Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
The Truth About Islam — Not What You Think
Whoever changes his religion, kill him. I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah… A saying attributed to Muhammad in Sahih al-Bukhari
Depending on who you listen to, Islam is either a perfectly peaceful religion that has been hijacked by a tiny number of extremists, or it is a violent political ideology whose followers are quietly waiting to take over the world.
I don’t think either explanation tells the truth.
The truth about Islam is much more complicated—and frankly much more interesting.
Islam is a religion, a civilization, a legal tradition, a political history and, for some people, a political ideology. Those things overlap, but they are not the same thing.
And before we talk intelligently about radical Islam, Iran, ISIS, Somalia, immigration, Sharia or terrorism, we need to understand how we got here.
Start at the beginning.
Islam began in Arabia in the seventh century with Muhammad.
Muslims believe Muhammad was the final prophet of God, following figures such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus. But Muhammad was not only a religious teacher. After establishing the Muslim community in Medina, he also became its political leader, judge and military leader.
That distinction matters.
Christianity spent its first centuries existing largely outside government. Islam developed a religious community and a governing political order almost simultaneously.
That is one reason classical Islamic law—Sharia—developed rules dealing not merely with prayer and morality but also marriage, inheritance, contracts, finance, criminal matters and government.
That doesn’t mean every Muslim today wants an Islamic government. Far from it.
But it does mean the relationship between religion and government has historically been different in Islam than it has been in modern Western Christianity.
Then Islam split.
When Muhammad died in 632, there was a fundamental disagreement about who should lead the Muslim community.
One side believed leadership should pass to qualified members of the community. This eventually became Sunni Islam.
Another believed leadership properly belonged to Muhammad’s family, particularly his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his descendants. This became Shia Islam.
The dispute became much deeper after Ali’s son Hussein was killed at Karbala in 680. For Shia Muslims, Karbala became one of the defining events of their religious identity.
Today roughly 87–90% of Muslims are Sunni and approximately 10–13% are Shia, although those numbers are estimates. Iran is overwhelmingly Shia, while countries such as Saudi Arabia are predominantly Sunni.
That ancient disagreement is still influencing Middle Eastern politics more than 1,300 years later.
When you watch Iran and Saudi Arabia competing for influence, or Sunni and Shia militias fighting in Iraq, Syria or Yemen, you are watching religion, politics, ethnicity and national interests layered on top of an argument that began almost immediately after Muhammad died.
But Muslims themselves aren’t necessarily obsessed with this distinction. Pew has found substantial numbers of Muslims in many countries simply identify themselves as “Muslim” rather than Sunni or Shia.
Muhammad lived about 570–632 CE. The Qur’an was revealed during his prophetic career, roughly 610–632 CE, and was collected into an official written form shortly after his death, traditionally under the early caliphs.
The Hadith were different. Stories and reports about what Muhammad said and did circulated for generations, often orally, before scholars systematically collected and evaluated them. Imam al-Bukhari lived from 810–870 CE and compiled Sahih al-Bukhari primarily during the mid-800s. Sahih Muslim, compiled by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (c. 815–875 CE), comes from essentially the same period.
So the timeline is approximately:
610–632: Muhammad receives the Qur’anic revelations 632: Muhammad dies 650s: standardized Qur’anic text traditionally associated with Caliph Uthman 700s–800s: major systematic collection and authentication of Hadith c. 840s–850s:Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim compiled
That’s why, for historical precision, I would say a controversial quotation in Bukhari is “a saying attributed to Muhammad in a ninth-century collection of earlier transmitted reports”, rather than implying somebody wrote it down while Muhammad was speaking.
The Qur’an and the Hadith are not the same thing
There is another distinction that becomes important when discussing what Islam actually teaches.
The Qur’an is the central sacred text of Islam. Muslims believe it contains revelations from God delivered to Muhammad.
The Hadith are different. They are collections of reports passed down about things Muhammad supposedly said, did, approved or prohibited. These reports were collected and evaluated after Muhammad’s death, rather than being contemporaneous recordings of his words.
For Sunni Muslims, two of the most important collections are Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, generally regarded as the most authoritative Sunni collections of Hadith.
This distinction matters because some of the most controversial sayings attributed to Muhammad—including statements concerning warfare, apostasy and religious authority—come from the Hadith rather than the Qur’an itself.
And this creates another major debate within Islam: not simply what does the text say?, but which reports are authentic, what did they originally mean, and should rules developed in the seventh century govern a modern society?
