9781422281147

W HAT A MERICANS K NOW A BOUT I SLAM

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Many Americans continue to see Islam as the “them” in an “us versus them” struggle. The notion that Islam is a violent religion and a threat to the United States has been especially prevalent since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The hijackers who crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon were members of an Islamic organization, al-Qaeda, which justi- fied their actions by framing them as part of a jihad against the United States. Negative attitudes and stereotypes about Islam have been fueled by other terrorist attacks around the world since then, including the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and the November 2015 mass shootings and suicide bombings that killed more than 135 people in Paris. The organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has repulsed many people due to its murders of non-Muslims in lands it has gained control over in the Middle East, particularly Iraq and Syria. Yet, as many moderate Muslim leaders and scholars have pointed out, the terrorist attacks and executions committed by ISIL actually violate Islamic teachings as the majority of the world’s Muslims understand them. The Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, instructs Muslims to fight only if they are being unjustly oppressed or attacked. Islamic tradition also forbids Muslims to attack or injure civilians, women, and children. Even the term jihad itself is widely misunderstood in the West. The word—which is often mistranslated in the mass media as “holy war,” and used to denote violence perpetrated by Muslims in the name of their religion—simply means “effort” or “strug- gle.” And in the sense most often used in the Qur’an, jihad actu- ally refers to the inner struggle that each person makes to improve his or her character and spiritual state. Physical struggles that involve human violence have a separate term, qital . Islam in America Positive or negative, there has definitely been a surge in interest about Islam and Muslims in recent years. While once there was a