Islam: Misconceptions and Challenges

There has never been a time when misconceptions about Islam and Muslims, and challenges that Muslims themselves face, have been so prevalent in the minds of people and so dominant in public discourse.
It is true that misconceptions have existed for many centuries, especially among westerners. This is due to their ignorance about the religion of Islam and its history, and deliberate attempts by certain segments of the population to misconstrue the Qur’anic verses and/or quote them out of context. The misconceptions are then propagated by some leaders of those countries, in particular politicians and evangelicals, and this filters down to the public at large via 24/7 broadcast media and social media, and becomes uncritically accepted by it.
It is also true that challenges that Muslims face have emerged in the past century or two. Several have arisen as a result of external forces that impinged upon the Muslim world. The most important force was the advent of colonialism and the consequential policy of the complete separation of ‘Church’ and ‘State’. There are, in addition, some internal forces that have compounded the problems. The most pernicious is the propagation of Salafi–Wahhabi ideology, an exclusionist and puritanical version of Islam, and its main tenet of takfīr, pronouncement of the charge of disbelief upon mainstream Muslims.
However, the existence and problem, respectively, of misconceptions and challenges have greatly increased since the tail-end of the twentieth century. The primary forces behind this development are twofold. Firstly, the rise of Islamophobia and the policy of regime change led to the emergence of fringe terrorist groups in the Muslim lands who espouse extremist ideology and commit horrendous terrorist acts; suspicion and fear have consequently been instilled in the minds of people in the West. Secondly, the politicisation of sectarianism in the foreign policy of some Middle eastern countries that feed upon ethno-religious differences; the goal of rival countries is to advance their political agenda and gain regional power and dominance.
Given the above narrative of the origin and intensification of misconceptions and challenges in recent decades, it is my humble hope that this book serves to (a) dispel ten of the most common misconceptions with the goal of persuading their peddlers to re-examine their rhetoric with an open, unbiased mind, and (b) address ten of the most pressing challenges with the purpose of encouraging Muslims to adopt appropriate strategies and tactics at different levels to effectively contribute to their resolutions