That fits your article very well because later, when we quote something like:
“Whoever changes his religion, kill him.”
we can accurately introduce it as:
“According to a saying attributed to Muhammad in Sahih al-Bukhari…”
Did Islam spread by the sword?
Yes. And no.
The first Islamic empires expanded extraordinarily quickly through military conquest. Within about a century of Muhammad’s death, Muslim-ruled territory stretched from the Iberian Peninsula through North Africa and the Middle East into Persia and Central Asia.
Pretending that conquest wasn’t part of Islamic history is rewriting history.
But saying Islam spread only by conquest is also wrong.
Conversion frequently occurred gradually after conquest, sometimes over centuries. Islam also spread through merchants, migration, missionaries, intermarriage and trade—particularly through parts of Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
So here again, the truth isn’t the bumper sticker.
Islam traveled with both soldiers and merchants.
Then came something else that gets forgotten: civilization.
When people today hear “Islamic world,” many immediately think of Iran, Afghanistan, terrorism or women wearing burqas.
That’s an incredibly narrow slice of fourteen centuries.
During parts of the Abbasid period, Baghdad became one of the world’s great intellectual centers. Muslim, Christian, Jewish and other scholars preserved, translated and expanded upon Greek, Persian and Indian knowledge.
Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, philosophy, engineering and architecture flourished.
The Metropolitan Museum describes the early Abbasid centuries as a period in which literature, theology, philosophy, mathematics and natural science flourished, drawing upon Greco-Roman, Persian and Indian traditions. Islamic-world astronomers improved methods of observing and calculating planetary movements, and physicians such as Ibn Sina—Avicenna—produced medical works that were later used in European universities.
That’s part of Islam’s history too.
So let’s get to what I call:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
THE GOOD
There are now roughly two billion Muslims, about one-quarter of humanity according to Pew’s latest comprehensive global count. Interestingly, the largest number of Muslims doesn’t live in the Middle East at all—it lives in Asia.
Most of those people aren’t thinking about conquering America.
They’re thinking about going to work, raising children, paying the mortgage, getting their kids through school and figuring out what’s for dinner—pretty much what the rest of us are thinking about.
Islam places enormous emphasis on charity, family, community, prayer, fasting, personal discipline and responsibility toward the poor.
Zakat, charitable giving, is one of Islam’s Five Pillars.
Ramadan requires millions of Muslims to practice fasting and self-discipline every year.
And across fourteen centuries, Muslims have produced extraordinary art, literature, architecture, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and science.
There are also Muslim intellectuals today trying to reconcile Islamic belief with democracy, religious liberty, women’s equality and modern pluralistic government. The idea that there has been no Islamic reform movement is simply false. Islamic reform and reinterpretation have been going on for centuries, and contemporary Muslim reformers continue debating democracy, secular government, human rights and reinterpretation of Islamic law.
That is the good.
But now we have to be equally willing to discuss the other side.
THE BAD
Islam historically never developed exactly the same concept of separation between church and state that eventually developed in much of the West.
And that remains a serious issue in some Muslim-majority societies.
There are countries where criticizing religion can put you in prison.
There are countries where leaving Islam can have legal consequences.
There are places where converting Muslims to another religion is restricted.
Women in some Islamic societies remain subject to legal and cultural restrictions that would be completely unacceptable under modern Western ideas of individual liberty.
Religious minorities and even minority Muslim sects can face discrimination and persecution.
Pew found that in 2019, 79 countries and territories worldwide had blasphemy laws and 22 had laws against apostasy. These weren’t exclusively Muslim countries, but apostasy laws were especially concentrated in Muslim-majority nations, particularly the Middle East and North Africa.
That deserves criticism.
And saying so isn’t hatred of Muslims.
We need to be able to distinguish between criticizing a religion or political doctrine and attacking the people who happen to belong to that religion.
I can criticize Christianity.
I can criticize Judaism.
I can criticize communism.
I can criticize capitalism.
I can criticize Islam.
Ideas don’t have civil rights.
People do.
Then there’s political Islam.
This is where another distinction becomes extremely important.
Islam is the religion.
Islamism is the idea that Islam should play a central role in political government.
And jihadism is an extremist revolutionary branch that uses violence to establish what it considers legitimate Islamic rule.
These are not interchangeable terms.
In 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The organization sought to Islamize society through religion, political activity and social institutions. Later, Brotherhood intellectual Sayyid Qutb developed ideas that would deeply influence militant Sunni Islamist movements, including later jihadist organizations.
Meanwhile, something very different was developing within Shia Islam.
Then came Iran.
Iran may be the clearest modern example of what happens when revolutionary religion and state power become intertwined.
