Getting to the Root of Understanding Islam

Few would consider Robert Spencer, author and prominent scholar of Islam, to be a radical.

Spencer’s politics fit snuggly within the mainstream of conservative thought. He appears regularly at both Human Events and FrontPage Magazine. His books are published by the stalwart conservative press Regnery.

His rhetoric and demeanor are hardly radical either. Read his books and you’ll find sly, witty humor to complement his often depressing subject matter. His talks are no different. He presents a friendly demeanor. Here’s an example from the recent Restoration Weekend:

So in what manner is Spencer possessed of the Radical Spirit?

To understand this we need to understand what it means to be radical. The first definition of the term (coming from its etymology) sums it up: “Arising from or going to a root or source.”

Thus Spencer’s radicalism soon becomes clear to those familiar with his books and his essential blog, JihadWatch. His principle project is this: to go to the root of understanding Islam. To strip away the obfuscations of the Left and alleged “moderate” Islamist apologists and to really demonstrate just what this religion is all about.

And so his newest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran is in a sense his most radical work yet. In the past Spencer has hit numerous Islam-related topics. Last year’s Stealth Jihad looked at how many Islamists have shifted tactics from violence to quiet subversion. Previous books focused on Muhammad and the differences between Islam and Christianity.

Now he examines the Koran itself. In twelve accessible chapters – each interspersed with sidebars and quotes in Idiot’s Guide fashion – Spencer gives a crash course on the Koran’s origins, its interpretation and its contents. He explains how the book was assembled and why it’s so difficult to understand. (It’s not even written chronologically!) He also shows how pervasively anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, intolerant, and violent attitudes are embedded within this book revered by more than a billion people.

The experience of reading The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran brought to mind two other “radical” texts, each exploring a different kind of faith.

The first is Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, the classic critique of the New Left by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Destructive Generation is a dense book that overwhelms with the sheer number, variety, and intensity of its facts and arguments. One completes it almost exhausted. Spencer’s Infidel’s Guide produces a similar effect. The author packs his text with so many quotes from the Koran, the Hadith, and prominent Muslim commentators that it’s profoundly difficult to argue with him. (Which perhaps explains why the usual anti-Spencer retort is to slur him as a bigot and not bother to even quote him.)

The second is this year’s Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) by agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. The new book by the author of Misquoting Jesus and God’s Problem provided a more thoughtful alternative to critiquing religion than the Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins militant atheism.

Spencer’s approach to the Koran is identical to Ehrman’s to the New Testament. He’s a nonbeliever who seeks to look at a holy text critically, examining how it was made and what the text itself actually says – not how it’s allegedly divine and infallible. Yet why is Spencer the “bigot” of the two? Why is it acceptable to look at Christianity critically but “racist” to do so for Islam? Why have we built an advantage to our enemies right into the fabric of our “politically correct” culture?

And it’s here where we return to understanding Spencer as a radical. Because Spencer is not just a radical intellectual – willing to take an idea to its root no matter how maligned the left-dominated intellectual culture might make him. He’s also a radical activist. Consider another of the American Heritage Dictionary’s definitions of radical: “One who advocates fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions.”

Possessed of the conservative’s understanding of human nature and loyalty to individual liberty he knows the only way one can both effectively and morally change society is to change people’s ideas. And so the “fundamental or revolutionary change” that he advocates is a revision in the way Americans understand Islam.

Let us support him as he pursues this intellectual revolution. Our very society is dependent upon its success.

FPM

Radical Analysis for a Radical Religion, Parts 1, 2 & 3: An Intellectual Revolution to Save the American Revolution

Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2

The experience of reading The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran brought to mind two other “radical” texts, each exploring a different kind of faith.

The first is Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, the classic critique of the New Left by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.

Destructive Generation is a dense book that overwhelms with the sheer number, variety, and intensity of its facts and arguments. One completes it almost exhausted.

