Muhammad Abu Layla plays us for dummies, or dhimmis. It would be refreshing if he would bother to explain to his fellow Muslims, the jihad terrorists around the world, how they have misunderstood Islam. From the Star Online, with thanks to Nicolei:
KOTA KINABALU: Islam continues to be one of the most misunderstood religions due to its misrepresentation in the Western media, a prominent Islamic scholar said.Al-Azhar University professor Muhammad Abu Layla said the religion followed by 1.3 billion people had constantly been wrongly portrayed by the western media.
“It is unfortunate when we hear that Islam encourages terrorism,” he said in his talk titled “The Misunderstood Religion” during a special session at the International CEO conference here.
Prof Muhammad said even the term jihad had been misunderstood, as the common perception of it was that of an armed struggle.
“Jihad has never meant to hold the sword. It is instead to initiate efforts to be peaceful, to protect the weak,” he added.
Prof Muhammad said those who propagate violence in the name of Islam were only twisting it to suit their needs.
Let's see. Jihad was never meant to hold the sword, eh? Yet there are over a hundred verses in the Qur’an that exhort believers to wage jihad against unbelievers. “O Prophet! Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell, an evil refuge indeed” (Sura 9:73). “Strive hard” in Arabic is jahidi, a verbal form of the noun jihad. This striving was to be on the battlefield: “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Qur’an 47:4). This is emphasized repeatedly: “O ye who believe! Fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear Him” (Qur’an 9:123).
“Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful” (Qur’an 9:5). The “poor-due” in this verse is zakat, which is a central obligation for Muslims. Thus the verse is saying that if the “idolaters” become Muslims, leave them alone.
Jews and Christians were to be fought along with “idolaters”: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).
Paradise is guaranteed to those who “slay and are slain” for Allah: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth” (Qur’an 9:111).
One may attempt to spiritualize such verses, but there is no doubt from the historical record that Muhammad meant them literally.
Most people will take this person's word for it and go on with their busy lives. The majority of people just yawn when religion of any kind is brought up. We have to keep chipping away at their consciousness, this is too important to ignore.
“Jihad has never meant to hold the sword. It is instead to initiate efforts to be peaceful, to protect the weak"
What was that Verse of the Sword again? And how did it get its name? And how did Islam spread so quickly through Mesopotamia and Syria, Judea and Egypt and North Africa and Spain, or Persia, or Hindustan, or Central Asia, or Byzantium? If it was by missionaries, those were some of the roughest, toughest and fastest-talking missionaries, spreading the sheer wonderfulness of Islam among tens of mililons of people, in record time (initially, in less than a century)to secure Muslim rule.
Extraordinary.
And if "jihad has never menat to hold the sword" what were those 78 battles that Muhammad took part in? The 27 mentions of "qital" or combat in the Qur'an? The more than 100 verses having to do with violent Jihad, as easily to be found on Islamic websites? Who are all those crazy Muslims, who on all those websites, simply misunderstand Islam?
What did Averroes write about Jihad? Ibn Khaldun? Ibn Quadama? Ibn Taymiya? Shaybani? Al-Shafi'i? Al-Mawardi? Barani? Al-Ghazalli? Sirhindi? What did Shah Wali-Allah write, Al-HIlli? Muhammad al-Amili, Al-Majlisi? [I take the names readily from the forthcoming "The Legacy of Jihad" by Andrew Bostom].
What about Khomeini? Qutb? Qaradawi?
In modern times, in just the last two centuries, what was the Jihad declared in 1804 in West Africa? In the 1830s by Abd el-Kader in Algeria? In East Africa, by the Mahdi in the Sudan? What was the world-wide Jihad declared in 1915 in Constantinople against the Infidels? What do all those millions who in the heady early days of Khomeini's rule, mean when they called for, wrote about, listened to speeches about, Jihad against Unbelievers? What do the millions of members of Laskar Jihad, or Gemaa Islamiyaa, or Jemaah Islamiyya, or Lashkar Jihad, in Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia, mean when they scream about "Jihad"? What do the Muslims attacking Kristine Withers on the street in New York City mean when they call for "Jihad"? What does Osama bin Laden, that hero all over the Muslim world, whose name is now the most popular name for Muslim babies born since 9/11, mean by "Jihad" against "Jews and Crusaders"? What do Pakistanies mean when they call for "JIhad" against the polytheistic Hinuds, those mishrikun?
