption that it was illegitimate and thus could not be tolerated"; another mob seizes a man and, without proof or trial, severs his hand simply because a mulla (priest of Islam) told them the man was a thief.

The very concept of free individuals with the right to make their own decisions is entirely absent from Islamic theocracies. There is no deciding between right and wrong but rather a robotic following of orders. Ibn Warraq quotes one Muslim thinker:

"The Western liberal emphasis upon freedom from restraint is alien to Islam. ... Personal freedom lies in surrendering to the Divine Will. ... It cannot be realized through liberation from external sources of restraint ... individual freedom ends where the freedom of the [Islamic] community begins. ... Human rights exist only in relation to [Islamic] obligations. ... Those individuals who do not accept these obligations have no rights. ... Much of Muslim theology tends toward a totalitarian voluntarism."

All Out War

The fascist, warlike nature of Islam is embodied in the concept of holy war, or jihad. In Islam, humanity is divided into two groups, the umma (Muslims) and the Harbi (non-Muslims). The umma reside in the Dar al-Islam (the Land of Islam) and the Harbi live in the Dar al-Harb (the Land of Warfare). All acts of war are permitted in the Dar al-Harb. The ultimate goal is to stretch the boundaries of the Dar al-Islam over the entire globe. The Koran therefore instructs Muslims:

9.5-6.: "Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them."

4.76.: "Those who believe fight in the cause of God."

8.12.: "I will instill terror into the hearts of the Infidels, strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every fingertip."

Muslims are told that those who perish while fighting a jihad will receive eternal rewards:

4.74.: "Let those fight in the cause of God who barter the life of this world for that which is to come; for whoever fights on God's path, whether he is killed or triumps, we will give him a handsome reward."

On August 23, 1993 the United Press International news service reported on an interrogation of Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, one of the suspects in the World Trade Center bombing. During the questioning, Ali was asked what the significance of the Koran and Islam was in these attacks:

"Of course, don't forget God said in the Koran, in times like this, everything is lawful to the Muslim, their money, their women, their honors, everything. I give you as example [Egyptian President Hosani] Mubarak, a tyrant. He is killing people, good Muslims. We'll be called sinners in the eyes of God if we don't do something about it [he gives a quote from the Koran] ...infidels must be killed....and the Muslim when he dies it is the way to heaven. He becomes a martyr. A Muslim will never go to hell by killing an infidel."

Once a city of the Harbi has been overtaken and conquered, the leaders can do what they like with the captured enemy. Pillage was encouraged, as was the rape and murder of all inhabitants, including women and children. Captives were also enslaved or sold at auction.

Bomb-making Islamic terrorists are a modern phenomenon, but they are carrying out a grand tradition of holy slaughter. History is overflowing with detailed accounts of atrocities committed in the name of Allah. During the Muslim invasion of Syria in 634, four thousand peasants were massacred. In Mesopotamia between 635 and 642, monasteries were ransacked and the monks slain. In Elam and Susa civilians were executed. In Egypt, in the towns of Behnesa, Fayum, Nikiu and Aboit, the Muslim solders murdered whoever they could find, including the elderly, women, and children. Tripoli was attacked and pillaged in 643. Carthage was destroyed and its people slain.

Around the eleventh century, Muslims massacred the people of India and justified it by citing the passages from the Koran about slaying idolaters. The invaders destroyed countless temples and works of art. In Somnath, 50,000 Hindus were slain. A Muslim general killed thousands of peaceful Buddhists in 1193, declaring that as idolaters they had no right to live. He also took care to destroy their library. In the 14th century, Firuz Shah, tyrannical Muslim ruler of northern India, attacked a village where a Hindu religious fair was being held and ordered all participants to be put to death.

In addition to these hideous crimes inspired by Koranic verses, there were also massive forced conversions, abductions and enslavement of non-Muslim people. Every year, for about 600 years, the Nubian kingdom was forced to send a tribute of slaves to the Muslim rulers in Cairo. In 781, 7000 Greeks were enslaved after a battle at Ephesus. At the capture of Thessalonica in 903, 22,000 Christians were sold into Muslim slavery. In 1064, a Muslim general destroyed Georgia and Armenia and enslaved the few inhabitants he did not slaughter. In Muslim-conquered territories of Southern Europe, one-fifth of all Christian children were taken from their parents and impressed into infantry duty for Muslim armies of conquest. For three hundred years, starting around 1350, as many as a thousand children a year were removed from their families in this way.

Science and Knowledge: Obstacles to Islam

According to legend, when the caliph Umar conquered Alexandria in the seventh century, he had the famous and vast library destroyed, saying that if the writings contained within were in agreement with the Koran, then they were redundant and therefore useless; if they disagree with the holy book of the Muslims, then they are blasphemous and must be burned. It turns out that this apocryphal story was not invented by critics of Islam but rather was created by Muslims of the twelfth century to justify the burning of other heretical texts.