Spencer’s Infidel’s Guide produces a similar effect. The author packs his text with so many quotes from the Koran, the Hadith, and prominent Muslim commentators that it’s profoundly difficult to argue with him. (Which perhaps explains why the usual anti-Spencer retort is to slur him as a bigot and not bother to even quote him.)

The second is this year’s Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) by agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. The new book by the author of Misquoting Jesus and God’s Problem provided a more thoughtful alternative to critiquing religion than the Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins militant atheism.

Spencer’s approach to the Koran is identical to Ehrman’s to the New Testament. He’s a nonbeliever who seeks to look at a holy text critically, examining how it was made and what the text itself actually says – not how it’s allegedly divine and infallible.

Yet why is Spencer the “bigot” of the two? Why is it acceptable to look at Christianity critically but “racist” to do so for Islam? Why have we built an advantage to our enemies right into the fabric of our “politically correct” culture?

And it’s here where we return to understanding Spencer as a radical. Because Spencer is not just a radical intellectual – willing to take an idea to its root no matter how maligned the left-dominated intellectual culture might make him.

He’s also a radical activist. Consider another of the American Heritage Dictionary’s definitions of radical: “One who advocates fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions.”

Possessed of the conservative’s understanding of human nature and loyalty to individual liberty he knows the only way one can both effectively and morally change society is to change people’s ideas. And so the “fundamental or revolutionary change” that he advocates is a revision in the way Americans understand Islam.

Let us support him as he pursues this intellectual revolution. Our very society is dependent upon its success.

NewsReal Blog

Suicide bomber read Koran verses before attack

by Robert Spencer

Now why would he read verses from the Book of Peace before committing an act of murderous violence? Find out in my book The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran.

"Suicide bomber read verses before attack," from Corriere della Sera, October 19

MILAN - A small green-painted door opens onto the balcony. Inside, an old sofa stands against one wall.

Resting on the cushions was a Koran open at the Cow Surah, the verses that suicide bombers read before they go out to blow themselves up.

The book was the last trace left by Mohamed Game in his lair, a third-floor flat in a block in Via Gulli. Just after seven o'clock last Monday morning, Game prayed before the open pages.

Then he picked up his explosives-packed toolbox and left. He went down three floors of stairs to the street, turned left and went on his way.

At a normal pace, it would have taken him just over five minutes to reach the nearby barracks in Piazzale Perrucchetti, at the end of the street.

Seven hundred and fifty metres separated Game from martyrdom. It has been a week since the attack on the Santa Barbara barracks in Milan....

Source: JihadWatch

The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of nine books on Islam and Jihad, a weekly columnist for Human Events and Frontpagemag.com, and has led numerous seminars for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. He is the author of the new book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran.

FP: Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Spencer: Thanks, Jamie. It is always an honor to chat with a perceptive and honest thinker like you.

FP: Well thank you.

So how is this new book different from your previous ones? Read more ...

Source: FPM

Book Review: The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran

At last, a readable and honest guide to the book that inspires terrorists worldwide: the Koran

Robert Spencer writes,,,the Conservative Book Club has made my new book, The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, a main selection for this month. Here is their review of the book:

If we don't know the Koran, we can't defeat the jihadists: Osama bin Laden, the masterminds of 9/11 and those who have perpetrated the over 13,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11 repeatedly point to it as their inspiration and authority, explaining that they're committing acts of terrorism and hate because of it. Yet the Koran is not an easy read -- it has been called "wrist-slittingly boring," as well as confusing, contradictory, and muddled. But Robert Spencer reads the Koran so that you don't have to! Now, in The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, Spencer, the bestselling author and Islam expert, shows exactly what's in the Koran, and why every military and intelligence official -- and every American -- should be concerned about this revered and reviled holy book. This witty and breezily written guide to the Koran explains who those who have vowed to destroy us think they are, what they think they're doing, and what they hope to accomplish.