What was Majid Khadduri thinking of when he treated of the "The Law of War: The Jihad" in his book on War and Peace in Islam. What did the English scholar J. Willis, in his discssion of the Arab slave-trade, mean when he wrote "Jiad adn the ideology of enslavement"? Or Jan Hogedorn, when he wrote his study of the Arab trade in black Africans, captrued and castrated for use as eunuchs, in his "The Hideous Trade"? What did Ibn Hazm of Cordoba -- Cordoba, that "ornament of the world," that showpiece of "tolerance" and "peace" under peaceful and tolerant Muslim rule -- mean when he wrote about Holy War? What did the Maliki school of jurisprudence offer?
And what was it that happened during the Arab conquests? What did the early Muslims call what they did, if not "Jihad"? What happened to the Nestorians? To the Jews? To the Greeks? To the Copts? To the Christians of North Africa? What happend to the Hindus of HIndustan? What happened to the civilization of Byzantium first at the hands of Muslims, first the Seljuk and then the Ottoman Turks, if not destruction impelled by "Jihad"? What happened for the first three days after the Muslim forces took Constantinople in 1453? What lead to scholars of Byzantium fleeing, carrying with them mansucripts of writers from classical antiquity, to Italy, leading to what later became known as the Revival of Learning? What happened even in modern times to non-Muslims? How did Algiers live for centuries, if not by religiously-sanctioned piracy on Christian shipping, until first Stephen Decatur (in 1815), and then the British a year later, and finally the French, by conquering Algiers in 1830, put paid to this practice? On what basis, if not that of Jihad, did the Muslim Kurds murder Christian Maronites in 1860? What language was invokved by the Ottomans to justify their murders of the Bulgarians in 1874-76, about which Gladstone so famously spoke? What were the impulses that caused Muslims -- Kurds as well as Turks -- to murder Armenians in 1894-96, and then again from 1915 (the year that the universal Jihad was declared in Constantinople) until 1920? Why, when the Armenians were being killed, was their constant mention of the word "giavour" (Infidel) and why was special cruelity inflicted on Armenian priests and their families? What caused the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians and Maronites and Jews , by Muslim Arabs -- in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Egypt, in Syria, in North Africa -- enthusiastically participated in by large numbers, who then split the take? What do the historians of the Armenian genocide, such as Vahakhn Dandrian and Peter Balakian, consider to be the role of Islam in the "Jihad" against the Armenians?
For that matter, how did the Turks regard the arrival of Jews -- Infidels -- even in the ruin and desolation into which the several Ottoman vilayets that later constituted Mandatory Palestine had fallen? Did they treat them well? Badly? What did the historian Adolf Boehm report about how, as a recent letter to the TLS by Dr. Tessa Hofmann (objeting to Andrew Mango's review of Balakian's "The Burning Tigris") put it, "the Young Turkish leader and Army Commander, Ahmet Cemal, reduced teh Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine by deportation and massacres, wiping out entire families of Jewish nationalist leaders: so that by "the war's end, it [the Jewish population] was reduced to 55,0000 souls, that is half of the pre-war population." A grim dimidiation, the result, again, of the Muslim "Jihad."
When one Professor Muhammad Abu Layla treats his Infidel hearers with contmept, believes they have no way of consulting Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, will fail to learn, if they have not alreadly learned, about the centrality of Jihad -- practically, as many Muslim scholars say, the Sixth Pillar of Islam -- as the means to spread Islam which is to "dominate and not to be dominated" -- when he does this, he simply invites his own ridicule, and of course he is now suspect for his grotesque and primitive attempt at apologetics (and one can see the same absurdities being offered at all sorts of Mosque Open Houses, Muslim Outreach, and so on-- where the mere mention, by a visiting Infidel, of Hadith and Sira will immediately be greeted with frowns of alarm by the Muslims in attendance, worried about anyone Who Might Know Too Much.) But eventually, given that all of the Qur'an in several different translations is laid out, synoptically, at various websites (e.g., www.usc.edu), given that the Hadith of leading muhaddithin, such as Bukhari and Muslim, are also available, given that the facts of Muhammad's life are also on-line, and much of the best scholarship on Islam as well, that is either to be found through the Index Islamicus, or can be found by enough searching (and a good deal is now being published that for decades was deliberately ignored). Of course, in many universities where Arab-funded chairs, and even whole "centers" of "Muslim-Christian Undderstanding" attempt to stem the tide of information and scholarship and free inquiry, but the data is beginning to overwhlem -- just like the astronomical observations that kept piling up, and piling up, and could not be denied, so that Copernicus, and then Kepler, not only could present their explanatory theories, but those theories, despite opposition, simply had to be accepted.
