In the Islamic community, Scholars are leaders and are those who have studied Islam thoroughly. Out of uneducated (in Islam) non-practicing Muslims and well educated scholars, the scholars are obviously the most representative of Islam.
Sorry, I judge a race, religion, culture, or country by looking at the entire sum of its parts. See, unlike you, I don't look at the houses in Beverly Hills and assume that "Everyone in the US is doing great." I don't take the best, and assume that that's it, that that's all there is to that culture.
I don't assume that just because a religion condemns violence by written doctrine (and which widespread legal religion doesn't?) means that all their followers do to.
Maybe if you judged a culture holistically, you would be less ignorant of the problems.
What most of you don't get it seems, is that many Muslims are only Muslim by name, that is, they do not practice Islam at all or very little
Nobody can live a life and follow a religion perfectly right down to the holy doctrines. The fact is that there are more violent Muslim radicals than there are radicals of other widespread religions.
You notice how Buddhists don't have to defend their beliefs because their followers and organizations don't wreck international havoc? This has never occurred to you? Why there happens to be slightly more negative connotations to the world "Muslim" than "Buddhist"?
It has a lot more to do than a couple bad seeds during the decade.
And we already went through the fact that the majority of Muslims are peaceful people. Enough with that, this point was brought up and accepted at the beginning of the conversation. It doesn't have to be said in every single post, when frankly, nobody disagrees with it.
The fact remains that an alarming rate of people from your culture have caused a great deal of violence - more than Buddhists, more than Taoists (the list could go on). And you think countries like China has never been "in disarray"? The big problem here is that you think Muslim culture should not take any responsibility, when the people that commit these acts come from Muslim nations. Luckily, not everyone is in the same state of blind denial: http://www.freemuslims.org/news/article.php?article=148
See, maybe if more Muslims, such as yourself, took the example above, started taking responsibility, and said, "Yes, we do have a tragic history of violence. More so than a lot of other religions, we many violent radicals. We need to stop these people, we need to make some changes", something positive might happen.
Instead, people like you go, "No, they're not Muslim. Not our problem. They don't represent us." While you completely ignore that it's natural to judge a religious culture with its believers. And they, if asked, would say they are Muslim. And religions are judged by all their people, not just the scholars, but the sum of their parts.
Yes, most Muslims would condemn such an act, and no, you're not going to get huge demonstrations against such wrong doings because the entire Muslim world is in disarray.
Whose fault is that? Let me guess - not Islam, not its believers, not the state - it's someone else's fault.
All that I say is please study Islam and hadith before you jump to conclusions based on the actions of a few lunatics and information from propaganda sources. If you truly wish to understand something, you'd look at it from all possible sides.
The problem here is that I do see it from all sides. And I already said that the majority of Muslims aren't violent, but the fact is that there are enough of them to cause international panic. The fact that you can't admit this shows you're the one with the problems seeing the brutal truth.Fortunately for society, there are Muslims out there who do accept responsibility. Even if denying it would be so much easier, and taking responsibility so much tougher.
http://www.freemuslims.org/news/article.php?article=148
