They had a very intelligent, funny dude on the Daily Show the other night, Reza Aslan (f*cking great name). He's just written a book about Islam called No God But God. Check out this summary.
From [A href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400062136/"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000CQNJZ0/qid=1144107304/sr=2-1/ref=mag_ny_100""][FONT color=#003399]The New Yorker[/FONT][/A]
[FONT face="Times New Roman"]Aslan, a young Iranian emigrant, lucidly charts the growth of Islam from Muhammad's model community in Medina—depicted as a center of egalitarian social reform—through the chaotic contest to define the faith after the Prophet's death. Within generations, seven hundred thousand hadith—accounts of Muhammad's words and deeds—were in circulation, many "fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs." Out of this muddle was born the primacy of the ulema, Islam's clerical establishment. The ulema, in Aslan's view, foreclosed Koranic interpretation, detoured from the Medinan ideal, and obscured Islam under a thicket of legalistic decrees. Fifteen centuries after Muhammad, Islam has reached the age at which Christianity underwent its reformation; Islam's renewal, Aslan attests, "is already here." However, both modernizers and their "fundamentalist" opposites call themselves reformers, and the victory of the former is not assured. [/FONT]
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[FONT face="Times New Roman"]From [/FONT][A href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/partners/marketing/booklist.html/$(0)"][FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#003399]Booklist[/FONT][/A]
[FONT face="Times New Roman"]Aslan's introduction to the history of Islam, which also devotes several chapters to the place of Islam in the contemporary world, tackles its subject with serious and well-informed scholarship. But, miracle of miracles, it's actually pretty fun to read. Beginning with an exploration of the religious climate in the years before the Prophet's Revelation, Aslan traces the story of Islam from the Prophet's life and the so-called golden age of the first four caliphs all the way through European colonization and subsequent independence. Aslan sees religion as a story, and he tells it that way, bringing each successive century to life with the kind of vivid details and like-you-were-there, present-tense narration that makes popular history popular. Even so, the depth and breadth here will probably be a bit heavy for some, who might better enjoy Karen Armstrong's shorter, if less authoritative, Islam (2000). That said, this is an excellent overview that doubles as an impassioned call to reform. John Green[/FONT]
It's a fascinating subject, and I'm almost entirely ignorant about it. Still, one of the things Aslan brought up was that there is no central religious authority in Islam. Various religious leaders come up with their own interpretations of the Koran, some WILDLY divergent from others, and issue a religious decree that their followers are bound to obey. This is why it's not very useful to make broad generalizations about Islam.
You might have a religious leader (perhaps in the West) decree that all violence in the name of Islam is evil, and his followers will generally tow the line. Somewhere else, a religious leader may decree that all non-believers in the middle east must be converted, expelled or executed and, having faith in their leader, the followers of this sect will likewise tow the line.
