Radical Muslims, such as Sept. 11 terrorist Osama bin Laden, have rejected the principles of Islam, an ISU professor said Wednesday night during an awareness discussion to dispel misconceptions regarding the Islamic religion.

Stephen Aigner, associate professor of sociology, hosted the discussion in the Oak Room of the Memorial Union.

“Anyone who does what Osama bin Laden does, at that moment, has rejected what the prophet has passed on from Allah,” he said.

Aigner, an American Muslim, said Islam is not a religion based on violence.

“The problem is with people who live under oppressed conditions and have been a long time,” he said.

Aigner also said the West is partially to blame for the current political climates in countries with terrorism. He said Britain and France set the boundaries of several Middle East countries after World War I, splintering ethnic groups such as the Kurds into different countries.

“History is written by the people who win the wars,” he said.

Aigner added that, even with adverse political conditions, violence only escalated after Middle East countries were invaded.

“We didn’t have suicide bombings until we had occupation,” he said.

Aigner added that people tend to think that all Muslims are Arab, and the goal of the discussion was to dispel that and other misconceptions about Islam he said American people hold.

“I think people are establishing an equation: Arab equals Muslim, Muslim equals Arab,” he said.

Ten people attended the awareness discussion, which was sponsored by the Student Union Board.

Tamim Mahayni, awareness director for SUB, said Islam is generally misunderstood in America and dialogue needs to be opened to solve the problem.

“You have to take the religion as a whole and understand it and talk to people who practice it,” said Mahayni, senior in biology.

Mahayni said he wants people to understand what it is like to live as a religious minority in America.

Alison Lima, a senior in biology who attended the discussion, said she hoped to gain facts from the discourse.

“I was going into it expecting to get a lot of knowledge,” she said.

Lima said she was angry that her history of science class was “christianized,” and she was not learning about Muslim contributions to science.

“I’m going to talk to my professor about why I’m not learning this in class,” she said.