So far off topic, but this thread hasn't been an exemplary thread of productivity, so it should be fine to discuss this Islam topic further.
You stated that Muslims wanted the world to bow down before Sharia Law. I interpreted that to mean that all Muslims want the world to comply with Sharia Law, and I attempted to correct your post by altering your quote to indicate that a small percentage of Muslims actually want that. I stand by this point.
If one examines any big enough group, one will find branches that differ in thought from the main group. Looking at practitioners of the Christian religion one can point to Southern Baptists, the Amish, Mormons, and Christian Scientists. All these groups have spawned from Christian backgrounds, and while today they aren't considered mainstream, they are a great example of how groups branch off of larger groups and go in various directions.
If you go into even smaller subsets of the above groups, you can get even more extreme with fundamentalist evangelical Southern Baptists who only have sex for purposes of procreation, Mormons who think that they should have multiple wives, and Christian Scientists who refuse to treat their dying children with any modern medicine. There will always be more and more extreme versions of an idea if enough people are involved. What do people think of when Mormons are mentioned? Polygamy frequently comes to mind. But polygamy is
banned by Mormons! Similarly many people think that all Christian Scientists refuse to take modern medicine, but for the vast majority of them,
this is simply not true.
Going even further into the minority groups of Christianity we can arrive at a variety of Christian organizations that have been associated with the word I hate to use, "terrorism." The KKK is a wonderful example of this,
but there are numerous others.
That was just a brief analysis of Christians. An analysis of any group will show similar breakdowns in extremist viewpoints. Some gun rights people like Seth above think that people should show ID to police who are just trying to do their job. Some of us think that there should be no test or training required to carry a loaded firearm, but some think there should be. Some of us think non-violent felons should be able to be armed, and I imagine some of us even feel that violent felons should be able to be armed as well. You can look at a centrally held idea like a bell curve. On one extreme end are people who think guns should all be registered, gun owners should be licensed, ammo should be tracked, etc. On the other extreme there are people who think any weapon (be it a revolver or a tank) should be able to be sold by anybody to anybody without any paperwork and anybody should be able to keep and carry/drive that weapon however they want.
Getting back to your point though, you claimed that all Muslims want the world to bow down before sharia law. The first article has a quote that says, "Currently Muslims make up less than two percent of the population. 'And among those, most don’t even know what Sharia is,' said one political observer." So most don't know what Sharia even is. Following this bell curve logic, we can assume that of those that know what Sharia is, a smaller subset believes in Sharia law, a small subset of that subset believes that the world should follow it, and a small subset of that final subset is actually trying to get the world to follow it. That sounds like a small percentage of Muslims.
The third article begins with, "The debate over Sharia law surfaced in Canada two years ago when a Muslim group in Ontario proposed the arbitration of family disputes according to Islamic law." Another way to write that would be "a Muslim group suggested that maybe Sharia law could be used by a person who is helping two groups in conflict to resolve a family dispute." To me, that doesn't translate into all Muslims demanding that the world bow down to Sharia law. It sounds like a group suggested that it could be used by arbitrators who were helping arbitrate a dispute among family members. I'd be willing to bet that this group was suggesting it specifically for Muslims as well.
The second article is the cleverest of the three, but it basically is saying that if people want to enter into an agreement where their family or financial dispute is heard by an arbitrator who happens to follow Sharia law, that they can do that. Again, this doesn't come across as meaning that all Muslims want the entire world to bow before Sharia law.
I'm not saying that there aren't Muslims out there who do want the world to bow down before Sharia law. I'm sure some would. But considering that Islam is the second largest religion in the world and over 1.5 billion people practice it, I find it impossible to accept that 1.5 billion people can agree on something, I find it impossible to believe that the majority of those 1.5 billion people want to impose their beliefs on the rest of the world, and I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anything but a small percentage of Muslims are actively trying to impose Sharia law on the world. If you disagree, go down to your nearest Islamic temple and conduct a survey and see what people think.
