Please don't twist the facts

The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practicing their own religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defenses, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilization, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage. 

But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine etc. was discouraged.

Intellectually the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual regression the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither. But for the emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilization would have disappeared with the fall of Granada in 1492.

The early successes of the Ottomans were not accompanied by an intellectual renaissance. Instead they became more and more preoccupied with minor issues such as whether tight trousers and peak caps were Islamic, whether printing machines should be allowed or electricity used to light mosques. The Industrial Revolution was totally missed by the Muslims. 

Nowadays the Muslims are providing the perfect example of the way of thinking responsible for the poverty, repression and strife endemic to the Islamic world.

They speak about the "humiliation and oppression" suffered by Muslims at the hands of non-Muslims and the need for Muslims to "regain their dignity." The inability to accept responsibility and the need to see every set-back and frustration as an affront to honor inflicted by Islam's perceived enemies is pervasive, juvenile and crippling. In an individual it would be symptomatic of pathological insecurity.

Yet where in the non-Islamic world to Muslims face the discrimination experienced by non-Muslims in Islamic countries? If Muslims find themselves condemned as terrorists, perhaps it is because so many of them have embarked upon killing innocents in the name of their God. And if, throughout the world, they find themselves unable to live peaceably with their non-Islamic neighbors, perhaps the fault lies within.

The primary enemy is, of course, "the Jews." Antisemitism has become part and parcel of Islam and entirely ignores the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to exist, not because of Jewish designs upon Islamic lands, but because a substantial majority of Muslims aspire to the eradication of the Jewish state. But the Jews are not the only enemies of Islam, in the eyes of the mainstream Muslims, Islam's enemies include pretty much the whole non-Islamic world, or at least those parts of it that have to misfortune to abut or interact with the ummah. 

Their insistence on identifying plots and conspiracies and enemies, their excusing of Muslim aggression as defense, is a manifestation of the disease that consigns Islamic society to the world's sickbed. In nearly every instance, Muslims could peaceable co-exist with their neighbors were they to resolve to live peaceably. 

Sadly, live-and-let-live, is not an tenet of Islam. That the most Muslims are not able to understand this, does not bode well for the future.