From Karen Armstrong`s highly acclaimed A History of God, p.303:


This spirit of tolerance and co-operation was strikingly demonstrated in the policies of Akbar, the third Moghul emperor, who reigned from 1560 to 1605 and who respected all faiths. Out of sensitivity to the Hindus, he became vegetarian, gave up hunting - a sport he greatly enjoyed - and forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday or in the Hindu holy places. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, were scholars from all religions could meet to discuss God. Here, apparently, the Jesuit missionaries from Europe were the most aggressive. He founded his own Sufi order, dedicated to `divine monotheism` (tawhid-e-ilahi), which proclaimed a radical belief in the one God who could reveal himself in any rightly-guided religion.

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, can be, and has been, interpreted in different ways.

Your beef is with a particular interpretation. That interpretation has a current, significant following for reasons that are mostly political, not theological.

Nor have Muslims been silent in their condemnation of the atrocities perpetrated in Islam`s name. If your media only shows you the ranting cleric from half a world away blame your media, not Islam.

http://www.al-islam.org/dilp_statement.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4660411.stm

http://washingtontimes.com/world/200...1407-8186r.htm

Another seventy-odd here:
http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/terror.htm

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