Review of Islam: What the West Needs to Know (2006) by Mrqu1Cky M — 11 Jan 2010

I just want people to notice that the "official" reviews from this site fail to effectively refute even the claims that they poke fun at. For instance, a gentleman from Chicago references a quote from the movie that declares Islam to be the only religion that mandates violence against unbelievers. The reviewer reaches vaguely back in to the past to point out that other, awful things have been done by the adherents of other faiths and thusly, this documentary is rubbish. Is it true that people in the past have perpetrated great evil under the banner of other faiths besides Islam? Absolutely. Do those faiths, in their source texts - their most revered written traditions, mandate that violence? No. The reviewer has missed the mark out of ignorance, willful or otherwise.

What impressed (and disturbed) me the most out of this documentary are these two things: 1) There's not a lot of dramatic, multi-sensory tricks played on the viewer. No over abundance of ominous or moody background music, no gloomy or washed out color palette when depicting a villain, etc. The material is trusted to do the job of a documentary - educating and persuading. 2) The source material says it all and it's not as one-sided as you might expect. The contributors readily acknowledge that there are "peaceful" verses in the Quran and these verses are read aloud with the same voice-over as the violent verses. The rub comes in the way that orthodox Islam sees the seeming contradiction between peace and violence. It is a "seeming contradiction" because it is not really a contradiction at all to a Muslim. Readers here will pardon my forgetfulness of the exact term in arabic, but there is a clear precedent in reading Islamic texts wherein the verse that comes later chronologically is the authority if there is a conflict between verses. The violent verses (so-called verse of the sword, etc.)? They were written in the later stages of Muhammad's life. Those verses have authority over any verse you may read or be shown that portrays Islam as a peaceful and tolerant religion. This by itself should be alarming enough for the entire "West" to take notice, but the rabbit hole goes deeper and instead of recapping the entire documentary, I'll just recommend that anyone interested in a serious look at Islam, it's roots, and it's relevance today, watch this. Don't accept the opinion of someone who's content to make fun of a single claim and utterly fail to deal with the rest of the information presented. Don't even take my word for it! Watch it and decide for yourself if it's just a bunch of biggoted hate-speech or if it has some real merit. Better yet, google this movie. Has it been effectively refuted? Are there a lot of articles out there taking on each claim of the documentarians and providing source material of their own to overturn or disprove them? OR, has this movie been swept under the rug, like any other movie that Hollywood doesn't like but can't find enough fault to publicly embarrass?