Writing for The Hill, self-described Muslim Reformer Shireen Qudosi has called on Muslims to acknowledge the bloody beginnings of Islam as a path to purifying the faith.

According to sacred Islamic sources themselves, Qudosi said, the Prophet Muhammad was “both peaceful and war-mongering.” At the time, “the Prophet would have been viewed as a violent terrorist to his opponents,” she said.

Denying or whitewashing these and other historical facts regarding Islam does nothing to help move forward, she said. “We must not be afraid to approach and contend with the complexity of Islamic law and history, the good, the bad, the ugly and the viciously anti-democratic,” she said.

Because of the “totalitarian nature” of Islamic law, she said, “it has occasionally intertwined and cross-pollinated with fascism, socialism and communism.”

Qudosi was invited to speak before a House Homeland Security Subcommittee last week, where she warned that Islamist pressure groups like CAIR were making it impossible for Muslims “to do the crucial work of reforming and liberalizing Islam.”

In her address, Qudosi criticized President Obama and his administration for their refusal to utter the words, “Islamic terrorism,” a policy that she considers foolish and misguided.

“Mr. President,” she responded rhetorically, “you don’t know who you’re fighting because you don’t know who or what you’re dealing with.”

“You don’t see a monster for what it is because it tells you it isn’t a monster. Or, to carry the metaphor further, because it tells you there’s no such thing as monsters,” she added.

She also came down hard on the “obsession with stamping out the public’s ‘Islamophobia,’” which would move Islam from a religion into a protected racial or biological context. Islam is a religion, she contended, and thus must be open to criticism.

The doctrines of Islam and its political systems, Qudosi noted, “must be lampooned and mocked and derided—not because they are all deserving of such treatment, but because ideas that we are not permitted to attack are the ideas that control us.”

“Only by approaching the religion’s tenets with a new spirit of inquiry can we ever disentangle the Islamic faith from the Islamism that is a metastasizing threat to human rights around the world,” she said.

Listen to Shireen Qudosi discuss her op-ed on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM:

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