Islam

Recently in World Religions lecture, we learned about Islam. Surprisingly to me, someone who isn’t very familiar with much of any religion found Islam to be much like Christianity found in the United States. There are common stories that are apart of the Christian religion. Also Muslims believe in one God, Allah, much like Christians believe in God. Both religions also have faith in prophets, like Muhammad and Jesus, as well as angels. There are also major differences within the two religions, of course, but the basic stories are closely related to each other. It then occurred to me that these two groups of people are in a war.

To be completely honest, I do not understand everything happening with this war. In the United States we believe that Osama Bin Laden and the al-Qaida terrorists were responsible for the tragedy on September 11th. It’s surprising how more and more we seem to be involved in this war. President Bush says that the United States is there trying to help the people and stop this terror.

Then I read this article from MSNBC.MSN.com entitled “Poll: Muslims think U.S. wants to weaken Islam.” Honestly, after taking this course in religion and learning a lot more about things in Islam I never understood, I started reading this article with as open of a mind as I could have. From class, I knew that the terrorist that flew planes into the World Trade Centers were most likely not a huge part of the Islam community. I also know that most Muslims are completely against acts of terror. So while reading I kept that in mind.

Firstly, I found it very interesting that there was a poll about this topic so I really was interested in reading it because it had to do with so much we learned in class. When I read that 40% of the people who took the poll believe the United States goal was to weaken the Muslim world and only 12% believed that the goal was to protect the U.S. from another attack. Also that the attacks on the U.S. while in Iraq and Afghanistan were justified. I can understand this to a certain degree.