I’m rather of two minds about this increasingly-popular debate topic. On the one hand, it’s foolish to paint a religion with a billion+ adherents as a monolithic anything–a monolithic religion of holy war or a monolithic religion of peace. That said, there seem to be outbreaks of Islamist fanaticism in an awful lot of the Muslim world, from Nigeria to parts of the Arab world to Afghanistan and Pakistan to Southeast Asia (the last of which regions has historically been characterized by the peaceful spread of Islam and a generally tolerant version of the religion there). I think Islam needs a Reformation or an Enlightenment or something. Without playing down the violent or bloody-minded aspects of Islamic history or scripture, I have to think that the spread of Christianity was historically associated with conquest, coercion, and imperialism as often as not, that the Christian Bible has its share of passages which can be used to justify violence, that Christian cultures have been rife with racism or the oppression of women, and that for most of the history of Christianity most Christians believed that matters of religious belief were properly the subject of some degree of coercion. Yet these days the vast majority of Christians seem to sincerely support full freedom of religion, equality of rights and opportunity for all, and although there have been exceptions, theocratically-motivated violence has generally been pretty rare in mainly or historically Christian areas in recent times. Somehow radical Muslims need to be dragged kicking and screaming–no doubt by their fellow Muslims, especially at first–into a world where some of their fellow Muslims will adopt new ideas about the relation between mosque and state and religion and morality and revelation and science; where some of their fellow Muslims will become purely nominal Muslims; where some of their fellow Muslims will become outright atheists, or convert to strange new religions and “cults”; and where theologically conservative Muslims will have to adapt to all this just as theologically conservative Christians have been forced to adapt.
Just a speculation, but one source for a new more tolerant form of Islam might be Iran. The Iranian people have already seen the “Islamic Republic” and “Islamic law” for going on a quarter of a century now, and a lot of them seem pretty fed up with it. Unlike the even more repressively theocratic Saudi Arabia, the opposition in Iran doesn’t seem to contain large numbers of people who consider the regime to be excessively liberal. There are still those in Iran trying to fashion “Islamism with a human face” (and of course hardliners trying to resist reform), but I wonder if many Iranians aren’t already beyond that point, to the point where the “Islamic Republic” of Iran may wind up being about as theocratic as the “Christian Kingdom” of England is–or, if the mullahs really blow it, it may simply be the “Republic of Iran”, with a democratic and secular government of a country which happens to have a Muslim majority. And Iran has at least some religious diversity, which could help the process along: in addition to the majority Shi’ite population, there is a Sunni minority; there are a couple of indigenous varieties of Christians (Armenian and Assyrian, I believe), I think still some Zoroastrians, and even a few Jews, all officially protected by the current regime; and of course the Ba’hais, who are not officially tolerated.
It’s also foolish to see every Muslim in the West as being part of some sort of Fifth Column. Yes, unfortunately some Muslim immigrants to the West have been driven into the Islamist camp. But we shouldn’t underestimate the seductions of Western culture. One hopes Westernized Muslims could become a kind of “vaccine”, remaining Muslim but spreading ideas about freedom of conscience and secular governments with equal justice for all back to the “old country(ies)”. (It’s also foolish to claim that Muslims and Christians who aren’t bloodthirsty theocrats aren’t “true” Muslims or Christians–systems of belief with a billion or two human beings adhering to them will inevitably have a lot of diversity in them, and systems of belief also inevitably change and evolve over time. Conversely, the claim that the fanatic and violent Muslims aren’t true Muslims is also usually pretty silly.)
So, anyway, long-windedly: Yes, there is a pretty widespread, even maybe systemic problem in the Islamic world right now, just as there have been nasty periods in Christian history. No, Islam isn’t just a religion of peace with some tiny handful of extremists and anyway what about abortion clinic bombers and Northern Ireland? But, I don’t think Islam is also inevitably a “religion of jihad”. Finally, though, to transform Islam, a lot of people must be made to understand that Islam is open to criticism and debate, and that riots aren’t the answer to newspaper columns–and neither are frantic efforts at self-censorship.