Zachary Karabell at Guffawington Post:
There is no denying that the world today is marked by a high level of violence in select parts of the Muslim world; it is equally true that there have been high levels of violence in Columbia and in multiple parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is not present. Not to mention North Korea. Humans are perfectly capable of fighting for any number of reasons, and will use whatever creed or ideology is convenient to support them. But the close association of Islam with violence and terror is a triumph for a cabal of loosely connected groups who have managed to define a religion followed by as many as 1.2 billion people in a narrow, limited fashion. In the process, both Muslims and people in the West have forgotten a legacy that extends across fourteen centuries, which have seen conflict, for sure, but have also witnessed high levels of toleration and long periods of live-and-let-live. For centuries after the Arab conquests in the 7th century, for instance, a small Arab Muslim elite ruled over vast numbers of Christians and significant Jewish minorities. Those non-Muslims were largely left autonomous, save for taxes, and while their lot was not necessarily easy, no society in those centuries celebrated human rights or individual freedoms.
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