The "theory" that has to be accepted to explain past, present, and future data about the behavior of Muslims, and above all their treatment of, and attitude toward, non-Muslims, is that they take Jihad seriously, they take the idea that Islam must cover the globe seriously, that they take the idea that "Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated" seriously, and it is only we, the foolish Infidels, who keep thinking that of course they must be kidding, or of course those who think that way are only an completely unrepresentative and small group. The failures of education, especialy of literature and of history, have weakened Infidels, caused their knowledge of history, their exercise of imaginative faculties, their attentiveness to words -- and to sleight of word -- all to have diminished. The consequences are there to see.
If a preposterous and primitive man such as Muhammad Abu Layla thinks he can get away with such nonsense, it may be because Infidels have led him, either in their laziness, or their diseased desire not to offend, have led him to think that.
The best way to deal with such apologists for Islam is to express outrage that the contempt they show -- "what kind of fool do you think I am" is the right response, and then to follow up with a demonstration that one is familiar with Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, that one knows what Ibn Khaldun and Al-Ghazzali and Averroes and a hundred major figures, of all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and of Shi'a Islam, wrote about Jihad.
Of course, one can agree with Muhammad Abu Layla on one thing. Violence is not the only expression, or instrument, of Jihad. Propaganda -- of precisely the kind he offers -- is also part of the Jihad. He is conducting Jihad, when he denies its significance. Only those willing to recognize what Islam teaches, and then to ask -- if not to answer -- What Is To Be Done? -- can be listened to without themselves being considered willing, or ignorant, instruments of Jihad.
This is just more of already abundant proof, that you cant believe anything these people say. They continually say one thing and do something else. Everything is convoluted...like in the book 1984, the Ministry of Peace waged war...well thats Islam...claiming peace while waging wars. Claiming Allah is all merciful, all compassionate and oft forgiving, while they murder people in his name...Allahu Akbar...give me a break...dont you think this is just a little toooo coincidental? swami
This cluelessness about Islam starts at the top with George Bush, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and DoJ.
The administration is awash in dhimmi's (must be votes and Saudi money).
New documents reveal that the FBI personally escorted two of the bin Laden family out of the country in the days immediately after 9-11, and about 160 members of the bin Laden and Saudi families were given a free pass and special exemption to air travel. It was a Bush government sanctioned flight of people with serious links to the terrorists, at a time when all aircraft (except military and "ConAir") were grounded.
And still that cozy relationship continues, as the family is friends and business partners with the Saudis.
Freedom House reports that the Bush government allows subversive Wahhabi literature to be imported and distributed in the US, Robert Mueller kowtows to the Muslims, and Islamists have infiltrated (with the Bush Governments blessings) the FBI, CIA, immigration and all government departments.
Don't believe me read Paul Sperry's Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have infiltrated Washington. Or join the FBI and CIA and attend their Islamophilic sensitive training sessions.
Want to get fired from the FBI or CIA just hint at "racial" profiling.. And since when is Musim a race anyway?
The problem is at the top in the Administration, and RNC, they actually believe their own hype that Islam is a religion of peace, or maybe it is just votes and money.
Of course giaour neglects to mention many of these CIA and FBI agents are career people who have been there for years, if not a decade or more, and were appointed by Liberals:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1114-01.htm
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/10/272728.shtml
http://www.watchblog.com/democrats/archives/001047.html
http://awol.objector.org/mumia/liberalsattack.html
Not to mention Clinton's own people have long since admitted that Bush had nothing to do with the Saudis leaving the US after 911.
