The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qu'ran. It teaches the value and importance of charity, mercy, and peace.
Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam.
The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam,
they deny somehow that God has a feminine face.
However, if you go to the holy texts,
you see there is this feminine presence.
To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world.
If we cling to the institution of Islam, then we tend to defend it against whatever we see as a danger to it, so because of this we see now that many people are defending states, defending territories, defending everything institutional in the belief that they defend Islam.
Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America, who have a distorted ideology, who have perverted the faith of Islam, and so we have to go after them.