Spencer explains what the Koran says about who Infidels are and what must be done about them; its appallingly harsh teachings on women; what it really says about warfare against Infidels; its strange teachings on Christians and Christianity; and its relentless demonization of the people whom the Koran identifies as the chief enemies of the Muslims: the Jews. He shows how the Koran developed, why central Muslim claims about it are false, and even provides a revealing and disquieting glimpse into the Hadith, the traditions of Muhammad that for Muslims worldwide are second in authority only to the Koran itself.

A huge number of policy decisions are predicated upon the assumption that the Koran teaches peace, and that those who brandish Korans and commit violence are misunderstanding their own religion and perverting the teachings of their own holy book. These include U.S. government postures toward Pakistan and Egypt; immigration matters; airport security procedures; military strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan; domestic anti-terror policies; and our acquiescence to Saudi Arabia's Islamic proselytizing campaign in America and many other countries. That's why The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran is so urgently needed: it shows how and why U.S. policies in these areas are not only wrong but dangerous to our national security -- and sounds a clarion call for a restoration of sanity on these issues in our national security establishment.

Proof: the Koran is just about the opposite of a "book of peace":

* Why most government and media analysts dare not even question the assumption that the Koran is peaceful

* How sacred texts are not entirely determined by what the faithful wish to see in them

* Infidels: why Allah hates them, and what he has in store for them -- straight from the Koran

* The strange story of how the Koran was compiled -- and the explosive significance of the existence of alternate versions

* The worst sin of all for Muslims: it's worse than murder, worse than rape, worse than genocide, and you're probably committing it

* The Muslim claim that the Koranic text was never altered -- why it's false, and why this matters

* Why it is so easy for non-Muslim readers reading English translations of the Koran to miss some of its most violent and worrisome passages

* The passages of the Koran that mandate warfare against unbelievers: why in traditional Islam they take precedence over more peaceful passages

* The little-noted and violent corollary to the Koran's famous passages forbidding the killing of innocent people

* But doesn't the Koran promise salvation to Jews and Christians? The truth about this celebrated passage

* How the Koran retells stories of the Biblical prophets but alters them to support Muhammad's claim to be a prophet

* Moses: the Koran's frequent retellings of the Exodus story -- and the all-important element of that story that the Muslim book leaves out every time

* The Islamic prophet Muhammad: why the Koran is essentially all about him

* Telling signs that the Koran was not delivered from heaven in pristine form, but was compiled from earlier Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources

* Koranic Jew-hatred: proof that Islamic anti-Semitism is not an import from Christianity, as many have claimed

* Are the Koran's violent commandments are largely meaningless, since similar ones are found in the Bible?

* The surprising and disquieting truth behind Islam's professed respect for other religions and reverence for their central figures

* The extraordinary implications of the Koran's preposterous teachings about Abraham, Moses and Jesus

* The alarming teachings of the Koran on women: how it reduces women to the status of commodities, and even teaches that women are deficient intellectually

* The Koran: does it really contain miraculous prophecies and other evidence of divine origin?

* The strange Islamic phenomena of "temporary wives" and "temporary husbands" -- and how justification for both comes from the Koran

* Love your enemies -- and other things the Koran doesn't say

* Barack Obama's June 2009 speech to the Islamic world: an object lesson in the hazards of not understanding the Koran

* How mistakes and false assumptions about Islam and the Koran is today leading the U.S. to make serious foreign policy errors

* What Infidels can and must do to defend free societies against those who take the Koran's message of violence and supremacism to heart

"Meticulous, comprehensive, indispensable. 'I read the Koran so you don't have to,' Spencer writes, but even for those of us who have read the Koran, this is a richly illuminating work." -- Bruce Bawer, author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept.

"Governing officials and media spokesmen may ignore Spencer's warnings, but they do so at their own risk, because Islamic jihadists are not ignoring what's in the Koran, and are working to destroy our freedoms in obedience to Koranic dictates. In illuminating for Westerners exactly what the Koran teaches, Spencer has performed a valuable service in the defense of Western civilization against the Islamic jihad." -- Geert Wilders, Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the Netherlands

"Unlike most of today's self-styled experts, Robert Spencer won't tell you that 'slay the idolaters wherever you find them' really means 'love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.' In The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, Spencer shows once again that he is America's most informed, fearless, and compelling voice on modern jihadism, insisting that we come to grips with the words behind the ideology that fuels international terror." -- Andrew C. McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.

