I recently finished reading The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran by Robert Spencer. Although the Koran is a jumbled and rambling collection of sayings, Spencer does a remarkable job of explaining some of the main themes, including its views on Jews, Christians, women, war and bringing the world into submission to Allah.
Spencer shows that the Koran’s virulent anti-Semitism, obsession with the tortures of hell, and mandate for global violence is not a matter of isolated passages taken out of context—as Islamic apologists and those on the Left like to assert—but are major themes of the book. Although I am not the expert on the Koran that Robert Spencer is, I’ve read the Koran from cover to cover and I can attest that he is telling the truth. I have to believe that those who argue that the Koran is about peace either have never actually read it or are lying through their teeth.
It is true, that there are some Islamic apologists who genuinely try to explain away all the commands to violence in the Koran. For example, “the twentieth-century Sudanese Muslim theologian Mahmud Muhammad Taha argued that the most of the Koran’s more violent and politically incorrect commands applied specifically to Muhammad’s situation in seventh century Medina and do not apply to the modern world.
Taha’s novel interpretation of the Koran might have been a good solution: “Were Taha’s ideas accepted, most of the Shari’a would disappear, including outdated provisions concerning warfare, theft, and women. Muslims could then more readily modernize.”
Unfortunately, in 1985 Taha was tried for apostasy and executed. His views were simply not acceptable to mainline Islam.
The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran is informative, clear, concise, well documented and hard to put down. Every American needs to read this book. It is not too melodramatic to say that the future of the West is at stake.
