Associated Press quoted the words of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden who said during the ceremony of presentation of the highest human rights awards of the Greek Orthodox Church in one of the temples in New York. According to Joe Biden, it is a moral obligation of society to protect religious freedom in order to protect society from the spread of violent extremism.

As known, today, when we speak about extremism and terrorism, almost everyone means Islamic extremism and terrorism. Therefore it is easy to understand Joe Biden who said that terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State distort Islam to justify horrific acts.

He also underlined that religious values are entirely consistent with civic values in the U.S.

Mr. Biden is absolutely right says leader of "Birlik" Party (Uzbekistan) Abdulrahim Polat. In fact, in the U.S. religious values are entirely consistent with civic values. But this conclusion is true only and only for those religions which already accepted principles of secularism. However, this principle is not accepted by Islam. According to the wrong interpretation of the Quran (so called – tafsir) any state should be Islamic; everyone in the world should be Muslim and moreover must live under the laws of Shariat.

The goal of the organizations like Al-Qaida and ISIS is to implement above mentioned principles into practice. Moreover, the methods performed by these organizations are not contrary to the currently accepted concepts of Islam. So it looks as if that members and supporters of Al-Qaida and ISIS are true Muslims!?

The only way out of this deadlock is to perform deep reforms in Islam itself, first and foremost, to accept the principle of secularism. This is an internal affair of Islam. However, due to the fact that the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism expands all over the world, the whole world should be interested in the issues of reforms in Islam and more directly involved in them.

Since the number of Muslims in almost all the countries all over the world has significantly increased, in my opinion, you can even say the proposal is natural. We must all understand that while Islam does not recognize the principle of secularism, religious freedom is the path initially to Islamic extremism, and then to Islamic terrorism.