Pipes' response to the "rebuttal" was remarkably charitable

Submitted by Shaykh Ratl N. Ro-El (United States), Mar 3, 2014 at 12:04

The so-called "rebuttal" was so full of typos, grammatical errors, malapropisms, insults, etc., that Mr. Pipes would have been justified in ignoring it completely. Instead, the comments he posted in response were remarkably restrained.

"The other religious text comes out of India by way of a visiting Earl of England who issued it out under the entitlement of Infinite Wisdom"

The "Shaykh" evidently believes "entitlement" to be a synonym for "title"? Regardless, where he got the idea that Infinite Wisdom "comes out of India," I'm not sure. A copy I've seen claimed it came from Lhasa, Tibet - a claim which the book does not substantiate. The book claimed some Tibetans believed the work to be by a Bramin - but there's no good reason to believe the introductory material to be anything other than a work of fiction. There's ample cause for recognizing it as fiction, e.g. "the great noise which it makes in this city [Llasa] and all over the [Chinese] empire, the eagerness with which it is read by all kinds of people, and the high encomiums which are given to it by some, at length determined me to attempt a translation of it into English". If any of that were true, it would be easy to find evidence of it, yet none has ever been uncovered.

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