The Politically Incorrect Guide to IslamBy Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 6, 2005


Frontpage Interviews guest today is Robert Spencer, a pre-eminent scholar of
Islamic history, theology, and law. The director of Jihad Watch, he is the
author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and
Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the
Worlds Fastest Growing Faith. He is the author of the new book The Politically
Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).



FP: Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Spencer: Thank you, Jamie. FrontPage is one of the few media outlets, liberal
or conservative, that is willing to allow honest discussion and exploration of
the roots of Islamic terrorism, and I am honored to be a part of that.

FP: Thank you Mr. Spencer. So tell us, what is the politically correct guide to
Islam?

Spencer: Unfortunately, there are many such books. Among the most notable, and
egregious in their whitewashing of Islam’s theology, history, and present-day
reality, is Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong and The Islamic Threat:
Myth or Reality? by John Esposito. One that is more like my latest book in
format is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam by Yahiya Emerick. A
popular new PC guide to Islam is No god but God : The Origins, Evolution, and
Future of Islam by Reza Aslan.

FP: What is your inspiration to speak the unspoken truths about Islam?

Spencer: I speak out simply because few others are doing so. The general refusal
to face the realities of what we are really up against in what is popularly
known as the war on terror is crippling our ability to mount a fully effective
response to the challenge of the global jihad. Political correctness and
well-meaning naďveté are playing into the hands of the jihadists and making for
some egregious policy miscalculations. Several rather high-profile
conservatives, for example, have told me that by focusing attention on the
elements of Islam that give rise to violence and fanaticism, I am alienating
moderate Muslims who might otherwise be our allies in the struggle against
Islamic terror. So in effect they would prefer to pretend that Islam is a
peaceful religion at its core in the hopes that this fiction will win us some
friends in the Islamic world.



This kind of thinking is flawed in many ways. In the first place, pretending
that anything false is true is not ultimately going to get us anywhere. And if
we refuse to allow honest exploration of what it is about Islam that is making
so many Muslims violent today, we are not really helping sincere moderate
Muslims: in fact, we’re cutting the ground out from under them by denying that
there is anything about their religion that they need to face and combat if they
wish to establish a lasting framework for peaceful coexistence between Muslims
and non-Muslims.



FP: If Islam is truly a religion of peace and tolerance than why is it so
dangerous to say what you want about it? You have received death threats over
the years for instance. Can you talk a bit about this?



Spencer: Yes, these threats are in effect saying, “Say that Islam is a religion
of peace and tolerance, or we’ll kill you!” I have received death threats, but I
am not going to stop telling the truth because of them. If everyone who tells
truths that others don’t want people to know gives in to violent intimidation,
what kind of world would it be?



FP: It is interesting you say this because the numerous death threats I have
received entail the same irrational paradigm. Let me explain:



While it is a given that many Muslims are on our side against extremism, that we
must ally ourselves with them (i.e. Free Muslims Coalition, Sheikh Palazzi
etc.), and that Muslims have the power to collectively reform and change their
religion into one of tolerance and peace (and that we must promote this effort),
I have at times shed light on the elements of the Islamic religion that, as you
show, legitimize and promote violence. Because of this, I have often encountered
email correspondence of the following nature:

[a] A Muslim emails me and tells me to never say again that Islam ever advocates
violence because this is not true.

[b] I answer in an email that I am not saying such a thing off the top of my
head but simply just gathering conclusions from reading the Qur'an (i.e. the
Verse of the Sword, Sura 9:5, 9:29 etc.) -- a source from which Osama and
al-Zarqawi receive their inspiration.

[c] Then the Muslim writes back saying that he will kill me.

The logic here is very twisted. How does the individual who threatens me
rationalize his step c with step a? If his effort is to convince me of the
inaccuracy of my own findings, he is not doing a very successful or convincing
job, to say the least. What is the psychology here?

Spencer: This is a strange contradiction from a non-Muslim perspective, but not
from that of a Muslim who believes in traditional Islamic legal directives
calling for the deaths of unbelievers who are at war with Islam. From the
perspective of such a man, Islam is indeed a religion of peace: the peace that
will prevail over the world when Sharia is the supreme law of every land. To
bring this about, he believes he is commanded by God to wage war – not
undifferentiated mayhem, but war for specified purposes, under specific
circumstances and for particular ends. When you invoke the Qur’an and other
Islamic sources to make that point that elements of the Islamic religion
legitimize and promote violence, you are doing so as an infidel. Even if what
you say is correct, you are approaching it all as an infidel and are thus
insulting Islam. And this insult must be avenged. It isn’t that you are
inaccurate, it is that you are critical. You are mistaking what they see as
justice for
undifferentiated violence.

