Thanksgiving dinner beckons so this is going to be short though not sweet. It is just that my breakfast was spoiled by reading Nicholas Kristof’s cowardly column, The Religious Wars which tears apart Judaism and Christianity but dares not mention Islam.
But, perhaps, I am being too harsh. Perhaps, Kristof honestly believes that Islam has nothing to do with current religious wars or that Islam, unlike its fellow monotheistic religions, had no need to grow as it and Koran were perfect to start with.
Alternatively, he knows that neither Jews nor Christians are likely to lead demonstrations against him or to threaten his and his family’s life.
As you can tell from the title, I believe the latter.
Solomonia accuses me of being a bit unfair to Kristof since he writes about internal religious wars not external ones and Islam, he argues, is not in the middle of one of those.
I happen to disagree. There is Sunni, Shia, Sufi and Ahmadi to mention just the very obvious disagreements. Indeed, in Pakistan Shia and Sunni are blowing each other’s mosques every so often. This in addition to other less obvious disagreements. Unfortunately, cowardice prevents a serious public discussions of these sometime deadly rivalries. Hence, the oh so mistaken impression that there are no internal religious wars in Islam.
