Is Islam a Religion? It’s got a few unique features more in common with political totalitarianism. By David Solway.

There are several ways in which Islam differs from all other major religions.

• It sanctions militant proselytization, mandating forcible imposition on other peoples by coercion, threat and overt violence.
• It punishes apostasy with death.
• It countenances no separation between church and state.
• The “religion” itself takes precedence over the transcendent values it should strive to attain: the flourishing of the individual soul, the love of God’s Creation, the grace and miracle of life, the conversation with the Divine, freedom of conscience and the inviolability of personal choice in determining one’s redemption. Instead, it elevates conformity to a set of stringent rules, down to the smallest detail, as a prerequisite to salvation, whose effect is primarily to perpetuate the faith itself at the expense of the individual [follower].
• The propensity to violence is not an aberration but an intrinsic element of the Islamic corpus.
• It reverse the Golden Rule (““What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”).