Youssef Ibrahim on "Weaponized" Islam

From the New York Sun (ht JihadWatch):

The bare facts are there for all to see: Over the past 40 years or so, Islam's millions of fanatical preachers and political operatives have represented the religion as one of an "oppressed" people, victimized for centuries by the multiple ogres of Christianity, Judaism, and secularism. Listen to many preachers, read several interpretations of the Muslim holy book, or go to a variety of madrassas from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, and you will quickly learn that Islam's central value, bar none, is jihad.

Far from a religion of peace, these clerics have "weaponized" Islam's text and the Koran into a war manifesto against even fellow Muslims — as between Shiites and Sunnis.

Raising the bar further, most Muslim scholarship of today maintains the refrain that Islam is not meant to be another religion, but the most definitive of God's revelations to man. As Muslim children are told daily, the Prophet Muhammad is not only the last of God's prophets, but the most authoritative.

Thus, it follows that Muslims merit greater privilege. A Muslim, for example, may take any number of non-Muslim wives, but the reverse is illegal. Abandoning Islam is punishable by jail or death. No other religion is acceptable.

The next step in such a logical progression is clearly the necessity to force others to submit. Islam has become imbued with a kind of droit du seigneur — the extrajudicial, absolute rights of a lord of the manor — which cannot be argued with.

Saudis, for example — and this includes their most moderate and modernized leaders — feel it is perfectly natural to fund the building of hundreds of mosques in Europe, from London to Cologne, but cannot find a shred of logic in allowing the construction of a single church or Buddhist temple in Saudi Arabia, even though millions of Christian and Asian expatriates work there.

The scholarly journeys down such roads have served to legitimize the excessive aggression in hundreds of the religious edicts issued weekly by both legitimate and rogue Muslim scholars — including the charlatans of Al Qaeda, who decree that killing infidels is a Muslim duty.

A Saudi expert on Islamic movements, Mshari Al Zaydi, who is the opinion page editor of the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, went to the heart of the matter in a remarkable essay a few days ago, in which he pointedly noted that Saudi religious leaders have never issued an outright renunciation of the religious thinking of Osama bin Laden.

The most the Saudi religious establishment has done, Mr. Zaydi wrote, is to "mildly state that Mr. bin Laden was simply an ‘erroneous mujtahid,'" — a term referring to those qualified to issue juridical opinions and edicts such as fatwas — "as though this man was not responsible for setting the Muslim world ablaze, taking it back centuries and much farther than its original backwardness." In Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood contests for power based on a single slogan: "Islam is the solution." Could it be that their version of Islam is also the problem?