THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET:
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam
by Serge Trifkovic
(Boston: Regina Orthodox Press, 2002)
Reviewed by Paul Eidelberg (snip) In her extraordinary work, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, Bat Ye'or avoids discussing Islam per se. She lets Islam's thirteen-century record of plunder, rape, and genocide discredit that religion. One would hardly know of such barbarism reading the doyan of Islamic scholars, Bernard Lewis. Judging from his book What Went Wrong? (2002), nothing is intrinsically wrong with the religion that enthralls 1.2 billion people. And Lewis, unlike John Esposito, is not known as an apologist of Islam.
Enter Serge Trifkovic, a man of extraordinary intellectual courage. His The Sword of the Prophet departs from the moral "neutrality" of academia and, in six lucid and well-documented chapters, provides a "Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam." Citing the Kuran and the voluminous Hadiths—the Traditions of what Muhammad said and did—Dr. Trifkovic exposes Islam's prophet as cruel, ignorant, and lascivious. He examines Islam's fatalistic theology; reviews this religion's devastation of other civilizations; warns of the Muslims' insidious penetration of America and Europe; criticizes U.S. appeasement of Saudi Arabia and other Islamic regimes; and goes to the heart of what must be done to prevent Islam's global ascendancy.
Chapter 1, "Muhammad," portrays a simple preacher who became a fanatical warlord in the process of conquering Mecca and Medina. After slaughtering Arab tribesmen and looting their camels, the prophet and his followers kidnapped their women and staged an orgy of rape. One Hadith explains:
We desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, but at the same time we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing 'azl [coitus interruptus]. But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah's Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah's Messenger … and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.
To the men of one Jewish tribe, Muhammad offered the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Upon their refusal, up to 900 were decapitated in front of their women and children. "Truly the judgment of Allah was pronounced on high," was Muhammad's comment. The women were subsequently raped. Trifkovic comments: "That Muhammad's actions and words, as immortalized in the Kuran and recorded in the Traditions, are frankly shocking by the standards of our time—and punishable by it laws, that range from war crimes and murder to rape and child molestation—almost goes without saying." Trifkovik is aware of the cultural and historical relativism that would prompt Western intellectuals to say, "we must not extend the judgmental yardstick of our own culture to the members of other cultures who have lived in other eras." He counters this relativism by pointing out that "even in the context of seventh century Arabia, Muhammad had to resort to divine revelations as a means of suppressing the prevalent moral code of his own milieu."
Muhammad repeatedly invoked Allah as a deus ex machina, professing revelations to justify the prophet's political and personal needs. "Nowhere was this more obvious than when it came to his exaggerated sensuality." Trifkovic cites Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am Not a Muslim (1995), who asks whether Muhammad was a "known fraud, or did he sincerely believe that all his 'revelations' that constitute the Kuran were direct communications from God?" Warraq does not see how this can possibly matter to our moral judgment of Muhammad's character. "Certain racists sincerely believe that Jews should be exterminated. How does their sincerity affect our moral judgment of their beliefs?"
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http://www.freeman.org/m_online/aug03/eidelberg.htm