FP: Throughout my life in academia, myriad volumes have passed before me that
contained criticisms of Christianity, within which there were various mocking
and ridiculing portrayals of its tenets and values etc. Your book doesn’t mock
anything, but just quotes Islamic sources and lets them speak for themselves. I
think that it would be essential to have this book as a must-read in the
curriculum for every introductory course for first-year students in the Arts in
university. Why is it that it is a given that this would never happen? For
instance, in many courses where the topic of 9/11 is raised, all kinds of
readings are given out that blame the U.S. for being the victim in this
terrorist attack. Why wouldn’t they at least offer this book as an alternative
explanation?

It is a given, of course, that this book would never make it on any curricula
readings in academia, even in courses on Islam which profess to give all sides
of the picture. Why?

Spencer: Because the academic establishment – the Middle East Studies
Association – is not interested in really giving all sides of the picture. Since
the 1970s it has been dominated by Edward Said’s view that any critical look at
Islam or the Muslim world by Westerners was ipso facto racist and imperialist.
This idea has coalesced nicely, of course, with the multiculturalist dogma that
the Judeo-Christian West is responsible for all the evils in the world, and that
those outside of and set against Western civilization can only be victims, never
perpetrators.



I have seen this play out in so many ways. I have information about universities
where professors were so determined to present a rosy picture of Islam that they
refused specific requests to add even Bernard Lewis to the curriculum, on the
grounds that he was not at all times uncritically positive about the Islamic
world and its achievements. Although these professors were not Muslims
themselves, they felt driven by multiculturalism and the Left’s hatred of the
U.S. to present a vision of Islam so apologetic in nature that, had a similar
presentation been made about Christianity, the ACLU would have been avid to take
the case.



Also, it is not unheard-of for outright Islamic apologists to occupy academic
positions in American universities, and to present Islamic proselytizing
material in academic settings. This is in part a manifestation of the general
American ignorance of Islam. Universities hire Muslim professors in order to
teach about Islam and the Middle East, and the other professors know so little
about the subject that they cannot perform adequate peer review – even if their
world view would allow them to do so in the first place. The academic
establishment has become so politicized that many professors of Middle East
Studies are presenting as fact highly tendentious and apologetically motivated
assertions about Islamic teachings and history, and their peers either don’t
know or don’t care, or both.



One result of all this was epitomized by an incident at a university where I
spoke not long ago. I was standing in the office of the professor who invited me
when another professor on the faculty of the same university called him to
express her indignation that someone who believed that Islam taught violence was
being allowed to speak on campus. Now, given the fact that Osama bin Laden, Omar
Bakri, Abu Bakar Bashir, Al-Zarqawi, and countless others insist almost daily
that Islam teaches violence, it would seem to me to be simply prudent to
investigate whether or not it really does, and if it does, what sincere Muslim
reformers can do about that fact. And it would seem to me that a university
would be the natural setting to perform such investigations. But instead, this
professor approached the prospect of my speaking there with the fury of a
religious zealot confronting a heretic. And indeed, I was threatening one of her
most cherished dogmas, one that has little or no basis in fact,
and so I had to be silenced – since the points I make cannot be adequately
refuted. This was one small manifestation of the fact that the universities have
become centers of indoctrination into a particular political and philosophical
perspective. They are no longer genuine institutions of higher learning.



Another example is the egregious Omid Safi of Colgate University, who devotes a
large portion of his course on “Islam and Modernity” to studying the trumped-up
and politicized phenomenon of “Islamophobia” – as manifested by the writings of
such world-class scholars as Bat Ye’or, Samuel Huntington, and Ibn Warraq, as
well as those of the Muslim convert Stephen Schwartz and others -- including
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. My own name appears on the list. Safi labels
his little enemies list as being made up of “unrepentant Orientalists, outright
Islamophobes, Neo-conservatives, Western Triumphalists, right-wing Christian
Evangelicals, etc.” I have taken issue at my website, jihadwatch.org, with
Safi’s propagandistically stacking the deck for his students with such labels,
particularly when they are applied to such scholars as Bat Ye’or and Huntington,
and for demeaning such scholars (which of course is what he intended to do) by
lumping them together with political activists and
journalists whose work is far more superficial. Instead of letting these
students approach the works of these people, as varied as they are, with an open
mind, and weigh them against the work of those whom Safi likes, Safi is doing
their thinking for them. He is not a professor; he’s a pamphleteer, a preacher,
a propagandizer. Predictably enough, he haughtily refused an offer from me (and
one from Daniel Pipes also) to come to Colgate and debate him about
“Islamophobia” and related matters. Of course, his very unwillingness to take
such challenges indicates that the outcome of such contests would not be in
doubt. But because his views mesh with those of the MESA establishment, he and
countless others like him are allowed to get away with this shallow
propagandizing in an academic setting, and with an academic veneer.



