Beating the Sword of Islam into a Ploughshare

Submitted by Robert M. Price (United States), Dec 17, 2002 at 13:32

Professor Pipes's comments are right on target. Nor is this the first time PBS has used taxpayer money to promulgate religious views, as witness their various begathons centered on Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra. Seeing one of these, I thought I was watching the 700 Club. And now Islam: the Whitewash.

Pipes is correct in lamenting the documentary's utter neglect of today's quest for the history of Islamic origins by such scholars as Günter Lüling, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Ibn Warriq, and others. Karen Armstrong, by contrast, is simply a smiling apologist for "ecumenical correctness" who has not a care in the world for what the founder of any religion actually said or did. She is an ecumenical spin-doctor. Personally, I feel the world would be much better off if all Muslim savants were like the brilliant and winsome Seyyed Hosein Nasr, a Sufi mystic and scholar. But it serves no one to pretend that all Muslims are. Or that their faith has any better track record than it did have or that other fallible faiths have.

It never ceases to amaze me how no one picks up on the parallel between 9/11 and the initial victory of Muhammad (even according to the uncritical "history" swallowed by Western scholars). The Prophet took advantage of the Sacred Month of Truce during which all Arab tribes agreed not to make war so that all might have peaceful caravan access to the holy city Mecca. He attacked a Quraiysh caravn, defenseless and unsuspecting, to gain "God's" first victory.

Don't tell me Islam is "essentially" a religion of peace. It, like all other religions, is not "essentially" a religion of anything. As Sartre said, existence precedes essence: a religion's "essence" is decided in every generation by its adherents and how they decide to live it. It is nothing other than what they make of it.

Robert M. Price
Fellow, The Jesus Seminar

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