Carl Ernst demonstrates anew his commitment to genuine academic inquiry

My esteemed Mr. Spencer -

Take heart: In today's climate, being called an "Islamophobe" is a BADGE OF HONOR.

In consideration of what "Islam" truly represents, being "phobic," i.e., afraid of it, would constitute a high degree of WISDOM.

Call me a PROUD ISLAMOPHOBE.

And thank you ever so much for your hard work and courage in exposing this hateful ideology for what it is.

The Truth About Islam
http://islamwatchers.blogspot.com

Spencer should sue

Any chance that any of these protests are being held in the S. Florida area? I live near the F.A.U campus and would be happy to join my voice to the crowd.

This is of course assuming that there are enough people in this area aware of the problem to MAKE a crowd.

Take a look. Varisco froths at the mouth for paragraph after paragraph, calls Horowitz an "idiotologue" and the week "Islamofascism by and for Idiots week."

Very powerful intellectual arguments by Varisco. It's a dogmatic response. A brave man world challenge Horowitz or Robert to a debate. However, he (and Ernst) would likely pretend to themselves that they are "above that". But they are just dogmatic.

I can just see Robert and David H. nailing the theses to the doors (Luther style) and challenging them to a debate. But they will call for a bull to have these guys burned at the stake.

When you spend your life studying a certain topic you become a bit protective of that topic and subconsciously take negative views personally. I don't think these professors are deliberate in there covering up for Jihad they just don't want to feel that the subject of there life's work is..well.. the enemy civilization.

Carl Ernst - you will go down in history as an idiot. A BLITHERING IDIOT.

Robert Spencer will go down in history as an American hero.

End of story.

Uh huh - where's the debate between Ernst and Spencer? Here's where: Ernst is too much of a cowardly blowhard, thus, no debate.

You are right - "Suzig" - "Islamophobe," a BADGE OF HONOR.

Any one of these kids who take this guys class, and happens to know a thing or two about the real Islam and questions the "prof", can most assuredly expect an "F".

I, as well as many, have experienced "educators" like these guys, and they cannot stand to be challenged to the truth.

Keep it up Robert. You are the leader of the "real and true truth".

These men are shills.

They defend, gloss, spin and backfill for a single man. This man, their ancestral patron and benefactor, was a mass murderer, serial rapist, torturer, child molester, extortionist, liar, oathbreaker and common thief. His book teaches others to be murderers, rapists, torturers, molesters, extortionists, liars and thieves.

These men defend Mohammed, while presumably not even believing his claims to prophethood. They are as despicable as the Vichy, and deserve the same fate.

Blowhammed,

You're kidding, right? These guys have been in the forest so long they can't see the trees?

My brother-in-law has spent his life studying (profiling) sex criminals, and believe me, he never covers for them.

Ernst, et al are bankrupt. They have nothing and they know it; that is why they refuse to debate. Mr. Spencer trades in truth and knows that personal attacks do not garner a following.

Exhibiting facts works if you can do it. Ernst cannot. When you have nothing you launch personal attacks.

Look at this stack of boldfaced lies. On the link Robert posted click on the "About " button where the site owner has the audacity to claim the following about his blog:

" We are scholars concerned about stereotypes, misinformation and propaganda spread in the media and academic forums on Islam and the Middle East.

• We are committed to fair, open-ended scholarly assessment of the current political issues of terrorism, gender inequality and intolerance.

• We encourage informed debate rather than partisan posturing on all issues.

• We believe in active involvement as public intellectuals communicating the best of available research."

Comments for this fraud/poseur's blog are permitted. Why don't we all leave a thought ot two with him?

Carl Ernst is the University of North Carolina professor who has included a trip to Jihad Watch in his course syllabus, as an example of "advocacy/attack religious websites."

This reminds me of the Irish joke "They say we are supposed to be neutral. But neutral against whom"?

It's such nonsense. We are all advocates. Only a Moe Howard or Zachary Smith Distinguished Professor is not an advocate of a point of a view-and not attacking other views? (Maybe some views should be attacked. And Ernst is not an advocate of his view?)

The problem here is just plain confusion. Ernst teaches the fictional Islam as laid out by imam Bush (or is he a prophet really?). Spencer studies the real world Islam. They aren't talking about the same religion, that's all.

Keep it up Mr. Spencer, you're doing an awesome job.

"An awesome job."

Ditto.