FP: You show the life of Mohammed, revealing that he was a military man (i.e.
the famous Battle of Badr). Why is it that so many Muslims I speak with deny to
me that their Prophet ever had anything to do with violence or with military
battle when their own religious texts demonstrate that he so clearly did? Do
these Muslims not know anything about their own religion? I find this doubtful
since the ones with whom I have had these odd conversations are very devout and
are immersed in their religious literature.

Spencer: They deny this because they are used to dealing with Westerners who
know nothing about Islam, and they assume that you will not be able to support
your assertion with references from Islamic texts, but will have to invoke some
secondary source that they can then dismiss as “Islamophobic” and ill-informed.
I have run into this kind of thing countless times, which is why in my new book,
as well as in all my other books, I carefully document every assertion I make
about Islam with abundant references from the Qur’an and other Islamic texts.



Now, why would they try to mislead you instead of being honest? Because they
want you to think well of Islam. If you were to become a Muslim, then you could
understand Muhammad’s actions in light of the Islamic worldview and the jihad
imperative in general. But before that, it is best that you do not know such
things. This kind of behavior is sanctioned somewhat indirectly by the Qur’an
(16:106), when it says that those who deny their faith will go straight to hell,
except those who deny the faith “under compulsion.” The great and still widely
read Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir explains that “this is an exception in the
case of one who utters statements of disbelief and verbally agrees with the
Mushrikin [unbelievers] because he is forced to do so by the beatings and abuse
to which he is subjected, but his heart refuses to accept what he is saying, and
he is, in reality, at peace with his faith in Allah and His Messenger.”
Historically this has been generally understood as allowing
for deception only when the Muslim is in fear of death or suffering physical
tortures, but contemporary Salafis have considered the worldwide war against
Muslims, as they see it, as allowing for deception of unbelievers whenever it is
deemed necessary to defend the faith. This works also from Muhammad’s dictum
that lying is permissible in war (Sahih Muslim, book 32, no. 6303).



FP: Whenever we hear about the Crusades, we picture these violent intolerant
Christians that waged war on Muslims who just wanted peace. Your book shows that
this is a complete falsehood. Tell us about the Crusades and why this
politically correct notion is the one that has prevailed about them.

Spencer: The Crusades were a small-scale defensive action designed to secure the
safety of the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims. The Crusaders committed abuses
that cannot be excused, but their excesses pale before 450 years of aggressive
jihad warfare that went on before any Crusade was called. Today, however, the
Crusades have become one of the cardinal sins of the Western world. They are
Exhibit A for the case that the current strife between the Muslim world and
Western, post-Christian civilization is ultimately the responsibility of the
West, which has provoked, exploited, and brutalized Muslims ever since the first
Frankish warriors entered Jerusalem. Bill Clinton affirmed this not long after
9/11, recounting the Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem in 1099 in lurid terms as if
it were something unique in history – when actually armies often behaved this
way in those days, including Islamic jihad armies. This is not to excuse the
Crusaders’ behavior, but only to say that it does not
bear the weight that is put on it today. The Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem,
according to journalist Amin Maalouf in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was the
“starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”



Maalouf doesn’t seem to consider whether “millennial hostility” may have begun
with the Prophet Muhammad’s veiled threat, issued over 450 years before the
Crusaders entered Jerusalem, to neighboring non-Muslim leaders to “embrace Islam
and you will be safe.” Nor does he discuss the possibility that Muslims may have
stoked that “millennial hostility” by seizing Christian lands centuries before
the Crusades — lands that amounted to nothing less than two-thirds of what had
formerly been the Christian world.



Professorial Islamic apologist John Esposito is a bit more expansive — he blames
the Crusades (“so-called holy wars”) in general for disrupting a pluralistic
civilization: “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political
events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of
so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring
legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.”



Esposito’s “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” were exemplified, he says,
by the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638: “churches and the Christian
population were left unmolested.” But he doesn’t mention Sophronius’ Christmas
sermon for 634, when he complained of the Muslims’ “savage, barbarous, and
bloody sword” and of how difficult that sword had made life for the Christians.



Here again, the multiculturalist hatred of the West, all its works, and all its
pomps, has fed and continues to feed these myths.



FP: Let’s touch on totalitarian Puritanism.

Modernity and democracy cannot prevail in any society where women do not have
individual rights, equality and the right of sexual self-determination. If a
woman wants to be promiscuous it simply doesn’t matter what you or I think about
it. You can say it is immoral and wrong but the bottom line is that, if a free
society is to prevail, it is none of our business and the state or religious
authorities etc. cannot interfere to punish the woman. If they do, we cannot
have true democracy and modernity in a society.

