Moderate muslims, the true minority.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid nearly boarded a plane decades ago on an eventual path to holy war with the United States.

Instead, he took an opposite route and now travels throughout Europe and North America warning about what he experienced firsthand as a member of a jihadist group run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current second in command of al-Qaida.

Hamid worries that Westerners have become too politically correct, refusing to accept that current Islamic teaching – not poverty, not Israel and not the war in Iraq – is the root cause of Muslim terror.

“I believe Islam can be taught in a peaceful manner,” he said. “But it’s unfair to say the current dominant form of Islamic teaching, which is salafi Islam, taught in mosques and universities, is peaceful.”

Quite the contrary, said Hamid, who traces the spread of this virulent form of Islam to the rise of Saudi Arabia as an economic and political powerhouse.

Salafi Islam originated in Saudi Arabia decades ago, and as that country’s oil profits grew, the fundamentalist strand began spreading throughout the Middle East.

Among other teachings, salafi Islam calls for the killing of apostates, considers Jews subhuman, encourages the beating and enslavement of women and urges war to convert nonbelievers, said Hamid.

“These are fundamentals of Sharia law. This is what they teach in the mosques and the universities,” he said.

Hamid was attending medical school in Cairo when he joined Gama’a al-Islamiyya, intent on becoming a more observant Muslim. “I was not thinking of doing evil to anyone, absolutely not,” he said. Within a few months, though, he became a self-described “vicious monster, like a beast,” due to the group’s teachings on Islam.

Encouraged by al-Zawahiri, Hamid considered fighting the Soviets as part of the resistance movement in Afghanistan – a move that likely would have put him in line to become a key cog in Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Those terrorists, too, were encouraged by warped Islamic teachings, particularly among Sunni Muslims, Hamid said.

Even in the United States and Europe, Hamid believes moderate Muslims are in the minority.

Hamid accused Muslims in the West of feeding into the radicalization of Islam by not forcefully confronting fundamentalist Islamic teachings.

“Because of them, reformation is not happening,” he said.

http://buffalonews.com/editorial/20061115/1041971.asp