"Robert Spencer incarnates intellectual courage when, all over the world, governments, intellectuals, churches, universities and media crawl under a hegemonic Universal Caliphate's New Order. His achievement in the battle for the survival of free speech and dignity of man will remain as a fundamental monument to the love of, and the self-sacrifice for, liberty. In our epoch of intellectual jihadism, this honest book is essential to understand the challenges of the twenty-first century." -- Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia; The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam and Islam and Dhimmitude

"Tony Blair calls the Koran 'progressive [and] humanitarian' but Robert Spencer has actually read the scripture and begs to differ. In an informed, sardonic antidote to the usual soft-peddling of the Koran, he concludes that its actual contents should alarm infidels and prompt them to defend their 'freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the legal equality of all people.' " -- Daniel Pipes, director, Middle East Forum

"For 1,400 years Muslim leadership spread misinformation and covered up what is in the Koran, even criminalizing exposing the truth or asking questions. The truth is too scary for many, both Muslims and non-Muslims. I thank Robert Spencer for bringing the truth of what is in the Koran to non-Muslims." -- Nonie Darwish, ex-Muslim and author of Now They Call Me Infidel

"This book is an incisive analysis of how Islamic jihadists read the Koran and understand it to be commanding them to wage war against non-Muslims. Military and intelligence analysts, as well as all Americans interested in protecting our freedoms, will find The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran to be a valuable guide to the thought processes and core beliefs of Muslim terrorists." -- Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad

Source: JihadWatch

Book Review: The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran

Product Description

Written in an extremely accessible style by bestselling author Robert Spencer, "The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran" is a fact-based but light-hearted look at the key elements, values, and beliefs in the Koran.

From the Inside Flap
The Koran: It may be the most controversial book in the world. Some see it as a paean to peace, others call it a violent mandate for worldwide Islamic supremacy.

How can one book lead to such dramatically different conclusions? New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer reveals the truth in The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran: not many Westerners know what's in the Koran, since so few have actually read it -- even among the legions of politicians, diplomats, analysts, and editorial writers who vehemently insist that the Koran preaches tolerance.

Now, Spencer unveils the mysteries lying behind this powerful book, guiding readers through the controversies surrounding the Koran's origins and its most contentious passages. Stripping out the obsolete debates, Spencer focuses on the Koran's decrees toward Jews, Christians, and other Infidels, explaining how they were viewed in Muhammad's time, what they've supposedly done wrong, and most important, what the Koran has in store for them.

From the Back Cover
Praise for The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran

" Meticulous, comprehensive, indispensable. `I read the Koran so you don't have to,' Spencer writes--but even for those of us who have read the Koran, this is a richly illuminating work."
--Bruce Bawer, author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept

" Governing officials and media spokesmen may ignore Spencer's warnings, but they do so at their own risk, because Islamic jihadists are not ignoring what's in the Koran, and are working to destroy our freedoms in obedience to Koranic dictates. In illuminating for Westerners exactly what the Koran teaches, Spencer has performed a valuable service in the defense of Western civilization against the Islamic jihad."
--Geert Wilders, Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the Netherlands

" Unlike most of today's self-styled experts, Robert Spencer won't tell you that `slay the idolaters wherever you find them' really means `love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.' In The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, Spencer shows once again that he is America's most informed, fearless, and compelling voice on modern jihadism, insisting that we come to grips with the words behind the ideology that fuels international terror."
--Andrew C. McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad

About the Author
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of nine books on Islam and Jihad, a weekly columnist for Human Events and the website Front Page Magazine, and has led numerous seminars for the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

Source: Amazon