Is it Possible to be an Islamophobic Muslim?

The following is an article entitled Headmaster Beheaded In Afghanistan By Taliban by Muslim A. Mohit on Technorati:

ONE MORE ENTRY in the endless list of stories bearing headlines such as Taliban beheads headmaster in Afghanistan raises the question: when are these sorts of activities going to end?

Muslims claim their religion is all for enlightenment, peace and harmony. Why then this continuous onslaught on education? I do not know of any other religion whose followers kill people to prevent the spread of education.

In a previous Technorati article, I wrote about Greg Mortenson, an American who is risking his own life to bring education to boys and girls in remote villages in Afghanistan. He even has members of the Taliban among his admirers, people who truly appreciate the gift he is bringing to the deprived Afghan people. Who are these people, then, who kill teachers?

Lack of education and injustice against women go hand in hand. Take the bastion of Islam—Saudi Arabia, where a woman’s worth is half of that of a man. In Saudi Arabia a woman cannot be on the street if she is not dressed according to strict Islamic dress code, and even then, if she is not accompanied by a male relative, she is subject to whipping by Islamic Police. The women cannot drive. Her inheritance is not equal with her male counterpart.

Proponents of Islam maintain that most of these practices are attributed to sharia laws, and many progressive Muslims claim that sharia laws are not always derived from the principles laid down in the Muslim holy book Quran; rather in many instances these laws are contrary to Quranic instructions. The problem is that there is no universal acceptance of these opinions among the Islamic scholars.

Many non-Muslims allege that Islam is a dangerous religion, and I admit that at the core of my heart, I feel I do not have ammunitions to refute this allegation about my faith. I have been taught that Quran is a divine book that God has preserved in the way it came to mankind. Nevertheless, I find many statements in Quran are not defensible in the justice system of the civilized world, just as Muslims find such statements in other holy books, which to them are not holy, since they consider those books to be adulterated.

The divinity of Quran has failed to save my people. I pray that they learn to respect other religions, realize how people of other faiths have reexamined the core concepts of their denominations, and reformed their practices to accommodate the latest discoveries of science to make them suitable for society with its ever expanding knowledge base.

In light of the beheading of headmasters, it's not surprising that, despite a population of over 1.2 billion, modern Muslims contribute so little in the fields of science, art, literature, music, or, for that matter, anything that expands the horizon of human knowledge.