I disagree with that as a characterization of Muslims overall, but certainly some self-appointed groups of Islamic purists like ISIS could (and I would argue should) be described that way. I don't think that's as foreign to Islam (or for that matter other religions; see here violence from Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, et al. in their own contexts) as the most rosy portrayals of the religion say. Muslims are of course not mindless killbot automatons, but neither are they just Episcopalians in hijabs or abayas or whatever.
I don't know or care what the likes of Sam Harris has to say about Islam (or anything else, for that matter). My impression of the religion comes from studying 1400 years of history and the ongoing relations of Muslims and others in the places in which Islam and hence Muslims hold sway in an uncontroversial and (to them) 'natural' manner, since several of those places are the traditional homelands of my Church (Egypt, obviously, but also historically Sudan and Libya; not to mention of course the Syrians and Armenians in Turkey and the wider Middle East). Islam in its own languages and cultural contexts is very different than what westerners make of it, whether we're talking about the likes of Sam Harris or Karen Armstrong. As for me, I like to remind myself that for every Wahabist there is the example of the likes of Safavid Shah Abbas I, who explicitly mandated the founding of New Julfa (the large Armenian quarter of Isfahan) in the early 17th century as a refuge for the Armenians who had fled to Persia to escape the violence directed at them by the Azeri Turks in Nakhchivan. The problem, if you will, is that in many cases, such examples stand out because they are so rare. I can't find the book itself right now (my books are in disarray as many are currently forming a wall of sorts to keep my darn cat off the raised portion of my kitchen counter), but there is a historical incident relayed in
Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq by Thomas A. Carlson (part of Cambridge's
Studies in Islamic Civilization series) wherein the Islamic authority of the day (I can't remember if it was a local governor or someone higher up) intervened in a dispute on behalf of a Syriac Orthodox subject of Mesopotamia against the claims of an Islamic subject against him. This is, Carlson points out, the single time in all of the documents he consulted for the book that such siding with a member of the 'wrong' group happens. Of course, such a thing is against the traditional conceptions of how Islamic societies are to be organized and run according to traditional Islamic sources themselves (going back to Muhammad, if you can believe what Muslims themselves insist), so we shouldn't expect otherwise, but the point is that this is a far cry from the at least theoretically impartial standard of justice we expect in modern countries not run by the dictates of Islam.
My point is not to share a historical factoid, but to point out that this sort of imbalance is baked into Islamic societies based on
Islamic conceptions of how to properly order society, so it's a bit much to lay interpretations that paint Muslims as inherently supremacist (I wouldn't say
violent, necessarily, though supremacism/cultural and religious chauvinism can certainly provide an impetus for religious violence to take place, no matter what kind of society we're looking at) at the feet of westerners or otherwise non-Muslim peoples, as though the problem begins with people who say that Islam is a terrible religion from an interfaith relations perspective, and not with how seriously some amount of Muslims take the Qur'anic position that Muslims are "the best of peoples" (3:110; the whole verse, it should be said, is
not-really-arguably much more arrogant and, on that account, worse for Muslim/non-Muslim relations) that basically guarantees that Islam will be a terrible religion with regard to how it treats non-Muslims as a class (in that particular verse,
specifically 'People of the Book', which is obviously relevant to the situation in Pakistan). We didn't put it in there. Heck, we do not even consent to be called 'People of the Book' in the first place. That's not our term. In the conqueror's language, we are
masihiyoun -- 'People of the Messiah (Jesus)', if anything.
So pointing to unfair portrayals of Muslims (which do exist, of course) can only go so far, because the root of the matter is in the Islamic texts themselves (not just the Qur'an, but also the related texts meant to govern the relation between Muslims and non-Muslims in accordance with it, such as of course the Constitution of Medina, and later documents such as the Pact of Umar) and how they are interpreted by Islamic schools of jurisprudence and other philosophical currents within Islamic societies. For us, of course, none of these things are worth a fig, and I think history shows that the rule of our societies by Islam has been at best a very mixed bag which tends more often toward the negative. Al Sisi likely wouldn't have had the impetus to allow the construction of the new cathedral in the planned Egyptian capital were it not for the earlier murders of the neo-martyrs of Libya by Islamist terrorists, y'know? So we can say "He let us have a new cathedral; how tolerant", or "Why do we have to die en masse because some barbarians think their god loves them for spilling our blood?", or perhaps many other things, but we can never say "It is an aberration that the mass killings have occurred in Libya" (or on the road to the monastery of St. Samuel of Qalamun, or wherever), because we know it is
not an aberration. History and our present and continuous reality of living under Islam shows us that without anyone from anywhere having to make some big pronouncement about Islam as a thing. We just have to see what happens, and not let our desire that reality be somehow other than what it is cause us to deny what happens,
In other words, as I said before, it's a Tuesday.
