"The root cause of Islamic fundamentalism is Islam."

What Islam needs is not Reformation, but rather, Englightenment. This is according to Ibn Warraq.

Excerpt:

The root cause of Islamic fundamentalism is Islam. What on earth has American foreign policy got to do with the stoning to death of a woman for adultery in Nigeria? It has every thing to do with Islam, and Islamic Law. The theory and practice of Jihad - Bin Laden’s foreign policy - was not concocted in the Pentagon, it is directly derived from the Koran and Hadith, Islamic Tradition. But Western Liberals find it hard to admit or accept or believe this. The trouble with Western Liberals is that they are nice; they are pathologically nice, terminally nice. They think everyone thinks like them, they think all people including the Islamic fundamentalists desire the same things, have the same goals in life. For liberals, the terrorists are but frustrated angels forever thwarted by the Great Anarch, the Great Satan, the USA.

Western Liberals are used to searching for external explanations for behaviour that they cannot comprehend; but I can assure them that Hitler’s behaviour cannot be put down to the Treaty of Versailles or the economic situation in the twenties or thirties. Evil is its own excuse. No, the Islamic fundamentalists wish to replace Western style liberal democracies with an Islamic theocracy, a fascist system of thought that aims to control every single act of every single individual, to quote Joseph Conrad: “Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a contempt for the secular logic of human development.”

It is extraordinary the number of people who have written about 11 September without once mentioning Islam. We must take seriously what the Islamists say to understand their motivations, to understand September 11, 2001. The four greatest influences on the modern rise of Militant Islam have been the Egyptians Hasan al Banna, the founder of Muslim Brethren, and Sayyid Qutb, the Indo-Pakistani, Maududi, and the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini. They all repeat the same message, derived from classical writers like Ibn Taymiyyah, and ultimately from the Koran and Hadith, namely, it is the divinely ordained duty of all Muslims to fight non-Muslims in the literal, military sense until man-made law has been replaced by God’s Law, the Sharia, and Islam has conquered the entire world.

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global war on terror Islam Islamic Fundamentalism jihad terrorism