In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini helped overthrow the Shah and established the Islamic Republic.
Khomeini developed the doctrine known as velayat-e faqih—the guardianship of the Islamic jurist—under which senior religious authority sits above much of the normal political system.
Iran therefore has elections, a president and a parliament, but those institutions exist inside a political structure ultimately dominated by religious authority.
Iran then attempted to export aspects of its revolutionary ideology and became a supporter of armed organizations throughout the region.
But there is something important here that often gets missed:
Iran is Shia.
Al-Qaeda, ISIS and al-Shabaab are Sunni extremist movements.
They are not all on the same team.
In fact, Sunni jihadists have massacred Shia Muslims, and Iran has fought ISIS.
So saying “radical Islam” as though it is one giant organization misses a huge part of the story.
Afghanistan changed everything.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Muslims from around the world traveled there to fight.
The United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supported the Afghan resistance, while thousands of foreign Sunni fighters were drawn into the conflict.
One of them was a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
Those networks helped create the infrastructure of modern international jihadism.
Eventually came al-Qaeda.
Then the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Then the USS Cole. Then the American embassy bombings.
And finally September 11, 2001.
But even that wasn’t the end.
Iraq created another monster.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship but also shattered much of the Iraqi state.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq exploited the chaos and deliberately inflamed warfare between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Eventually that organization evolved into what became ISIS.
When Syria collapsed into civil war, ISIS suddenly had the space it needed to build something al-Qaeda never managed to create on that scale:
A physical “caliphate.”
At its height ISIS controlled large amounts of Iraq and Syria and imposed an extraordinarily brutal interpretation of Islamic law.
Muslims themselves were among its largest groups of victims.
The rise of ISIS cannot be explained simply by saying “Islam caused it.” The Iraq War, sectarian politics, state collapse and the Syrian civil war were all essential parts of the story.
And then there is Somalia.
Somalia demonstrates another pathway to radical Islam.
Its central government collapsed in 1991.
What followed was civil war, warlords, poverty, foreign intervention and huge areas where functioning government barely existed.
Into that vacuum eventually moved al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab is affiliated with al-Qaeda and wants to overthrow Somalia’s government and impose its version of Islamic rule.
It remains one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations. CFR reported in July 2026 that it continues exploiting weak state authority, clan divisions and humanitarian crises throughout Somalia.
According to the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, the four deadliest terrorist organizations in 2025 were ISIS, JNIM, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Shabaab—all militant Islamist organizations.
That brings us to:
THE UGLY.
The ugly part of Islam today isn’t your Muslim neighbor going to mosque.
It isn’t the Muslim doctor treating you in the emergency room.
It isn’t the Muslim businessman opening a restaurant or the Muslim kid sitting beside your grandchild in school.
The ugly is religious absolutism combined with political power and violence.
ISIS throwing people from buildings. Al-Qaeda flying airplanes into buildings.
Al-Shabaab bombing civilians.
The Taliban preventing girls from receiving an education.
Iranian authorities violently suppressing people challenging the Islamic Republic.
Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Ahmadis and other minorities being persecuted because somebody believes God has authorized the state—or a militia—to enforce religious conformity.
We should be able to say that plainly.
But here’s where I think both political sides get this wrong.
Some on the left seem terrified to criticize anything connected to Islam because they’re afraid criticism itself will be labeled Islamophobia.
Some on the right take legitimate criticism of Islamic extremism and extend it to Muslims generally.
Both are intellectual shortcuts.
The real battle may actually be happening inside Islam.
There are Muslims who believe Islamic law should govern the state.
There are Muslims who want democracy informed by Islam.
There are Muslims who favor secular government.
There are Muslims who hardly practice the religion at all.
There are Sufis. There are Sunnis. There are Shias. There are reformers.
There are fundamentalists. There are jihadists.
And there are millions upon millions of people who would rather you stop asking which category they belong to because they’re just trying to live their lives.
Oxford’s newly published Handbook of Islamic Reform documents exactly this enormous internal debate—over democracy, secularism, women’s rights, human rights, religious authority, political violence and how Islamic teachings should be interpreted in the modern world.
And perhaps that’s the part we should be paying the most attention to.
Because the future of Islam isn’t settled.
So where does that leave the West?
I think the answer is actually fairly simple.
You should be completely free to be Muslim in America.
Build a mosque. Read the Quran. Pray five times a day. Fast during Ramadan.
Wear a hijab. Believe Sharia comes directly from God. Believe Christianity is wrong.
