Probing Islam - Deeper Into Islam

<body> <table border="0" cellpadding="30" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="table74"> <tr> <td> <h1>Deeper Into Islam</h1> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="table75"> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top"> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p>A respected commentator said in 2002, anyone who would understand the real views of leading Muslims must delve deeper than the surface of their public statements. He noted a common pattern, that such leaders ‘speak moderately to the general public and radically to Muslim-only audiences’. There is a deeper Islam and there are gentler Muslims. Is the following (made to a mosque audience in 1996) the only ‘deeper Islam’: ‘We must never forget that as Muslims, we are obligated to desire, and when possible to participate in, the overthrow of any non-Islamic government - anywhere in the world - in order to replace it by an Islamic one’? What of the ‘gentle Muslim’ who said this? He was in fact the first Muslim to be honoured, allowed to give the opening daily prayer, in the US House of Representatives. He asked God to guide the nation’s leaders and grant them righteousness and wisdom. A year later, to a Muslim audience, he is reported as allegedly saying that if Muslims were cleverer politically they could take over the United States and replace the constitutional government with a caliphate. Beyond all this, what can be found by looking ‘deeper into Islam’? Here are brief quotes, many abridged or précised, some religious, some political, some mystical, a ‘taste’ of deeper Islam. </td> <td align="left" valign="top"> <img border="0" src="images/deeper.jpg" width="200" height="315" hspace="10"></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body>