Given the time in which Mohammed and Islam arose and the wars waged against both the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople and the Persians, can you expect anything else? Christianity arose during the height or rather the dark ending days of the Western Roman Empire. It was suffused with the Cult of Mithras and various other religions into a common and popular set of tenets, adopted even by the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. It was an almagamation through missionary work, because conquest was unworkable given that the Roman Empire held all temporal power.

Could Mohammed’s religion, given the environment in which he lived and the amount of wars waged by Islam, be the same as Christianity? No. Perhaps in the future, but not as it stands now.

To build upon Pacificus’ excellent construct, I have met many Muslims who were wonderful human beings. However, the question becomes whether a person can be both a good human being and a good Muslims. After having read the the Koran, I have serious doubts - to be a good human being, one would have to contradict entire sections of the Koran and Haddith.

The Old Testament gave us 10 laws by which to live - none advocated violence against one’s fellow Man. The New Testament redefined our relationship with God with two over-arching commandments: a) loving God first and foremost and b) loving others (ALL others, not just Christians) “as you have loved Me”.

Gray is absolutely right: Islam pits those that are Muslim against those that aren’t. Although I have met Muslims that do live by the Golden Rule, I have never met a Muslim that did so in the name of Islam…or at least according to any text within the Koran that could stand on its own right without direct contradiction from another Sura.

“Islam has no Golden Rule”

Every other religion in the world has some version of: “Treat others as you wish to be treated.”–

except Islam.

I’ve read the Koran (in english, unfortunately) and I’ve read a lot the the Haditha, but there is no Golden Rule….

I think to the extent Islam has been a good religion it has been despite Muhammad. He was personally nothing but L. Ron Hubbard with more violence — somewhere in the gray area between sincere crackpot and cynical charlatan. From the poison soil of the religion he created, later thinkers managed to coax some wholesome fruits and lovely flowers, especially when they assimilated whole chunks of Persian, Indian, and Roman civilization.

The problem now is that the driving force in modern Islam is Wahabbism, a very severe back-to-basics style of fundamentalism. They’ve cast aside all the humanizing influences of the past thousand years and strive to return Islam to its barbaric murder-cult origins.

We need to inform the Saudi government, now, that _all_ funding to mosques and madrasas outside their own country must end now. If they won’t stop, then the West must make them stop.

This can be analyzed using some of Aristotle’s questions that come up in his Politics, a book I recommend to you and your readers. Some of the basic questions of political philosophy are “who is a citizen” of a given regime; and further, who is the good citizen of a given regime; and finally, in which regime is the good man also the good citizen?

Aristotle comes down to admitting that democracy, even though it is one of his “deficient” regimes, is ultimately acceptable because it is one of the regimes which allows the philosopher to be left alone to pursue wisdom; and although aristocracy is the regime where the good or noble man is also the good citizen simply, it is also possible to be good or noble in a democracy, for the same reason democracy is benign towards philosophy.

This is all to say that I think it is possible for a Muslim to be a good citizen in the West, or a good Muslim in the West, but not both at the same time. A good Muslim, by their own definition, cannot be a good American citizen, if by good we mean one who takes the whole teaching of the Koran as mandatory. Those Muslims willing, like Jews and Christians, to reread and moderate some of the text of the scriptures, are quite assimilable to open, Western societies, but are not good Muslims as measured by an orthodox reading of the Koran; those who are bent on expresssing the full political, social, and theological import of the Koran into the social milieux they find themselves in, cannot be assimilated, nor do they wish to be–and they are therefore never going to be good citizens, or good men, by Aristotle’s reckoning.

The regime in which the good Muslim is the good citizen is a very deficient regime, as demonstrated by the Taliban regime, the Sudan, etc.