Prof. Ernst refusal to debate Mr.Spencer in regards to Islam only shows Ernst's intellectual cowardice and moral bankruptcy. For a professor of his stature and experience it ought to be a piece of cake to debate Spencer, even if over the internet.

His students should ask for their money back. I mean does anywant want to learn from a professor who so doubts his own work that he can't even debate a layman like Mr.Spencer.

Mr. Spencer is very very far from a layman. That professor is likely better described as a layman. He probably doesn't even speak Arabic. A degree from his school is meaningless other than for a job in State Department or for the big media.

A scriptural understanding of Islam explains in perfect resolve why those buildings in NY are gone and why people are killed by "suicide bombers . Learning about scriptural fundamental Islam is essential to the survival of the west.

The media and academia are working hand in hand t destroy what created them

Mr. Edward R. Murrow.

This might just do nobody any good.

At the end of this discourse
a few people may accuse this reporter...

...of fouling
his own comfortable nest...

...and your organization may be
accused of having given hospitality...

...to heretical
and even dangerous ideas.

But the elaborate structure
of networks...

...advertising agencies, and sponsors
will not be shaken or altered.

It is my desire, if not my duty,
to try to talk to you journeymen...

...with some candor about what
is happening to radio andtelevision.

And if what I say is responsible...

...I alone am responsible
for the saying ofit.

Our history will be
what we make of it.

And if there are any historians
about or years from now...

...and there should be preserved...

...the kinescopes of one week
of all three networks...

...they will there find recorded
in black and white, and in color...

...evidence of decadence,
escapism...

...and insulation from the realities
of the world in which we live.

We are currently wealthy, fat,
comfortable, and complacent.

We have a built-in allergy to
unpleasant or disturbing information.

Our mass media reflect this.

But unless we get up off
our fat surpluses...

...and recognize
that television in the main...

...is being used to distract, delude,
amuse, and insulate us...

...then television
and those who finance it...

...those who look at it
and those who work at it...

...may see atotally
different picture too late.

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/g/good-night-and-good-luck-script.html

The Middle East Studies Association, or MESA, or more accurately MESA Nostra, is the professional organization of teachers of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in this country. In 1970 about 3% of its membership was Muslim; today it is about 70%. Here is an article from 2005 for students of Carl Ernst and others interested in what currently constitutes the "academic discipline" of Middle Eastern studies.

Fitzgerald: MESA Nostra

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald introduces you to the Middle East Studies Association:

"Mesa" or "MESA" is the acronym of the Middle East Studies Association, the professional group of those who at American universities and colleges are charged with the responsibility of teaching the American young, those trusting, innocent, infinitely malleable young, with learning about the Middle East -- which is to say, about Islam.
As an organization, MESA has over the past two decades slowly but surely been taken over by apologists for Islam. Many of these are Muslims, and many are non-Muslims. The latter includes quite a few people who are married to Muslims, or who, to get along with their colleagues (and remember, the most political place in the entire universe is a university faculty, and that institution which, alas, Randall Jarrell failed to immortalize (if memory serves), the Departmental Meeting. Junior faculty owe everything to, and therefore must curry favor with, senior faculty. If that means signing an anti-divestment petition that has the mighty empire of Israel, fons et origo of everything that has ever gone wrong with the Muslim and Arab states and peoples, then so be it. Funny thing about being a trimmer, however, is that the mere act of signing something you really don't believe helps to convince you that you really do believe it, otherwise you would have to come to terms with your own cravenness, your own pusillanimity. And no one wants to do that.

The method of apologetics is simple: concentrate on Israel, or the more tendentious reification of an alternative state, "Israel/Palestine," keep clear of such topics as land ownership under the Ottoman Empire, the actual demographics of the Ottoman vilayets and sanjak that made up what became Mandatory Palestine, don't even whisper that more than half of the Jews in Israel had never left the Middle East but lived as dhimmis in the Yemen (virtual chattel slaves), in Iraq, in North Africa, in Syria and Egypt -- because officially, all Israeli Jews are "European colonialists"; finally, do not under any conditions mention that a goodly number of the ancient "Palestinian people" (invented post-1967) are the descendants of Arabs and Berbers who were veterans of Abd el-Kader's campaign, Egyptians who came with Mehmet Ali, Muslims from the Balkans and Bulgaria and other Ottoman territories in Europe who were transferred, en masse, by the Turkish government as the high tide of Islam receded -- for that area (a/k/a in the West as "Palestine") was by far the most desolate and under-populated in the Ottoman Empire, always excepting the Empty Quarter of Arabia).

