Inexpressable Gratitude for Dr. Pipes' Courage

Submitted by Susan (United States), Nov 1, 2002 at 14:12

I wish to express my hearfelt, almost inexpressable gratitude to Daniel Pipes for publishing this well-written and thoroughly on-target article.

I have long been aware of the whitewashing of many uncomfortable but undeniable aspects of the orthodox Islamic belief system by many of our established institutions. Dr. Pipes has concentrated on the halls of higher education in this article, but this whitewashing is visible everywhere: in the mainstream media, in the US State Department, and even worse, in our secondary and primary public schools, as Dr. Pipes pointed out not long ago in one of his columns for the New York Post.

As this article so brutally shows, we can no longer trust those who represent many of our established institutions to provide accurate information about the motivations of those who have declared war upon us. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on John Esposito or any other Islamic apologist to spoon-feed us information about the beliefs of Islam or its history.

We can, and we should, make the effort to study Islam for ourselves, ideally from its primary sources such as the collection of traditions by Bukhari that Dr. Pipes mentions in his article. There really is no excuse for our ignorance in the age of the Internet -- Bukhari and most of the other major collections of Islamic traditions are posted online. Many of the most important classical Islamic texts such as Ibn Tamiyah (also mentioned in Dr. Pipes' article) and the Reliance of the Traveller (an important manual of Islamic law) have been translated into English and are easily accessible from Amazon.com or another online bookseller.

I'm not an Ivy League scholar, but one of the reasons I know that Dr. Pipes is one hundred percent correct -- and John Esposito and the others are 100 percent wrong -- is because I have sat online and sifted through Bukhari's narrations, for hours on end, and yes, I have seen most of those 199 references to military jihad contained therein within my own eyes.

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