Killing unbelievers

An excerpt from the book "Leaving Islam" edited by Ibn Warraq. From the chapter 20: "Mirza: Floods, Droughts, Islam, and Other Natural Calamities."

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"There were several good affluent Hindu families near our village and I had some school friends from those Hindu families. Several of them were very good friends of mine, with whom I used to go to school and play and eat together in their houses. I noticed that many times local Muslims were hostile toward those Hindus whenever any riots occurred in neighboring India. These scenarios of riots used to bother me very much, as it was very hard for me to conceive why Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) had to die for crimes committed by some Hindus in Delhi or Bombay. One day I asked one local mullah if he supported killing of local Hindus for his Muslim brother in Delhi or Bombay. I was simply stunned and horrified by his reply. The mullah told me: "It is the sacred duty for the Muslims to kill kafirs. Hindus are kafirs, therefore it is our duty to kill them!" I asked him if it is written in the Koran or hadith to kill Hinidus. The mullah replied, "Yes!" At that time, it was not possible to verify the mullah's assertion, since I did not understand a word of Arabic and there was no translated Koran available to me."

...Later in the same chapter...

"I purchased two transalted Holy Korans, one in English and one in Bengali. I also purchased some renowned sahih hadith books. I also gathered the Bible, Bhagavat Gita, and some chapters from the Upanishads. I was reading the Koran, first very slowly but systematically from the beginning, and my intention was to finish the Koran. Before that, I had read the Koran selectively, some verses here and there with no clear-cut idea of what it was. The more I read the holy book, the more I was dismayed. My intention was to search divinity, philosophy, science, ethics, morality, social, and political issues in the Koran. But alas, the Koran was a book with no chronology, no philosophy, no science at all (but had plenty of erroneous science), pleny of problems in ethics and morality, amply redundancies, unfit social and political teachings by today's standards, and, above all, it had ample superstitious scriptures. I also found that the Koran was a book full of hatred, cruetly, unethical matters--no divinity at all."

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