The apologetics consists in hardly ever discussing Jihad, dhimmitude, or indeed even introducing the students to Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Sometimes an expurgated version -- the Michael Sells horror -- is assigned to students The Hadith and Sira are never mentioned. Books on the level of Armstrong and Esposito are assigned, and feelgood nonsense like Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World.

But not everyone who is a member of MESA is completely awful. There are a few reasonable people, some of the Ottomanists and suchlike. MESA is a little like the Soviet Union of Writers, which had thousands of members and hardly a real writer. When one considers Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Bernard Lewis, and a few others, on one scale, and the assorted Khalidis and Dabashis and Massads and Bahranis in the other, you can guess which side kicks the beam. No member of MESA has done as much to make available to a wide public important new work on Muhammad, on the origins of the Qur'an, and on the history of early Islam, as that lone wolf, Ibn Warraq. No one has done such work on the institution of the dhimmi as that lone louve, Bat Ye'or. It is an astounding situation, where much of the most important work is not being done in universities, because many university centers have been seized by a kind of Islamintern International. Willy Munzenberg could have learned a lot from Edward Said, who was only begetter, with his Orientalism for a good deal of this "post-colonial hegemonic discourse" stuff that permanently stunts the mental growth.

Recent presidents of MESA have included Lisa Anderson, the well-versed and compleat academic (and beyond, what with the Councils on this and the Committees on that, all very impressive if you are impressed with that sort of thing) operator, Dean of the School of International Blah, and Joel Beinin and Laurie Brand, about whom you may google, and Rashid Khalidi, and -- has Juan Cole served his term, or is that coming up? Well, you get the dreary picture

In any case, even MESA has its constraints. For example a few years ago it had to award, it could not avoid awarding, a prize for the best book of the year to Michael Cook for his 720-page Commanding Right and Prohibiting Wrong in Islam, even though Cook is suspiciously learned and has written a book, perhaps too warily not permitted to be reprinted, with Patricia Crone (who herself is very good, but also, at times, as in her treatment of Christoph Luxenberg, not quite as brave as she should be).

Why do I refer to MESA as "Mesa Nostra"? Because it is a kind of "Our Thing" conspiracy, but not nearly as appealing, as folkloric, as the Mafia, or the 'ndrangheta, or the camorra, for in Italy the malavita has three main components. Everyone knows everyone else; the maneuvering, the politicking, the fear that the hot breath of Campus Watch, and perhaps even Congress, will take away all that government money that the Khalidis and the Dabashis et al. wanted to use to spread their anti-Israel anti-American and "why-do-they-hate-us?" and "it is only a handful-of-extremists" message, and how can that mean old U.S. government not want to fund that, huh?

"Mesa Nostra" is my little invention. It communicates the doubtfulness, and more, of the enterprise. It has nothing to do with real scholarship. Ask yourself this: could Joseph Schacht, the great authority on Mohammedan law, or Arthur Jeffery, an authority on Islam, on Muhammad, even on aspects of the lexicon of the early Qur'an, both of them once stars in Columbia's middle-eastern firmament, have been hired today -- at Columbia, or indeed, anywhere that the plotters of Mesa Nostra rule the roost?

The Arabs have poured money into various Georgetown Centers for this and that (because that's where the power is, that's where the foreign service officers are trained, that's where Peter Bechtold, who gave a cheerleading address to the last meeting of Mesa, heads the "Foreign Policy Institute" and was so instrumental in drawing up that farcical list for General Vines). They have also bought up chairs: the nice "Guardian of the Two Holy Places" professorship of law that Frank Vogel holds, and a King Abdul Aziz Thisorthat, and so on. Oh, they get their money's worth. They do, indeed they do.

So that's why I call it "Mesa Nostra." Everybody should.

[Posted by Hugh at January 25, 2005 8:18 AM]

Anyway, today's learned students are not going to be willing or able to put any daylight between what their instructors tell them true is and what they know to be true, They are under the constraints on time and money.
Islam is the solution and is the path to peace don't believe it? You will fail this class.

