Rob Wallace and Lauren Effron from abc news;
While some fundamentalist Muslims may declare they follow Muhammad’s instructions to “fight the infidels,” moderate scholars argue the infidels he was referring to have been dead for 1,300 years.
“‘Infidel’ in the Koran is not just a noun or an adjective, it is the word that the Koran uses to describe explicitly and exclusively the Meccan aristocracy with which the Muslim community was at war with,” explained Dr. Reza Aslan, a Muslim scholar and author of several books on the Middle East.
Father Dan Madigan also pointed out the key passage that follows the “fight the infidels” line that many radical Islamists often ignore or don’t know it exists.
“The verse immediately after it says, ‘If any of the unbelievers asks you for sanctuary, then take them into your houses so that they might hear the word of God and then let them go on their way,'” he said.
ABC News took questions from viewers and posed them to a group of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of the Holy Quran. The above extract was in relation to the question of whether the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) demanded that infidels be killed.