Like so many other Americans, September 11, 2001, completely altered the course of my life.
Up until then I had been a naive teenager, worrying about a boy who broke my heart, how I would spend my last few weeks of summer vacation, and what major I would choose as I entered my second year of college.
The attacks of September 11 woke me up to the larger world around me. The one that existed outside my small protected bubble of upper-middle class suburbia and my college campus. It woke me up to the fact that there are people in the world who would kill me and those I love out of hatred for our lifestyles and in the name of their god.
Of course, as we all know, not long after that horrible day, America went to war.
And I, the nineteen year old college sophomore, became fascinated by war; why they are fought, how they can be prevented, how they are fought, and of course their aftermath. Accordingly, I decided to major in political science with a focus on international relations. It became even more personal to me when my USMC infantry then-boyfriend was deployed to be part of the “tip of the spear” as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I inhaled as much information as I could about the Middle East and specifically the wars that had been fought there throughout the 20th century. I tried to educate myself about the history of terrorism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the history of AQ. These are topics that still interest me greatly and that I’ve tried to stay on top of, even though I ended up going down a very different career path.
You might be wondering what the point is of the proceeding paragraphs, why am I bringing all of that up? To make the point that even I, someone who while not an expert, was certainly someone who spent a lot of time and study thinking about our terrorist enemies and where they come from and what their motivations are…and yet it wasn’t until VERY recently that I decided I needed to learn for myself whether or not Islam is truly a “religion of peace” as I have heard and accepted for the past 13 years.
The brutality of ISIS, the influx of Western jihadis to Syria, and what almost appeared to be an epidemic of beheadings by Muslim extremists all over the globe (UK, Algeria, Syria, and the most recent one in Oklahoma) – it finally hit me that for 13 years I had made a lot of assumptions about the religion of Islam without ever taking the time to find out if I had an accurate picture or not.
It is a bit scary to me that it has taken me 13 years to do this, but I have finally started to attempt to really learn about Islam, beyond the platitude of “it’s the religion of peace.”
What does that mean exactly? And how does endlessly repeating that it is a peaceful religion, give us any sort of understanding about these terrorist monsters who are raping, torturing, beheading and committing genocide in the name if Islam? How can we in the West continue to parrot that Islam is a religion of peace when the fact is we (or at least I was in this camp) are totally ignorant as to what Islam actually teaches?
I decided to start this blog as a place to:
a) write about what I’m learning about Islam. I have started reading the Qu’ran along with the Sira (biography of Mohammed) and am reading as much as possible from critics of Islam as well as rebuttals of those criticisms by Muslim scholars.
b) discuss the questions raised through my studies, what kind of answers I have been able to find online, and my analysis of those answers (i.e. do they answer my questions?)
c) finally I hope that someday maybe this blog can be a platform for engaging moderate muslims and fully fleshing out their understanding of their religion and how it can be so different from what the terrorists claim the religion commands.
Something I’ve come to discover over the past few months of reading is that there are easy platitudes we can make (“Islam is the religion of peace”) but the truth is much, much more complex (by Mohammed’s design?). Hopefully I can start to unpackage some of it here and figure out whether or not Islam really is the religion of peace.