And for new visitors to Jihad Watch, and especially students at Chapel Hill, there is this contest, which just for fun you can enter (no peeking, via google, at the submissions of others):

January 27, 2005
Hugh Fitzgerald Announces the MESA Nostra Contest, and Makes You An Offer You Can’t Refuse
It's contest time at Jihad Watch, with our TaqiyyaFest still open for entries, and now a new offer from the Vice President of our Board, Hugh Fitzgerald:

Readers of JihadWatch are aware that MESA Nostra is the professional organization in which, in order to become a uomo d’onore, or a donna d’onore for that matter, no kneecaps need be broken, no nightclubs broken up, no trucks hijacked, no girls put on the streets, no cocaine contraband prescribed by “los medicos” of Medellin be distributed. No, there are only two requirements to become a Made Man in MESA Nostra. The first is easy: you must view the entire Middle East through ideological blinkers, in which Islam scarcely matters, and in which, whatever happens, Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude will be ignored, so that contemporary expressions of millennium-old doctrines, attitudes, impulses will be interpreted without the slightest reference to those doctrines, attitudes, impulses.
That is content.

There is also form.

What would Shakespeare have been like had he not forced himself to squeeze his dramatic verse into the Elizabethan doublet of iambic pentameter? Or Spenser, without the Spenserian stanza? It is not only writers in Elizabethan England who found such constraints productive. How impressive that 20th century French writer who managed to produce a novel without using the letter “e,” or that other one who composed a series of works based on a single device: the beginning and the final sentences of whatever he wrote were phonetically identical, though semantically wildly different, and he assigned himself the writerly task of beating a plausible path through the overgrown jungle of language, a path that led ineluctably from that first sentence to the same-sounding, but different-meaning, last sentence.

Many of those in MESA Nostra may not realize it, but they are akin to Shakespeare and Spenser, Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel. For them it is not a question of verse-forms, or lipograms, or homophonic puns. Their self-imposed constraint consists in limiting their scholarly lexicon to fewer than fifty nouns, and two-dozen verbs. They harness these exhausted nouns, these over-worked verbs, and put them to work, no matter the subject. No matter the subject.

Thus the prose produced by one member of MESA Nostra will sound remarkably like that of another. Here we mean the enthusiastic, full-throated members of MESA Nostra, those whose interests do not stray very far from “Iraq” and “Palestine” and “colonialism” and “empire,” and the obvious ring-changing variants: “occupied Iraq/Palestine,” “Iraqi/Palestinian people,” “Israeli colonialism,” “American empire.” Many members of MESA Nostra membership have a deep and abiding personal and professional interest in these matters, as they do in little else. They can do no other.

But a few members of MESA Nostra are members-in-name-only, who remain different in mental makeup, and distant from the bureaucratic intrigues, the political tendentiousness, the anti-American,anti-Israel, anti-Western themes and variations. These “non-member” members do not write about the “construction of Palestinian identity” nor the “(de)construction of Israeli identity.” Rather, they write about “The Methods of the Mudaddithin,” or “Ephraim of Edessa,” or “Xavier de Planhol and Agricultural Desolation in the Berber Heartland,” or “Yemeni Jews as Chattel Slaves” or “The Destruction of the Coptic Churches of Upper Egypt,” or “Schacht, Jeffery, Gottheil: Three Masters of Morningside Heights” or “Arabic but not Quran’ic: The Evidence of Numismatics” or “Twelver-Shi’ism in Mevlevistan” or “Ibn Battuta, the Rihla, and the Destruction of Hindustan” or “Why There Was No Arab Copernicus or Vesalius: An Inquiry” or “Aisha and Marriage in the Islamic Republic of Iran” or “Quran’ic Memorization and Comparative I.Q. Levels in Post-Independence India” or “Sir William Jones and the Re-Discovery of India” or “The Role of Hadrami Traders in the Muslim Conquest of the East Indies” or “The Story of Thomas Pellow” or “Indo-Persian Miniatures of Jihad-Conquest in the British Museum Collections: A Catalogue Raisonee” or “Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge: A Critical Edition” or “Book-Binding at the Abbasid Court” or “The Role of Hungarian Converts in Ottoman History” or “The War Within Islam: Universalist Claims, Arab Supremacist Doctrine” or “The Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and Pacta Sunt Servanda: Muhammad and Grotius on the Law of War and Peace” or …well, you get the idea. But these are not the people whom we have in mind when we discuss MESA Nostra at JihadWatch. We are talking about the other kind.

And it was with that other kind in mind – the card-carrying careerists, the blurb-and-reference swappers, the runners-for-office, the risers-high, the much-interviewed, the solemn dispensers of wisdom to the unwary, the True Believers – that we created the MESA Nostra Contest.

