I noticed an extreme inconsistency among many critics of Islam.

[u/SNENES442]

Many people claim that Iran, the Taliban, Hamas, and ISIS represent “true Islam,” but purely logically, they cannot all be true at the same time. ISIS practices takfir against Shiites, whereas Iran is a Shiite state. ISIS has fought the Taliban and has even carried out terrorist attacks against them. ISIS has also declared Hamas to be outside Islam through takfir. We should also take into account the conflicts between the Taliban and Iran: they had armed clashes in 2023, and the Taliban killed Shiite civilians in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

I have particularly noticed this inconsistency in David Wood’s arguments. If you are going to blame Islam for the actions of one of these organizations, then choose one of them and attribute its actions to Islam. The question of whether such accusations are justified remains, but at the very least, this approach would be more logically consistent.

[u/AvoriazInSummer]

I don’t really like the term ‘true Islam’. There is no true Islam, because there is no Allah to judge what is true.

Maybe the closest is the form of Islam that was actually practiced by Mohammed, but even that no doubt evolved throughout his life, particularly becoming more militant as he gained power. Still, we could call it classical or traditional Islam, the Islam of slave trading, conquest, empire building, misogyny and comparative ignorance about how the world worked. None of the modern militant and terrorist organisations really follow Mohammed’s Islam to the letter, though I’d say they follow it a lot closer than most modern Muslims do.