Yeh Gary Robert Muelller (appointed by Bush) is a career agent been there for decades.
Stop obfuscating and pontificating dude, and hauling in Clinton is playing tu quoque which doesn't work since I am not a Democrat, a leftie or a Clintonista.
And oh yes Bush had a lot to do with the Saudis leaving after 9-11, after all he is friends and business partners with the Saudis, so much Prince Bandar sleeps in the LIncoln Bedroom, visits him in Crawford (with Prince Abdulllah) and is affectionately known as Bandar Bush.
Wake up and smell the coffee, and you can start here with the Sperry Files and reading his book Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have infiltrated Washington (thanks to your dhimmi president).
As regards Understanding (True) Islam.
I have to say that thanks to Robert Spencer, the veil of ignorance was lifted from my eyes.
It was his book Onward Muslim Soldiers that awakened me.
Until about a year ago I was like the vast majority of the unwashed masses, totally clueless as to Islam, and I believed what Bush said that it was a religion of peace.
I was (still am) on a forum which, because it doesn't ban people or censor posts, has become a haven for Muslims and skinheads (most of whom are not so surprisingly self defined Christians who also are anti NAZI, with of course a contingent of multicultural types, who are not really leftists considering their virulent hatred of "feminists", gays}.
A Muslim convert (calls himself a revert of course) begged me to read the Qur'an. Of course he believes (as I later discovered) that by merely reading the Qur'an one became a Muslim, and to continue to persist in rejecting Islam as the True Ideology, meant that I was being deliberately deceptive and that my heart and mind were hardened (Qur'an says by Allah), he is also a Hadith rejector, but only selectively, there is a lot of protestantism in him and his type..sifting and sorting, snipping and cutting through his (their) sacrted scripture to justify and rationalize his (their) positions as regards fulfilling needs and assuaging fears.
Well I read the Qur'an and was appalled, in fact I had difficulty wading through the pages of hate filled invective, and irrational claims (like evil spirits and magic). Nothing but threats and sex, take out the threats, sex, the approval of theft and murder and the Qur'an is down to a few pages.
Still I had no clue, to me Islam was just another religion, albeit a shade more dysfunctional, patriarchial and misogyonistic than other religions.
Then I read Maxime Rodinson's Muhammad, very enlightening but still historical, and I looked at as history no more no less. I still did not make the connection between the "religion" of Islam, the biography of Muhammad and the political religious ideology called Islam today.
That didn't happen until I read Onward Muslim Soldiers. Thank you Robert.
Since Onward Muslim Soldiers I have read about 20 books on Islam, by Muslims and non Muslims. In fact I have a book shelf 8 ft long full of books about Muhammad and Islam, all of the works of Robert and ibn Warrag and many more, and it is growing. I am awaiting the fill of an order from Amazon with four more books.
I have books on Islam, as well as the history of the mid east, the Sauds, Iran, Iraq, The Shi'is of Iraq (Yitzak Nakash, a must read BTW), and even Thomas Patrick Hughes, Dictionary of Islam.
I would say that I am more learned, more read and much more activist in anti Jihad work, than the frequent posters to JW and DW.
My purpose in writing this personal revelation is to personally thank Robert Spencer for helping to wipe clean my glasses.
And in thanks, I have vigorously defended Mr Spencer from spurious ad hominems on another forum, ad hominems (in fact one thread was devoted to him) designed specifically to negate his message and effect, by questioning his motivations and "ethnicity" or origins.
What contributions have the rest of the JW and DW types made outside of friendly forums, such as this, in which you don't have to face crowds of muslims, anti semites and dhimmis?
It takes nothing but cowardice to be part of a hallelujah chorus, it takes nerve and verve, knowledge and guts to confront, alone, hostile hordes.
Gary working on the assumption that you live in denial and won't click on links or face unpleasant realities, here's a snippet from the Sperry Files
Link posted above.
PS Gary, don't play the Clinton (Dem) card on this old man. Saudi money reaches across the political aisle.
About the only thing I can say for Clinton is that he was actually more stalwart in his support for Israel than Bush and the Republicans, and it was his support for Israel, that resulted in the block voting of Muslims (especially in Florida) for Bush in 2000.
