Taking Back Islam

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Like many religions, it's about fortifying the soul to help a person navigate the day to day.

Yes. And that guidance is, first and foremost, doing things that earn the pleasure of God, which in turn helps your fellow human beings. Because, on a very basic level, no one can live well if somebody else is not living well.

What about extremists who cloak themselves in the Islamic faith? What do they commonly misunderstand or misinterpret about the Muslim religion?

The central misinterpretation is the lack of understanding about how the Koran talks about living with others. There is also a tendency to take religious verses completely out of context or take them too literally. The Koran is not just a series of literalisms, and that's why people have to be guided by religious scholars. None of the people who are extremists or terrorists -- and who claim the Muslim faith or the Islamic faith -- are scholars of the religion.

Ultimately, the motivation is not spiritual but political.

That's absolutely correct. They use religion as a crutch, hoping that some people will identify with them. If they stood up and just said the things that they're saying and took the religious context out of it, I would contend that they would have no followers. The central aspect of the Prophet Muhammad's life is that his life was an open book. He talked about everything he did, sometimes in intimate detail. How do terrorists operate? They work in the dark recesses of society, hidden from people, not knowing who they are, who they're interacting with, what they are teaching, or what they really think.

What about the concept of jihad? That word is thrown around a lot in the Western media, and it's obviously a very powerful, loaded word.

The literal meaning of jihad is to struggle, to strive. There is a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, after he was returning from a battle: We return to the greater jihad from the lesser jihad. The Muslim understanding has always been that the greater jihad is the struggle of the thriving within one's soul. It's from the struggle to not succumb to base desires, like greed, material want, bodily pleasures. Muslims do understand that jihad can sometimes entail war. But what is often misunderstood is that war in Islam cannot be a war of aggression. War in Islam is defined only as a defensive war. And even in the context of a defensive war, there are elaborate rules of engagement.

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