Another asymptotic Muslim on frontpage, more nougaty center to Islam

By the term "asymptotic Muslim" I mean the Muslim who is extremely critical of Islam, but never quite goes all the way to the logical conclusion: that Mohammed himself was evil, unjust and dangerous, and that the Islam he spawned, the essential Islam and the Islam of history for the last 1400 years into our present, is also irredeemably evil, unjust and dangerous.

Thus Mahmud writes: "Mawdudi, the founding father of modern Political Islam, claims that even if all the world’s Muslims together wanted to make the slightest change in these laws, they would not be allowed to do so."

For asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud, Islam is not the problem, Mohammed is not the problem: Mawdudi (or Sayyid Qutb, or "Wahhabism", or "Salafism", any number of other modern "Isms") is the problem. Mahmud might extend his critique into the distant past of Islamic history and blame this or that political ruler or cleric or fiqh scholar for "hijacking" Islam, but he can never bring himself to take a cold hard look at Islam itself and see the problem there, at its heart. No: for asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud, Islam forever has a harmless, nutritious, sweet nougaty center, and all the problems we see throughout its history and into our present -- all the horrible, evil, unjust, grotesque, ghoulish deformities we see in Islam, must be forever tangential and peripheral, for asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud. For an analysis on another asymptotic Muslim recently featured on frontpage, see my essay on my blog:

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/11/chewy-sweet-nougaty-center-to-islam.html