In many of my conversations with Muslims, we begin a discussion where they say
that Islam is compatible with democracy and freedom, but when I begin to touch
on this area and refuse to stop talking about it, the individuals with whom I
speak always end up getting very angry and appear as though they are on the edge
of violence, insisting that this is not the “Islamic way.”

Well then, it means our definitions and notions of what a free society is are
very different, now doesn’t it? The bottom line, again, is that you can moralize
all you want about how immoral and wrong the actions of a promiscuous woman are.
But the fact is that, in our notion of freedom, it is her business and if,
hypothetically, her behaviour is morally wrong, then she can deal with it with
her own God on her own Judgment Day after her death; it is not our business to
punish her for her activity or to set up a society in such a way that her sexual
self-determination is suffocated. If we do, we do not have a free society. We
will have a society that, inevitably, will have dissidents sitting in jail,
because all freedoms are connected to one another. (i.e. if a woman’s sexual
self-determination is illegal then what happens to a novelist who dares to write
about an adventurous woman who seeks love outside of state regulation? etc.)

Comment from you sir?

Spencer: This is a crucial point. As Dinesh D’Souza has pointed out, virtue
cannot be genuine without the freedom not to be virtuous. If that freedom does
not exist, then the result is not virtue; it is just coercion. This is why the
Muslim criticisms of Western immorality ring hollow, because they would replace
Western libertinism not with genuine virtue, but with enforced conformity and
fear.



This is a fundamental difference between the Judeo-Christian values of Western
civilization, out of which developed modern post-Christian notions of freedom,
and Islamic civilization. I am no fan of modern society’s relativism and worship
of the atomized individual, cut off from any responsibilities to family or
nation – responsibilities that the human race has taken as axiomatic across all
cultures throughout history. But I do not believe that the only alternative is
coercion and intimidation. I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition has the
resources within itself to meet the challenges of both Islamic violence and
soulless materialism without returning Western society to a situation in which
virtue is ensured by force. In any case, if it turns out not to be able to
summon those resources in the near future, it will not survive.



FP: What hope is there for Islam?

Spencer: There is hope for a retreat from literalism within Islam, but it will
be an uphill battle. It can only come when moderate Muslims acknowledge the
sources and magnitude of the problem they face. So far few have done that.

FP: Robert Spencer, thank you for joining us today sir.



Spencer: Jamie, thank you again for your kindness in asking these probing
questions and considering these views. The window of free speech about Islam and
terrorism is closing; half-truths and wishful thinking dominate the public
discourse. But not at FrontPage. I appreciate the opportunity you have provided
to tell the truth.



http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19360



See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1326 Islam's
Supremacist Past Is Its Present



See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1303 Multiculturalism,
Tolerance and Pluralism in Islam

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1298 Tolerance and
Pluralism: Islamic Supremacist Literature sold in OZ Islamic Bookstores
See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1292 Islamic
Separtists in Australia: That's why we don't believe in democracy

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1281 Tolerance and
Pluralism: Islamic Supremacist Literature casually sold in Australian Mosque

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1261 Tolerance and
Pluralism: Muslim converts to Christianity face persecution and death in
Bangladesh

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1246
Tolerance and Pluralism: Muslim Book calls Norwegians
'Satan's sons'

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1237
Triple-pronged Jihad -- Military, Economic and Cultural

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1216
Al-Qaeda book on managing savagery

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1204
Chicago Tribune: Watchdog group assails mosque's Saudi
books

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1185
Egyptian Progressive Criticizes Muslim Intellectual
Doublespeak

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1184
Submission - Never-ending Islamic Conspiracies

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1172
Blood Libel: Muslim Conspiracy Theories

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1113
Comparing the Rhetoric of Jihadism and Nazism

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1050
Arab ethnic cleansing imperialism and colonialism:
1,400 Years of Islamic Aggression

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/928
Saudi export of strict Islam raises suspicions

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/906
The Race Against Lies

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/810
Christians and Jews Demonized in Saudi Textbooks

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/718
Islamic concept of Al-Taqiyah to infiltrate and
destroy kafir countries

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/803
The Rise of Middle Eastern Crime in Australia

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/767
"Intolerant Form of Islam" Taught in German Public
Schools

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/762
Egyptian Textbook: Beheadings are part of Islamic
Culture

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/713
Exclusivism and multiculturalism in Islamic society

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/536
Hate at the Local Mosque

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/380
The Imperialism of Khilafists: Their grand designs to
conquer the west

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/363
New Book Calls Europe 'Province of Islam'

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/23
The Agenda of Islam: A War Between Civilizations

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/2
The Clash Of Civilizations And The Great Caliphate






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