A New Haven cleric rejects claims of Islamic violence, contrasts Islam with Western history, and defends Muslim civilizational achievements.
Imam Saifuddin Hasaan of Masjid Al-Islam in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a February 13, 2026 Friday sermon that critics who label Islam as violent ignore what he described as Western historical atrocities.
He claimed that tens of millions of Native Americans were killed by the United States and that millions of Africans were enslaved, adding that countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and nations in South America eliminated their indigenous populations.
Hasaan argued that Islam has never committed comparable crimes and instead “uplifted” and improved every society it entered. He pointed to Muslim-ruled Spain as an example of what he described as a flourishing Islamic civilization during Europe’s Dark Ages. He also accused the West of appropriating Muslim intellectual heritage, citing the Westernized names of scholars Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd as Avicenna and Averroes.
