Well, I suppose we can start by reminding you of what you already know
(Q) said:
Why are there pedophiles, rapists, murderers and drug traffickers in an Islamic state? Do the people there not give a rat's pattootie about their perfect religion and what their obligations are to it?
Well, in terms you and I would both accept, nature provides. I've said of sex crimes before that even if we manage to educate date-, acquaintance-, and spousal rape out of society, nature will still provide us with sociopaths. I think the same is true of murder insofar as there will
always be sociopaths and psychopaths.
In terms you and I would reject, God has His own purposes that aren't meant to be understood by finite creatures such as ourselves.
In political and historical terms, we must recall that Islam originated in the seventh century, in a particularly harsh environment, and much of what the Qur'an codified was a selection of pre-existing sociomoral codes that originated among nomadic peoples in that environment. Islam goes through periodic fits of redefinition, and as you're such a critic of the faith and its history, I can safely presume you've studied those at least as much as I have. At present, Islam exists in a sociopolitical cycle that is still recovering from a traumatic decline after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The influence of fundamentalism is expected, and the period and severity of that influence is exacerbated by external influences. Muslims are humans, too. You seem to forget that from time to time. The faith that produced Rabia (perhaps the most famous of female Sufis, who once asserted that she would burn the Kaba'a if it stood in the way of a Muslim's path to God), Rumi, and al Hallaj (
ana al haqq), to say the least, is also capable of producing greedy and corrupt people as well. Islam has fought at least two massive civil wars over this, and the only thing that prevents the current internecine discord from exploding to such a degree is that issues like the Israeli theocracy and the Western institutions that bankroll and cover for its crimes have given them something to focus on. Still, though, as we saw in Iraq, those internal grievances still smolder, and often flash into open flame.
How can an alleged "religion of peace" even survive in such a society?
There are a couple ways of looking at that. Either it subsists beneath the corrupted exterior, or else it simply dies.
And we can also consider the idea of society. How can Islam exist as a religion of peace when it has, for its entire existence, been viewed by Christians as an enemy and, in recent years, an object of human exploitation by the Western world?
I'm an American. I hear Christians frequently call this a Christian nation. But the one thing we won't ever do as a nation is turn the other cheek and attempt to rise above the violence. And Muslims, like Christians, being human, are subject to its psychological processes. That's why the guilty among them are more likely to make excuses than fulfill the demands of faith.
