To Jim

Submitted by Nabil Ahmad (United States), Aug 11, 2009 at 17:43

Jim:

>> Robert Spencer has never, not once, advocated violence against anyone.

When he was caught and asked about his ties to the mailing list that I mentioned earlier, he threw a hissy fit. I SAW his responses. He got in a twist big time...and ended up accusing his accusers, who happen to be right-wing and patriotic Americans themselves, of all sorts of things. He sure seemed to be upset that he got caught in the first place and tried to do a CYA big time. Perhaps he was afraid that his income would dry up if any of the serious accusations levelled against him gained any traction among his fans.

Also, Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq are conveniently missing the big picture. There's a lot more to Islam than a bunch of hand-picked passages that advocate violence. Iread parts of one of Spencer's books and he seems to draw some pretty unpleasant conclusions out of thin air, conclusions that are not backed by precedent or by the accounts given by Muhammad's enemies of the time. So I stand by what I believe with regard to Spencer...he is a bigot with a beef against Islam. I didn't always have this attitude towards him...I saw him as someone who wanted to stop the extremists. But it looks to me like, according to his own words, deeds and associations, that he may be one himself.

The Qur'an WAS a revelation in the true sense. The Arabs had not had a prophet of their own in millenia. The commands of the Qur'an were given to them through Muhammad, and they did not know what to make of them at all. And Muhammad himself knew litlle or nothing of Judaism and Christianity other than his contacts during trading missions, but he never embraced either religion. And for an illiterate man to produce what his detractors in Mecca called "bewitching poetry", when he had never been a poet nor read a single book, was odd, don't you think? And he never sought material gain, either. The pagan leaders of Mecca had attempted to bribe him with money, women, even power, in order that he would cease preaching about One God...and he turned them all down. Now why would he have done that?

I agree that the Qur'an was put together some years after Muhammad had passed on, but many of his followers had memorized the entire thing. When it was finally brought together, any "false" or revelatons would have been filtered out.

This was not so with the Bible. It was put together CENTURIES after Jesus had left. And then there was plenty of bloodshed with regard to what Christianity was and what its self-appointed leaders wanted it to be. By then surely the message would have been spread out far and wide and mangled beyond recognition.

With regard to Aisha, to do such a thing today would be considered to be immoral by contemporary standards. But back then this sort of thing was commonplace...and not just among Arabs but even among Jews. One of Muhammad's youngest wives came from a Jewish background and was around 17 when she married him. And that was AFTER she had been married to...a Jewish man.

Remember also that public nakedness among the Arabs was not considered to be immoral, either...especially among the pagans.

There is negativity and anger towards Muslims because of what a number of them have done in the name of their religion...and this anger is understandable. But once a person gets to dig deeper into Islam, he or she could come to the conclusion that these "Muslim" extremists are nothing but a bunch f political opportunists who try to use religion to justify their aims and control the ignorant among us. They have turned Islam into a junk religion. But I know better.

Now why was there (and still is) anger and hatred towards the Jews for so many hundreds of years? What did they do to be ostracized all over Europe for so long? Many of them found life in the Middle East to be far more hospitable than in Europe. This is true, according to Dr. Pipes himself.

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