The centuries provide many such examples of Islam's deliberate turning-away from knowledge and human rights, a very common phenomenon in other world religions. The Koran, for example, accepts slavery as an institution, even more so than the Bible. It should be noted that the Muslims are bidden to be kind to their slaves, and to free a slave is considered a great act of kindness. However, under Islam, slaves are merely property and have no legal rights whatsoever. Black slaves especially were treated with total contempt and disdain by ancient Muslims. In fact, black slaves existed in the Muslim world into the twentieth century - some sources report that thousands of blacks are kidnapped from Africa each year and reduced to slavery in Middle Eastern Muslim households.

The study of "foreign" sciences - that is, subjects like mathematics, philosophy, natural history, medicine, and astronomy - was looked upon with great suspicion and occasionally open hostility, especially during the Middle Ages. These foreign sciences were allegedly a threat to Islam, as they came largely from non-Muslim sources. Ibn Warraq quotes one non-Muslim scholar as suggesting that science and philosophy flourished on Muslim soil during the first half of the middles ages; but it was not by reason of Islam, it was in spite of Islam. Not a Muslim philosopher or scholar escaped persecution. To give Islam the credit for [Ahmad ibn Rushd] and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent.

The twelfth-century Arabian scientist Ibn al-Haitham asserted that the earth was spherical, not flat. His work was castigated as heretical and his books were burned. Carl Sagan updates this Muslim aversion to a spherical Earth in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World:

In 1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished. Among many ironies, the lucid evidence that the Earth is a sphere, accumulated by the second-century Graeco-Roman astronomer Claudies Ptolemaeus, was transmitted to the West by astronomers who were Muslim and Arab.

In Islam, any study that is not essential to the furtherance of the cause is deemed unnecessary and therefore forbidden. Biology and paleontology, for example, is largely ignored by believers since discoveries in those areas would hinder Islam rather than promote it, e.g. the development of heretical evolutionary theory.

'The Inexplicable Taboos (or lack thereof)

One would think that Islam would call for mass executions of gays and lesbians, but there among Muslims there has always been a certain level of tolerance. The Koran expressly frowns upon homosexuality but in some instances comes across as rather ambiguous:

52.24.: "And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls."

76.19.: "They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders."

The early Islamic theologians demanded death for homosexuals, and in many instances gay men were executed. However, gay men and lesbians, not to mention hermaphrodites and cross-dressers, were tolerated in Muslim society; medieval Westerners would have certainly condemned the same groups, and in this respect the Islam of the past was more progressive than Christianity of the same time period.

Perhaps one of the most ridiculous and well-known taboos in Muslim societies refers to pork. In many parts of the Muslim world, it is forbidden to even say the word "pork." Occasionally, the thought police will raid gift shops and toy stores for images of the famous Muppet Miss Piggy. Any toys or objects featuring this character are publically destroyed. The novel Animal Farm is banned from Islamic countries since it features pigs as characters. The Koran does forbid the consumption of pork but doesn't forbid using the word "pork" at all, or prohibit pig imagery.

5.3.: "You are forbidden carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh dedicated to any other than God."

6.145.: "Say: I do not find, in what is revealed to me, aught forbidden to him who eats thereof except it be carrion, or blood outpoured, or the flesh of swine - that is an abomination - or an ungodly thing that has been allowed to other than God."

The peculiar aversion to pork is puzzling. Wine and other intoxicants are also forbidden by the Koran, yet alcohol is not treated as an obscene and intolerable thing. Pigs are filthy animals, true, but other filthy animals such as scavenging hyenas, hedgehogs, camels and locusts are permitted for consumption. The consensus among modern critics of Islam seems to be that Mohammed created a pork taboo as yet another way of highlighting his religion amongst the competing religions. Mohammed was aware of other tribal and religious prohibitions of pork consumption, and presumably felt that by making this one thing so taboo that even mentioning its name was obscene, he could perhaps gain more acceptance of his cult, sort of like Republicans trying to out-Nazi each other during the primaries.

Women, the Lowest Caste

Islam considers women to be inferior creatures. Muhammad himself once said that he would "never touch the hand of women" because women were viewed as unclean temptresses. In addition to the humiliating dress code, women are thought to be half-human and in need of guidance:

4.34.: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those [women] from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart; and scourge [beat] them. Then, if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High Exalted, Great."

The sayings of caliphs, leaders of Islam, were like proclamations of Catholic popes, and their words became the foundation for later Islamic traditions and law. Their misogyny has profoundly influenced Islamic culture. For instance, the second caliph Omar said, "Prevent the women from learning to write! Say no to their capricious ways." He also remarked, "Adopt positions opposite those of women. There is great merit in such opposition."

