The Difference Between Islam And Muslims

Comment: From time to time I publish your commentaries on the news on my Facebook page and many write to me and claim that you are confusing Islam and Muslims. Sometimes you make sharp remarks regarding Islam.

Answer: In my commentaries I don’t mean the religion itself but its extremist clerics.

I have nothing against the Islamic religion because after all, thousands of wonderful things were written in the Koran, and as a philosopher, I can say that the Islamic religion is a positive religion at its foundation.

On the one hand, there certainly is an extremist side to Islam, but if it is not artificially inflated, if it isn’t developed and put above all other faiths, it is a religion with which every person in the world can live in peace.

On the other hand, what is presented to us today as the religion of Islam is not really the original Islam.

I have met with many Arab religious leaders, particularly the Sufis who are representatives of the Arab Kabbalah, and I can say with certainty that in the past among them was a very developed aspiration toward love, toward connection between people. But today everything has completely changed. Many contemporary scholars who are involved with this phenomenon have written about it.

In my commentaries I talk about the extremist Islamic religion of our day. You can not be extreme, kill others indiscriminately, and then hide behind religion. There is no connection with this behavior and religion. Everything depends on the way in which you use religion.

The same thing can be said about Judaism. There are many people who promote hatred, while Judaism itself relies on the principle of “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), and “your friend” is every person near you. This means that everything is inherent in religion but not in the same form that people interpret it.

If you enter into a religious area in Israel, you can see how the religious people move to the side and avoid contact with strangers. That is how they also behave in America in the areas where they live. So it is possible to say the same thing about Islam and even about other religions.

The problem is that today the Islamic religion is flourishing and bears an extremist religious character and there are people who under the guise of religion convey their policies in that way. Of course you can close your eyes to this phenomenon, just as we do with everything else, but it will not make you any safer.

I am not a politician, I am a philosopher, so I am completely neutral and don’t belong to any political party. I express my point of view as a person who studies the wisdom of Kabbalah and understands the evolution of nature, the general internal law and its power, which is called “Allah,” Elyon (higher). The problem is that it is necessary to interpret it correctly. The higher power is the power of love and connection between everyone in the world.

Only then will we see that between true Islam and the wisdom of Kabbalah (true Judaism), there are no differnces.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 6/23/16