Do You Know Muslims Who Are Really Nice People?

For years I've been working with many people from many different countries, including several Muslims. One Muslim in particular is a very nice guy, a hard worker, and a mature leader. He is a very likable person.

While I was working with him, he was always listening to the Koran on his headphones. Most reasonable people, I think, would point to him as an example of how wrong it is to say that Islam is bad or potentially dangerous. I mean look at this guy. He's a perfectly nice man.

He is originally from Africa, but he lives in the United States, he's not married, and he has 15 children from four different women, and works a fairly low-paying job. And recently he was arrested and convicted of two counts of statutory rape.

Now here's my point: Just because you know a nice Muslim doesn't mean Islam is a benevolent ideology. Just because you know a nice Muslim or ten nice Muslims, it does not follow that Islam is an benign ideology. When someone is nice, it doesn't tell you what they believe or what they're capable of. "Nice" just means they know how to behave in a way that people like.

Even beyond that, someone can be a perfectly nice person and still believe that the prophet Muhammad was an apostle of the Almighty and brought true teachings to mankind which say it's right and good for a man to have four wives, and it's right and good to have sex with girls as young as nine years old.

If he accepts Islamic ideology in its entirety, he would not feel guilty about any of this. In fact, he would feel good about it because he is following the example of the prophet himself (and it says 91 times in the Koran that a good Muslim should follow Muhammad's example).

And Islamic doctrine includes the obligation to bring all people in the world under the rule of Islamic law, and includes the justification of using force to accomplish that goal. It is all one unified ideology and it explicitly says there is no "picking and choosing." In other words, a Muslim must follow the whole thing.

And it would be perfectly acceptable to an entire panel of the most authoritative Islamic scholars in the world to do all of that while being likable.