"George W. Bush was elected to president of the United Stetes of America because of the Muslim vote. Tha'ts right, the Muslim vote"
Gop Strategist GROVER NORQUIST, founder of the Islamic Institute, after the 2000 election.
In fact it was Sami al Arian, the terrorist professor, who delivered 50,000 muslim votes in Florida. Bush is owned by the Muslim community and the Saudis.
Which I surmise share the same "family values" as you and other conservatives.
All you need to know about Islam is: Bali, Beslan, 9/11, Madrid, Bagdad, Kosovo, Moskau...
It's all in my song: ..."Hijack, carbombs, kill the Jews..."
Sheik Yer'mami, Winds of Jihad:
http://www.terrorists-suck.org/fight/winds_of_jihad.html
All you need to know about Islam is: Bali, Beslan, 9/11, Madrid, Bagdad, Kosovo, Moskau...
It's all in my song: ..."Hijack, carbombs, kill the Jews..."
Sheik Yer'mami, Winds of Jihad:
http://www.terrorists-suck.org/fight/winds_of_jihad.html
Once again, you work on the totally false assumption that I am 100% behind Bush.
I prefer to keep my doubts to myself. There's too much junk like Sperry or this:
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1314.cfm
And too much idiocy about 'christian reconstructionism,' which will fail as miserably as socialism has, time and time again over the last 3000 years. Reducing the US to a USSA is not the answer.
Or haven't you noticed, all the countries that Most exemplify your goals, are being overwhelmed by muslim immigrants? Sweden and Holland being prime examples.
I am not even sure I am 'Conservative(I've worked raising river otters
http://www.otternet.com/ROA/wildlifecenter.htm
the last otter in the picture is a personal friend, and now resides at a Wildlife Museum near Cleveland, Ohio)
And working on the Powwow circuit for 9 years. But I suspect I am seeing things from the Inside of these issues, while you and yours just see ways to Manipulate such groups to achieve an 'equal' measure of misery.
Eh. Your 'evidence' aside, I shall continue to post relevant links. The same people who uphold Hamas, seek to change the US and the West- for the Worst.
Gary, easy on the personal details bud. These people would certainly try to harm you if they got the chance (sorry - merely the 'radical minority' Good thing there's so few of them, and that they make the classic error of wearing big red nametags saying: "Hi. I'm: ABDUL. I work in: TERROR"). Don`t make it easy for them. Me, I've said I'm in SE Florida and I'm leaving it at that. In fact, my steath program says I'm not even there.
Maybe I'm nowhere?
Geoff
“Jihad has never meant to hold the sword. It is instead to initiate efforts to be peaceful, to protect the weak,” he added.
Let's ask Nick Berg, Paul Johnson et al about this blatant mistatement from this lying, taqiyyah spewing SOB...
This is not a left v right, Dem v Republican thing, but so long as fools on both sides of the argument and aisle cast it as such, we are the losers.
That's quite a hypocrisy my friend. If that's the case why don't you put the shovel down and we'll take the hipwaders off?
“Jihad has never meant to hold the sword. It is instead to initiate efforts to be peaceful, to protect the weak,” he added.
But what he did not add is that the "efforts to be peaceful" refer to the "peace" that follows when Islam triumphs, for until then there will always be strife, and that the "weak" to be protected are only the Muslims, who are being "oppressed" whenever they are prevented from spreading Islam. There is not a word, not a syllable, anywhere in the Qur'an or the Hadith or the Sira, about Muslims rushing to the defense of "weak" non-Muslims -- it is simply an impossiblity. It would, from a Muslim point of view, make no sense. The only way to help non-Muslims is to get them to become, by trickery or even bribery (the wife of an acquaintance was offered $30,000 by some girls she taught in Saudi Arabia if she would become a Muslim. She refused; I thought she might have just taken the money and run.), Muslims. There is no other way to "help them."
People in the west don't have a clue how evil Islam is.
Man is a machine and can be modified, tuned, and rebuilt.(choice is an illusion, free-will does not exist, therefore(real)"democractic principles" are unnecessary and actually detrimental to society).
They think they can do that to the muslims. They've been doing it to us.
