The German government has been trying to portray itself as completely confident that Islam and the West can integrate smoothly.  It was therefore somewhat surprising when nearly 200 police raids smashed an Islamist sect over the weekend, on the charge of recruiting German nationals for service in the Islamic State (ISIS).

The group, which had been under surveillance for a year, had recruited about 140 people to join militants in Syria and Iraq, the German interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, told a news conference later in the day. In all, about 500 people in Germany are believed to have some connection to the organization.

Its members have been a familiar sight, handing out German-language copies of the Koran on the streets and in shopping centers across the country since 2011. The group has also posted propaganda videos on the Internet promoting violence, officials said.

The story provides a window on the divisions within radical Islam.  Even forms that are not the most radical can apparently be leveraged by Islamists to support the utterly radical.  German-language copies of the Koran by themselves represent a departure from the most radical forms of Islam.  This is because the Koran is supposed to be the word of God in a nearly pure form.  Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad was ordered to “recite” the words spoken to him by an archangel, which words came from God.  If you think of the matter as a kind of telephone game, only two interpreters then stand between you and God Himself.  One of them is an angel of high degree, and angels in Islam have no free will.  (Indeed, free will is undesirable in the Islamic theological picture, since after all the only thing you could do with it is fall away from God’s will — sin, in other words.)  Thus, the angel’s transmission should have been fairly reliable.

Muhammad’s interpretation of the divine revelation is thus the only occasion for error, so long as you stick to the original language.  Theologically, Muslims admit that Muhammad could occasionally err.  A group of verses is said to have been given by a Satanic source rather than the angelic one, and Muhammad is supposed to have passed them on in error.  These verses were the inspiration for Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, which caused him to be placed under a death sentence by radical clerics from Iran.  Nevertheless, the idea that Muhammad could have introduced error into the Koran is orthodox.  Another source of potential error arises with any translation of the Koran into any other language than the classical Arabic in which it was originally given.  Since preserving the integrity of God’s message to humanity is of first importance, the most conservative sects of Islam simply do not allow translation at all.  This German sect, by providing German translations, has thus already departed from the most radical visions.

Nevertheless, they were also providing fighters to ISIS.  Indeed, Syrian refugees to Germany have found its native sects far too conservative for their liking.  That shows that the fact that a sect is not as radical as possible does not imply that it is therefore safe, or not a danger to a Western system.  Groups such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, who claim to eschew violence, similarly recruit for more radical organizations than themselves.  The threat posed by such organizations must be kept in mind.

All the same, Germany has elected to focus most of its attention not on the threat from radical Islam, but on groups opposed to radical Islam.  Much as London has elected to invest vast resources in targeting so-called “hate speech,” Germany has elected to focus its attention on those who object to Islam’s most radical messages.  Germany has raided the homes of immigration critics, considering them hate criminals for questioning the compatibility of Islam and the West.  Though these citizens have legitimate concerns, the government takes it to be more important to block their criticism or skepticisms about radical Islam than to address radical Islam itself.

The degree of “radical” in “radical Islam” is not the point, as this example shows.  Less-radical organizations still feed the most-radical.  Islam needs a reformation, one that addresses its long history of theology in a way that advances human rights.  If Muhammad could introduce error into the Koran, why should he not have introduced error on these points of human dignity and free will?