Free Republic

As is customary with the Saudis, any competition when it comes to ruling Islam is crushed to the best of their ability. They have all but obliterated the moderate Muslim voice in the United States and elsewhere in the world, and now with millions of relatively secular Muslims free from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, the Saudis are thirsting to inseminate the seeds of Wahhabism into Iraq. Wahhabism is the Kingdom's lifeblood — should Iran (or democracy) gain hold of a sizeable majority of Iraq's population, the Saudis' attempts to dominate Islam would be compromised. Frightened of this prospect, the Saudis have...

Durán, Durán Karen Yourish, New York COURTESY AJC. Khalid Durán thought his book on Islam for Jews would improve relations between the faiths. Instead, it has brought a death threat.Khalid Durán is a marked man. A few weeks ago, Sheikh Abdulmunem Abu Zant, a leader of Jordan's militant Islamic Action Front, charged him with apostasy and called for his death.Durán's crime? Writing a book subtitled "An Introduction to Islam for Jews" that doesn't quite toe the party line.Durán, a German citizen with a PhD in Islamic studies, now living in suburban Washington, is a liberal Muslim scholar who received his...

How CAIR Put My Life in Perilby Khalid Durán On April 4, 2001, a self-described advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. by the name of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), issued a press release1 attacking my forthcoming book, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews.2 CAIR's attack snowballed into a campaign of personal vilification, which eventuated in a Jordanian political leader calling me an apostate (murtadd).3 Neither CAIR nor Sheikh ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Abu Zant of Jordan's Islamic Action Front had ever read or even seen my book, but the CAIR attack prompted the latter to issue an...