The contest is simple. Below is a single paragraph, itself consisting of a single sentence, transparently written in Mesanostran. Contestants are asked to identify the author.

“In conclusion, I feel that this work of analysis, by focusing on the implications of the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops and their supporters throughout the American empire, both equally unappeasable in their demonstrable need for “the Other,” does what in a quasi-heuristic sense it was intended to do, as it manages to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of postcolonial subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter- or, more exactly, anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian or indeed to Cairene, Abbasid, Jordanian or Palestinian thought for, as a native of (Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Ramallah, Teheran, etc. – choose one) and hence a non-European, I am of necessity self-assigned to that category of people best placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but of equal necessity, not as one obviously intent on de-undermining or rather meta-determining the poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing.”

The prize for the first correct entry emailed to director@jihadwatch.org will be a nicely framed copy of Professor Hamid Dabashi’s celebrated Poem in Prose to Edward Said, which you may read now by googling “Hamid Dabashi” and “Edward Said.” For many, that will be prize enough.

[Posted by Hugh at January 27, 2005 9:17 AM]

Give it up High, they came they saw they are indoctrinated. JW & Spencer and all concerend are ""Racists" & "Bigots" of the first order" These are young intelligent quick study experts. They are ready to be CEO's, Like "Kfed" they have put in their time,they deserve to be respected.

"...and assumes the sheep will fall into lockstep".

The Professor knows how good an assumption that is. If the students don't parrot the given line (with slight variations to keep up the pretense of academia), they don't pass the course.

I like the introduction to the Young America Foundation podcasts "... fighting liberal intolerance on campus...".

"Liberal intolerance". That used to be an oxymoron.

Ernst seems to have relied entirely on ad hominem in his relation to Spencer. What kind of a scholar does that? Even if Spencer's position were mainly in error, anybody who is not an ignoramus about Spencer's views knows he's got a carefully reasoned and encyclopedically well-informed position that deserves a forthright response, not a response of intellectual thuggo-snobbish ad hominem from a pretentious academic. If I am assigned Ernst's books, how will I read even the best parts without feeling a bit of disgust?

"His name-calling"

I hate to point this out, but Mr. Spencer isn't entirely innocent when it comes to name-calling. As I recall, it was he who called Dean Esmay a "yapping chihuahua" and Jimmy Carter a "sanctimonious windbag." His posts are often sardonic and patronizing (his referring to his opponents by their first names and hectoring them as if they were children, for instance). I have yet to detect a single error in what Mr. Spencer has said, but the way he says it is sometimes quite distasteful.

For example, I SERIOUSLY doubt that he and Khaleel Mohammed are on a first-name basis.

SUZIQ: "In consideration of what "Islam" truly represents, being "phobic," i.e., afraid of it, would constitute a high degree of WISDOM. Call me a PROUD ISLAMOPHOBE."

Technically, a phobia is an irrational fear, which is what renders the word 'Islamophobe' a non sequitur. There's nothing irrational about a fear of Islam, at least for anyone who values human freedom.

"I have yet to detect a single error in what Mr. Spencer has said, but the way he says it is sometimes quite distasteful."

Special emphasis on the lack of any errors in Robert's comments. Calling someone a name that emphasizes who they are in a comedic manner is in no way the same as what dhimmis such as Esmay and Carter do, i.e. complete fabrication of the truth and appeasing Muslims at all costs. If all someone has on Robert is that he is patronizing and calls people funny names, then that should say a lot.

I appreciate your honesty, RoobartSbansar.

"I have yet to detect a single error in what Mr. Spencer has said, but the way he says it is sometimes quite distasteful."

So, you complain that he's sometimes "distasteful"(IYHO), but consistently correct?

OK.

The great thing about these essays about Dr. Ernst is that some near him will consider the reasoning, consider the increasing respect enjoyed by this site and its leadership, and will say, "Is there something genuine here that you, Herr Docktor, are overlooking?"

Dear readere is something genuine here. Genuine, intelligent, and true.

Does even Bernard Lewis speak often of the Islamic treatment of minorities, included the "protected" ones? And aren't the dhimmi laws and the egotism and the cruelty the adolescent (and violence-prone) maleness the most important subjects for the western nations needing to deal with the increasing presence of Muslims. "Muslim": an adherent of a political system and social order that ought not be protected by civil rights law.

