The great Koran con trick

New Statesman (U.K.) ^ | 12/10/2001 | Martin Bright

[Rain-maker]

Bump: the scam is up..koran a farce

[Cacique]

A FORMER MUSLIM PROFESSOR ON WHY HE LEFT ISLAM (click on picture)

The Hardcover edition.

[isthisnickcool]

CULTISTS CORRECTION FLUID.

[japaneseghost]

This is not new. Islamic scholars have known for years that some of the original Koran, which was in the possession of a wealthy family in Pakistan and stolen some years ago by one of the military regimes, was different (but not substantially) from the Koran read today. This makes total sense due to inconsistencies in the modern text.

[Excuse_Me]

Believe me, if the Muslims can stomach their own version of the Koran and Hadith, and still follow Mohammed, this "revelation" won't phase them in the slightest. Anyone who believes that rape and murder is okay, as long as you do it for God, might just as well live in Jonestown as Mecca.

[MarMema]

They found that Islam, as represented by admittedly biased sources, was in essence a tribal conspiracy against the Byzantine and Persian empires with deep roots in Judaism

No wonder they are still killing the Orthodox whenever possible.

[Rain-maker]

Maybe we'll get lucky they'll drink poison brew en masse.

[MarMema]

might just as well live in Jonestown as Mecca.

LOL, just yesterday I was telling my older children about Jonestown as part of explaining OBL and the Taleban to them.

[marty60]

Islam, The only Internationally recognized CULT of DEATH

[Gritty]

they have left the field open to the radical right in the United States, where it has been used to justify a crusading, Christian fundamentalist approach to Islam.

... or perhaps a more accurate examination?

[an amused spectator]

The work of John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting, which emerged initially from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1970s, questions not only Islam's own version of its origins; this "new history" of Islam takes as its starting point a problem that has long troubled scholars - the almost total lack of contemporary Islamic sources.

To name just a few 'dead people walking'.

[monkeyshine]

Patricia Crone

When I read that at first I thought it was Free Republic's own "Patria One".

[A. Pole]

Bump

[dennisw]

Another Muslim con game. How come I'm not so surprised?

[Alouette]

John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting

These sound like Christian names. So will a special FATWA be made against them personally (like the one for Salman Rushdie) or do they just fall under the generic FATWA for "all infidels"?

[Thinkin' Gal]

When I read that at first I thought it was Free Republic's own "Patria One".

Eeeek. The same thing happened to me. :-/

[George W. Bush]

The news that a recent scientific paper on the common genetic roots of Jews and Palestinians had been suppressed by learned journals, because of the political sensitivity of its conclusions, made for depressing reading.

I thought it was well-known that Jews and Arabs are branches of a common tree. Certainly the Old Testament indicates it clearly as does, in my understanding, the Koran. Even within the secular field, there is a reason why we refer to Semitic peoples which includes Jews and Palestinians as well as other Arab peoples.

Politicalusa.com, one of a number of websites committed, since 11 September, to rooting out the liberal "traitors" who have dared speak out against US government policy, includes a series of pseudo-scholarly attacks on Islam. In one article entitled "The myth of Mecca", Jack Wheeler (an adviser to the Afghan mujahedin in the Reagan era) manipulates the new history to argue that Muslims must be forced to accept that their religion is based on a series of made-up ideas.

Well, it took a while but we finally get to the truly bad news. Christians who are "right-wing" (some even worked for that sadist Reagan) actually have opinions on this subject.

I watched the liberal-slanted Islam: Empire of Faith on PBS last night (just a self-abuse thing, I guess) and noted how Christians were denigrated at every opportunity and Islam was glorified at every opportunity. PBS is planning to celebrate the penetration of Islam in America with some crappy program about Islam In Appalachia which will supposedly show how Islam is rising in America even within the Bible Belt. Ugh. Funded by some Methodist committee if I understood the credits correctly. What a surprise for me to learn that modern Methodists would rather propagandize for Islam instead of funding missionaries to oppose the false god Allah.

[denydenydeny]

Ziauddin Sardar is one of the few Muslim intellectuals genuinely to have engaged with the new historians. He has called their work "Eurocentrism of the most extreme, purblind kind, which assumes that not a single word written by Muslims can be accepted as evidence". Writing in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, Sardar placed the western revisionists firmly in the post-colonial orientalist camp, from where colonial "experts" have consistently told Muslims that they know best about the origins of their primitive, barbarian religion....Sardar points out that all of the academics responsible for the new Islamic history emerged from the School of Oriental and African Studies, a colonial institution that is noted for training generations of Foreign Office officials and spies.

Buzzword follows buzzword. Note that the viewpoint of Crone, et. al, is countered only by ad hominem attacks rather than factual refutations.

The popularity of Edward Said's beliefs among Islamists and leftists alike stems from their utility as a club with which to beat heretics and infidels.

[BenF]

I haven't seen her since President Bush froze the assets of the Holy Land Foundation. Think there could be a connection?