Believe atheism is wrong. Believe I’m wrong.
That’s what religious freedom means.
But the same freedom protects the person who says Islam is wrong.
It protects the Muslim who decides to become Christian.
It protects the Muslim who decides to become an atheist.
It protects the woman who refuses to wear a hijab just as much as the woman who chooses to wear one.
And no religious law gets to supersede the Constitution or the civil law that applies equally to everyone.
That’s the line. Not Muslim versus Christian. Not Islam versus America.
Individual liberty versus compulsory ideology.
That’s a fight the West has already had within Christianity, monarchy and political ideology, and it took us centuries to get even close to getting it right.
Islam is still having parts of that argument within itself.
So what is the truth about Islam?
It isn’t what either side wants to squeeze onto a bumper sticker.
Islam has produced conquerors and philosophers.
Scientists and fundamentalists. Beautiful architecture and brutal theocracies.
Charitable institutions and terrorist organizations.
Reformers and reactionaries. Peacemakers and warriors.
Just like understanding Christianity requires knowing the difference between Jesus, the Crusades, the Inquisition, Martin Luther, the Vatican, Southern Baptists and the guy who attends church twice a year, understanding Islam requires considerably more than knowing the words ISIS and 9/11.
There are things in Islamic history worth admiring.
There are things happening under Islamic governments that deserve serious criticism.
And there are extremist interpretations that the civilized world—including Muslims themselves—should oppose without apology.
That is the good. That is the bad. That is the ugly.
And somewhere between pretending there is no problem and pretending two billion people are the problem… is probably where the truth about Islam actually lives.
AND YES — RADICAL ISLAM IN AMERICA IS A REAL PROBLEM
Now we have to talk about the part of this subject that people sometimes become very uncomfortable discussing.
There really are radical Islamists in the United States who reject the Western system itself.
Not Muslims generally. Not the guy who owns the convenience store.
Not the Muslim doctor, engineer, accountant, soldier or neighbor who wants exactly what the rest of us want.
I’m talking about Islamists who believe Islam should ultimately replace secular political systems and about jihadists willing to use violence to accomplish those objectives.
And yes—some of them very explicitly talk about eventually replacing Western civilization with an Islamic political order.
That isn’t something critics of Islam simply invented.
They have actually written it down.
One of the most disturbing examples surfaced during the federal Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case.
In evidence was a 1991 internal Muslim Brotherhood document titled An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.
The author described the Brotherhood’s work in America as a “Civilization-Jihadist Process.”
More disturbing was the objective it described: a long-term effort aimed at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
That isn’t my characterization of their intentions.
Those were their words. The document was ultimately introduced as evidence in federal court. Now let’s be careful here.
That document does not prove that American Muslims generally share this objective. It doesn’t mean that every Muslim organization ever mentioned in Brotherhood documents is secretly attempting to overthrow the United States. And it was written in 1991, so we shouldn’t pretend it automatically describes every organization or Muslim political activist operating in 2026.
But pretending the document doesn’t exist is equally dishonest.
There have been organized Islamist networks in America with explicitly anti-Western political ambitions.
And the ideology hasn’t disappeared.
Here’s something even more current.
In January 2026, Hizb ut-Tahrir’s American organization held its annual Khilafah Conference.
Khilafah means Caliphate.
The organization’s own announcement said Muslims have a duty to restore an Islamic way of life through establishment of the Khilafah. Its American website describes the Caliphate as a political system that would comprehensively implement Sharia and presents Islam as an alternative to secular liberalism.
That’s worth thinking about. This isn’t ISIS operating secretly in a cave.
This is political Islamist ideology being openly discussed inside the United States in 2026.
There is an important qualification: Hizb ut-Tahrir America itself says it does not work to overthrow Western governments and describes its method as political and intellectual rather than violent.
Fine. But I’m allowed to listen to what people say they ultimately believe.
And if your ideal society is one where secular liberal government is replaced by a state implementing religious law, then I can peacefully—and strongly—oppose your political philosophy.
That is not Islamophobia. That’s democracy.
Then there is the violent version.
This isn’t theoretical either.
American authorities continue finding people inside this country attempting to support ISIS and other Islamist terrorist organizations.
In July 2026, a Houston man pleaded guilty after admitting that he disseminated ISIS propaganda and concealed material support for the organization. According to the Justice Department, he had also discussed wanting to kill as many “infidels” as possible.
Also in 2026, three men admitted terrorism-related offenses connected with supporting ISIS after investigators said members of their network discussed jihad, firearms, explosives and travel to Syria to join the organization.