Ali, Mohammed's cousin and the fourth caliph, said that "The entire woman is evil and what is worse is that it is a necessary evil! ... You should never ask a woman her advice because her advice is worthless. Hide them so that they cannot see other men! ... Do not spend too much time in their company for they will lead you to your downfall! ... Men, never ever obey your women. Never let them advise you on any matter concerning your daily life ... They have three qualities worthy of an unbeliever: they complain of being oppressed when in fact it is they who oppress; they take solemn oaths and at the same time lie; they make a show of refusing the advances of men when in fact they long for them ardently. Let us implore God's help to escape their sorcery."

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali, living in the eleventh century, wrote that the Muslim woman should

stay at home and get on with her spinning, she should not go out often, she must not be well-informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbours and only visit them when absolutely necessary ... her sole worry should be her virtue, her home as well as her prayers and her fast ... she should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband's sexual needs at any moment.

al-Ghazali goes on to say that Allah has punished women in eighteen separate ways, including:

   * menstruation
   * pregnancy
   * childbirth
   * lesser share in inheritances
   * liability for divorce but inability to initiate divorce
   * seclusion
   * exclusion from many religious rituals and ceremonies
   * disqualification for positions as rulers and judges 

In addition, the testimony of one woman in an Islamic court is only worth half of the testimony of a man. Some modern Muslim scholars give weight to discredited theories allegedly showing that female cranial capacity is far below that of males. Since the primary function of marriage in Islam is procreation (for the woman) and pleasure (for the man), Muslim women cannot ask for divorce unless their husbands' penises have literally withered away. The Heaven of Islam is full of wide-eyed female virgins ready to fulfill the sexual needs of dead, pious, Muslim men. There are no equivalent male servants for devout Muslim women who have passed on to the next world.

Here are some interesting examples of the treatment of women under Muslim law as reported by Ibn Warraq. In the Pakistan of the late seventies, martial law was imposed and holy days like Ramadan were enforced by armed soldiers. Women were forbidden to compete in sporting events and the zina laws were introduced. "Zina" is a word for illicit sex that includes adultery, fornication, rape, and prostitution, and the zina laws recommended amputation of hands and executions for violators. What this meant in practive was that rape victims were often charged with violating the zina laws.

For instance, a Muslim in Pakistan kidnapped and raped his friend's daughter. Her father brought charges against the rapist but his daughter was thrown in prison for committing zina. Her father successfully bribed the police to release her and when she returned home she was severely beaten for dishonoring her family. In another case, a sixteen-year-old domestic worker named Safia Bibi was raped and impregnated by her landlord and his son. Bibi's father had the two men charged in court, but since the testimony of even one man automatically outweighs the word of one woman, they were not convicted. However, Bibi's pregnancy was evidence of adultery (it is thought that pregnancy can only result from consensual sex) and therefore she was sentenced to three years in prison, fifteen lashes, and a fine of 15,000 rupees. Human rights groups in Pakistan report that a rape occurs every three hours in Pakistan, half of all rape victims are juveniles, and 72 percent of all women in police custody are physically and sexually abused. Most of those women are in prison on charges of violating the zina laws.

Speaking of Pakistan, many people cite the 1988 election of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as an example of a more liberal Islam, since under traditional Islamic law, women cannot act as heads of a Muslim state. However, her government lasted almost two years, at which point she was forced out of office on charges of "corruption" and her husband imprisoned. In a hopeless attempt to cling to power, Bhutto frequently gave in to the demands of the Muslim clerics and theologians and refused to acknowledge the rights of women, whose lot was no better when Bhutto left office. Bhutto has since won and lost national office yet again.

Conclusion: Be Afraid

It seems obvious that Islam, like Christianity, is a successful worldwide religion only because of the bloodthirst and greed of its most devout leaders. Cobbled together from a mishmash of traditions and concepts, Islam's main function is to convert the unbelievers and slay those who refuse to convert. It is marked by several characteristics of fascist movements: dissent is punishable by death, women are second-class citizens, government is undemocratic and considered infallible, popular pogroms are encouraged by the ruling class, and, most importantly, all actions are justified when carried out in the name of the cause.

Sources:

Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books, 1995. 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228-2197.

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Random House, 1996. (Can probably be ordered from any bookstore.)

Read some reactions to Islamaniacs. You can also read a criticism of Judaism, or an Islamic critique of the Nation of Islam. If you think I'm some Christian fundamentalist bigot who hates Jews and Muslims, think again.

The summer 1997 edition of the World Policy Journal contains an interesting article about a moderate Muslim thinker who is challenging the fundamentalists of Islam. You can read the summary online, but you'll have to buy the magazine to read the article.