Free Republic

With the latest world events--fighting in Fallujah, gun battles in southern Thailand, and an attack on the diplomatic quarter of Damascus--attention is turning even more intently to radical Islam. In March, after the Madrid train bombings, Beliefnet talked with Michael Sells, a renowned comparative religions scholar whose specialty is Saudi Salafism, also known as Wahhabism, about the state of play in global Islam and terrorism. We are reprinting it today because his comments are, if anything, more accurate now than they were a few weeks ago. What does this mean for the landscape of worldwide Islam? If it’s true that...

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER “Islam, like all the other major religions, is a religion of peace or of violence depending on who is interpreting it.”—Prof. Michael Sells, whose book on Islam is scheduled to be required reading for all incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina. One of my theories of life is that certain strains of stupidity are immune to the effects of logic and reason. While some bad ideas, like communism and disco, spread quickly but eventually succumb to the white-blood-cell qualities of freedom and good taste, other obviously stupid notions—such as...