Dear Muslims, let's try together to close our eyes for a moment. Now imagine our Islamic everyday with the following absences: cars, trains, planes, internet, mobile phones, phones, personal computers, and electricity. We agree: such a daily routine would be rather dreary. Now let us open our eyes and pose this question to ourselves: what is our contribution in the full course of history to these innovations? If we refuse to evade the facts, the answer is obvious: nothing! At the same time, we probably agree that Islam and we as Muslims are caught in an identity crisis. Just think of jihad, terror and the fanaticism of political and conservative Islam, which wants to establish God's rule on the earth by force, at any cost.

Islam has nothing to do with these atrocities according to the consensus of most Muslims in the world. The perpetrators were not Muslims: they did not understand or failed to correctly implement the teachings of the canonical sources of Islam. The ideology of the Islamists has nothing to do with Islam, for Islam is the religion of peace. Many exponents of these theories forget that the Islamists do not pray in synagogues, churches, or Buddhist temples, but rather in mosques. They do not pray in the direction of Jerusalem or Rome, but rather towards Mecca, the holy city of all Muslims.

Of course, the ideology of the Islamists has to do with Islam, whether they are violent or not, for otherwise, the Islamist Islam could never have spread so quickly or successfully throughout the world. The cited apology may be in many ways wellmeaning, but it is, in any case, insincere. It betrays the innocence and complacency of its exponents.

It has to do with pious wishful thinking that, however, falls short of reality. Obviously, not all Muslims are terrorists. Equally obvious is that the terrorists are Muslims, and even consider themselves to be model Muslims who live according to the Quran and Hadith. Finally, the part of the Quran that was revealed in Medina (622-632) and the political acts of the Prophet himself as statesman – the canonical sources of Islamic legal and religious teaching – serve Islamists across the world as an instruction manual. In addition, Islamist terror is buttressed by a violent, theologicallybased ideology that must be regarded as an adoption of the history of ideas concerning Islamic violence.