PJMedia.com reports: “After 9/11, we were inundated with the claims that by this time have become near-universal assumptions: Islam is peace. Jihadis are just a tiny minority of extremists. Jihad means a spiritual struggle and is willfully or ignorantly misinterpreted among jihadis. 

Yet an Islamic scholar has just offered a succinct and telling enunciation of Islamic values that differs sharply from these claims. Is he an ignorant, racist, bigoted ‘Islamophobe’ whose views can be easily dismissed? Hardly. He is an internationally respected Muslim Brotherhood leader whose words should be carefully pondered in Washington, but they won’t be. 

The Kuwaiti Islamic scholar Tareq al-Suwaidan, who has been named among the 500 Most Influential Muslims for the last three years, recently enunciated a vision of Islamic values that differs markedly from what we have been told again and again in the West: ‘Preserving life is not the only objective of the shari’a – these include the preserving of religion, life, lineage, intellect, and property. These are the main objectives of the shari’a.’

That all sounds reasonable enough, but then al-Suwaidan added, ‘Which one of these objectives has higher priority? It is preserving religion, not preserving life. This is why there is a thing called ‘Jihad.’ If preserving life had the priority, there would be no Jihad – we would abolish it. Preserving religion takes priority over preserving life.’ Thus peace, which would preserve life, is not the ultimate goal; Islamization is…”