They, are those who are the true believers and modern day proteges of Rousseau and Wilhelm Wundt,Dewey,Sanger, B.F.Skinner, Marcuse, Habermas and a hundred others.
This is what the DENIAL is all about people.
ABSOLUTELY,POSITIVELY.
Hugh
If she had taken the $30,000 dollars and run, the only place she could have run to would have been Antartica where there are no muslims.
Hugh-
$30,000 to become a Muslim? That works out to $10,000 per brain cell.
One to hate Crusaders.
One to hate the Jews.
One to fear Allah.
Rudimentary, my dear Watson.
Hugh,
`If a preposterous and primitive man such as Muhammad Abu Layla thinks he can get away with such nonsense, it may be because Infidels have led him, either in their laziness, or their diseased desire not to offend, have led him to think that.`
This will give an added perspective:
1.Non-Malays living in the vicinity of mosques in Kuala Lumpur hear this call to arms against the non-Muslims through high-pitches megaphones
2.Dato' Seri Najib kicked the ball first to insist to insist none should openly debate if Muslims could slander the followers of other religions
http://www.mggpillai.com/article.php3?sid=2049
Dato` Seri Najib is the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, a bumiputra (for what it`s worth)
Hugh says:
"There is not a word, not a syllable, anywhere in the Qur'an or the Hadith or the Sira, about Muslims rushing to the defense of "weak" non-Muslims -- it is simply an impossiblity."
They are certain, by stating it the way they do that we in the West will understand it through our Judeo-Christian experiences of helping the weak, (no matter what their religion) in our society.( The big Tsumani 12/26 is a good example)
They are relying on us to misunderstand the information they're carefully spoon feeding us. This is a lie of omission. They are hoping that we are taking for granted that we are included in their references to "we." We're not.
They explain it with conviction because they are referring to other Muslims not non-Muslims. They will take care of one another and we will suffer. They leave this part out. It's in the fine print .... written in blood.
These claims of "the West doesn't understand Islam" are increasing in frequency. More and more Islamic "scholars", clerics and what-nots are taking up the cause of telling us filthy kafirs we don't know Islam. They do this because they know too many of us do know what Islam is really about. More of us are being informed and informing others, via the Internet and print media, despite their many attempts at censorship. They can't quite shut down free speech so they seek to scramble the airwaves with the Islamic specialty: taqiyya and kitman. Dissimulation and deception. Or in lay terms: lies.
Thats funny, his description of islam is the standard theme of all the dominant media/cultural/government institutions in the "West".
The power-brokers of the "West" want to make islam into something it is'nt, by using the tools of psychological manipulation and brainwashing, rooted in the works of Rousseau and later declared "scientific" by Wilhelm Wundt. It is based on little more than rats in a cage or Pavlov's Dog, basically it is a con-job on massive scale.
They are the ones who are trying to "hijack" islam. They are true-believers in Pragmatism. It means more than the informal common definition, it is a philosophical belief system, and it is antithetical to democratic principles because it does not acknowledge free-will or choice in humanity.
Pragmatism says "something is true only if it is useful", of course this means anything can be true and anything can be false, it's all situational-- there is no concrete reality and truth does not really exist. It is a tool exploited to maintain the position of power by the powerful, what they seek is the utopia of the complete protection and freedom of action for infinity of the elitist god-man class to rule over lesser humanity.
Like all other cultures and religions that have lasted for any appreciable amount of time, Islam is indeed multifaceted and far from monolithic. So, the good Don probably is right.
Look, the Western elite's insistance that abandonment of a traditional belief was a necessary rite of passage in order to join the club left it clueless when Khomeini's revolution rolled around. Fear of Shi'ism (we knew nothing about those people save for Khomeini and Lebanon's troubles) was the thing that kept us from finishing off Sodom Insane in 1991 when if the job had to be done, it should've been done). In the same time frame, the same cluelessness was blinding us to the rise of Islamic militancy in Sharki Turkistan and dissidence in the Islamic enclaves of China proper.
Frankly, I'm for letting the Islamic world stew in its own juices; and once its revolution has run its course, we can sit back and watch the Christian missionaries, without the benefit of gunboat diplomacy, pick up the pieces.