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Professor K.S. Lal has studied and taught the history of Islam in India for the last more than fifty years. His characterization of Islam as an ideology is being presented below:
1 Islam is understood more correctly when it is called Muhammadanism. Muhammad is the central figure in Islam. He controls the hearts and minds of all Muslims everywhere…
2. Fundamentalism is not accidental but essential to Islam It sees unchangeability as strength. That is why the word reform is so abhorrent to Muslim thinkers and religious leaders …
3. In Islam truth is established by the sword… dissent is hated as heresy and stamped out as infidelity … early medieval Indian Muslim chronicles mention the sword as the greatest harvester of converts. Islam was made to spread, as the old saying goes, with Quran in one hand and sword in the other. Sword was freely used in forcing people to become Musalmans
4. There is a uniqueness about Islam. Non-Muslims are to be converted to Islam freely. But once a Kafir becomes a Musalman, he has to remain one for ever thereafter. He is not permitted to renounce Islam or revert to his original faith. Punishment for such apostasy is death…73
5. Islam lacks any doctrine of coexistence... Muslim madrasas cannot shed their Kafir complex… The present adjustment of coexistence is a temporary expediency in India…74 It is the teaching of Islam to shun contact with non-Muslims except with a view to converting them Muslim separatism expresses itself in many ways 75
6. In Islam all human beings are not treated as equals. It makes a distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. A non-Muslim is a Kafir, an inferior being. Non-Muslims do not enjoy any human right in this world; they cannot enter Paradise after death. Islam has two sets of principles of morality, ethics and justice: one is for Muslims and the other for non-Muslims. Sincerity, well-wishing and brotherhood are for the believers and faithful Islamic scriptures recommend setting Muslims against non-Muslims, believers against infidels to defend Islam and destroy unbelief. Individual and group killings of Kafirs is encouraged 78
7. Islam recommends Jihad or permanent war on adherents of other religions This makes Islam a totalitarian and terrorist cult which it has remained ever since its birth.79 There have been wars but wars fought by Muslims are in the service of Allah. This gives Islamic belligerency divine sanction and terrorism becomes a divine command 80
8. Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam. Iconoclasm derives its justification from the Quranic revelations and the Prophets Sunnah or practice …81 non-Muslims cannot reclaim their desecrated temples. This is the law of Islam…82
9.Islam has all the ingredients of imperialism found anywhere in the world in any age… 83 By destroying the national spirit of non-Arab Muslims, Islam has demolished the Asian centres of civilization such as Egypt, Iran and India…84
10. The Islamic principles of denigrating the non-Muslims, of aggression and violence against them – principles that perpetually incite to riot and rapine – have boomeranged. However brave face the fundamentalists may try to put up, the victims of Islam today are by and large Muslims themselves. The Prophet must have known that violence begets violence and repeatedly exhorted Muslims not to kill one another after his death. He also had a premonition that violence of Islam against non-Muslims will be met with a backlash. There is a hadis in Sahih Muslim which says that once the Rasul opined that Islam which began in poverty in Medina would one day return to Medina in poverty. Just as a snake crawls back and coils itself into a small hole, so will Islam be hunted out from everywhere and return to be confined to Mecca and Medina. The increasing power of the non-Muslim West and the disenchantment of Muslim dissidents point towards that possibility, howsoever remote.
Prof Lal has presented many other facets of Islam such as that Islam has no word for democracy; that secularism and Islam are mutually exclusive; that Islam can set up only a theocratic state; that Islam has institutionalised slavery and degraded women; and that Islam has laid waste many countries.
Islamic Terrorism in India 