In another 2026 case, federal authorities charged a New Jersey man who allegedly discussed attacks on American targets, including places of worship, while communicating with ISIS supporters. Those charges remain allegations unless proved in court.
And in August 2026, federal authorities charged an Albany woman with attempting to support ISIS after alleging that she conducted reconnaissance of the New York State Capitol and discussed killing legislators and damaging the American political system. Again, those allegations have not yet been proved at trial.
So when someone says:“There is no radical Islamist problem inside America.”
That’s simply not true. There is. Our own Justice Department and FBI deal with it.
Iran represents another branch of the problem.
Remember what I said earlier: radical Islam isn’t one organization.
ISIS and al-Qaeda are predominantly Sunni jihadist movements.
Iran’s revolutionary government and Hezbollah come from a very different Shia Islamist tradition.
But that ideology has reached America too.
In July 2026, a federal jury convicted Hadi Matar, the New Jersey man who attacked author Salman Rushdie. Federal prosecutors said Matar had immersed himself in Hezbollah’s ideology and acted pursuant to the Iranian religious decree calling for Rushdie’s death.
The Justice Department has also brought cases alleging Iranian-linked terrorist planning against targets in the United States.
So we are dealing with several different threats:
Sunni jihadism.
Iranian revolutionary Islamism. Political Islamist movements. Online radicalization.
And networks that attempt to recruit people already living inside Western societies.
They aren’t identical.
But they share one dangerous characteristic when taken to their extreme:
The individual becomes subordinate to an ideology claiming divine political authority.
And this is where America needs to be very clear.
You are completely free to believe Islam is the one true religion.
You are free to believe Sharia comes from God.
You are free to advocate for a Caliphate somewhere else in the world.
You can tell me capitalism is evil. You can tell me democracy is evil.
You can tell me America is evil.
The First Amendment protects an enormous amount of speech—even speech I find offensive, foolish or dangerous.
But there is a giant difference between believing something and attempting to impose it through terrorism, intimidation, material support for terrorist organizations or violence.
That’s where the line gets crossed.
And America should enforce that line aggressively.
The more difficult danger isn’t always someone carrying a bomb.
This is where I think the conversation becomes more interesting.
A political ideology doesn’t necessarily have to conquer a country militarily.
Ideas can spread through schools. Universities. Religious institutions. Political organizations. Social media. Community organizations. Elections. Propaganda.
Perfectly legal advocacy.
That’s how democracy works. And here is the uncomfortable paradox: A free society gives people the freedom to advocate against the free society itself.
Communists have that right. Nazis have that right. Christian theocrats have that right.
And Islamists have that right.
Up to the point where advocacy becomes criminal conspiracy, material support for terrorism or violence.
The answer isn’t to abolish freedom.
The answer is to defend Western principles confidently enough that people aren’t afraid to challenge ideas that oppose them.
But don’t make the opposite mistake.
There are millions of American Muslims. Most are not plotting a Caliphate.
They’re not secretly waiting until there are enough Muslims to overthrow the Constitution.
And treating every Muslim as though he is a sleeper agent would be both ridiculous and profoundly un-American.
In fact, radical Islamists would probably love nothing more than convincing ordinary Muslims that America will never accept them.
It makes recruitment easier. So don’t give them that victory.
The distinction needs to remain absolutely clear: Muslim: a person practicing a religion.
Islamist: someone who wants Islam to become a governing political system.
Jihadist: someone willing to employ revolutionary violence in pursuit of extremist Islamist objectives.
Those are three very different things.
But let’s also stop pretending the third group—and parts of the second—don’t exist here.
They do.
Some radical Islamists genuinely believe Western civilization is morally corrupt. Some reject secular democracy. Some envision restoration of a global Islamic political order. Some want Sharia to replace secular government.
And an extremely small but very dangerous subset is prepared to kill people to advance that cause.
That is not a theory. We have their writings. We have their organizations. We have their propaganda. We have federal prosecutions.
And unfortunately, we have their victims.
The correct response isn’t hatred of Muslims.
It is something much simpler: Defend the Constitution – Defend freedom of religion. -Defend freedom from religion. Defend freedom of speech—including the freedom to criticize Islam. Defend the Muslim who wants to worship peacefully.
Defend the former Muslim who wants to walk away from the religion.
And oppose anyone—Muslim, Christian, communist, fascist or otherwise—who believes his ideology gives him the right to take those freedoms away from somebody else.
Because religious freedom means you have every right to practice your religion.
It does not give you the right to make me practice it too.
That is the line America cannot afford to surrender.