Is it possible that this site is correct?

Hugh Fitzgerald's post in the prior Ernst thread presenting a reading list for students of Islamic civilization, should be reproduced. (I imagine it probably will be.)

But, here it is, for students of Carl Ernst or any other interested party. Now one must consider: Hugh Fitzgerald is the Vice President of Jihad Watch, and hence an official representative of the site. Ernst claims this site is "critical of Islamic studies as an academic discipline." What can this mean given the reading list Fitzgerald recommends? And what does this tell you about Carl Ernst, his integrity, and his view of Islamic studies?

In the syllabus Ernst raises the issue of discern traits of 'neutrality' in treatments of Islam. This is a loaded issue that works of assumptions about what constitutes 'neutrality', of course, but setting that aside, what does Ernst's comments about this Web site, given the list below, tell you about Ernst's 'neutrality', to use his own unfortunate category?

Here is the post by Fitzgerald:

Students from Carl Ernst's course are offered below a list of Suggested Reading, consisting of books by twenty authors, few of whom are likely to have been included on Professor Ernst’s own syllabus, or to be mentioned in whatever list of “Other Reading’ he hands out or otherwise make available.

The list was kept to under thirty authors (the list might have had 130), with a deliberate inclusion of many unsurpassed scholars from the Golden Age of Western scholarship about Islam – the period from 1870 to 1970. Many celebrated scholars are not included: there is not the “Mohammedan Studies” by Ignaz Goldziher, not Noldeke on the sources of the early Qur’an; not John Wansbrough’s “Quranic Studies,” and in the case of C. Snouck Hurgronje, possibly the most important of Western scholars of Islam, only one title is listed.

There are many other articles that one could find – that one should find – in back issues of “The Moslem World” (now “Muslim World”), especially those that appeared before 1950. A CD containing the Encyclopedia of Islam can also be obtained.

The syllabus of Carl Ernst, one suspects, contains such things as a bowdlerized Qur’an – the “Approaching the Qur’an” of Michael Sells, and texts such as Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” designed to undercut, before the students even encounter them, the scholarship of those who, in England, France, America, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, made the study of Islam their life’s work. Said himself may have been an Arab, but he was not a Muslim, never received a Muslim education (rather, he attended first an Anglican school, Victoria College, in Egypt, and then continued his education in the United States). His elementary blunders, his fantastic mistakes, have been quietly dissected by Bernard Lewis in his article “The Question of ‘Orientalism’” and, more recently, by an entire book devoted to explaining who the “Orientalists” were, and why Said, who simplified, omitted, misunderstand, or simply read, so many of them, deserves not respect but contempt – a book by the hardly unsympathetic-to-Islam English writer Robert Irwin.

I haven’t looked at Ernst’s syllabus. But I’m sure he does not include Robert Irwin’s book, nor Bernard Lewis’s article, and I assume he includes “Orientalism” as that is a staple, of the Higher Apologetics in universities. I doubt if he includes a single work by any apostate from Islam, not a single thing by Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or even Irshad Manji; he is unlikely to add the soon-to-be-published book by the articulate and brave Wafa Sultan, to any future syllabus. He is unlikely to welcome the book to be published this monty by Ibn Warraq, which shows that Said was not merely wrong, but completely, totally wrong, for it is the Western world, since the Greeks, that has been wide open to other societies, and it has been the world of Islam that has appropriated, but always claimed as its own, never giving credit to others, and which maintains an attitude of permanent hostility to all Infidels everywhere, as Islam naturally treaches. For if you are taught that Dar al-Islam must forever be in a state of war (if not open warfare) with Dar al-Harb, and that it is the duty of Muslims to participate, sometimes collectively and sometimes as an individual duty, in Jihad to spread Islam by removing every barrier to its expansion and its dominance, you are unlikely to be “open to ‘the Other’” – and Islam, as so many things, beginning with the indifference to Western ideas and institutions and art and literature (look at the near-absence of translations into Arabic), but a very great interest in Western military hardware, demonstrates this in every way, and every day. Muslims have a solemn duty to remove all the obstacles to the spread of Islam until it covers the globe, and Infidels reduced to their proper condition – that of dhimmis – who must acquiesce in Muslim rule, and endure a condition of permanent humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity. But will Carl Ernst’s students get a hint of this? Will they read the Qur’an and Hadith with understanding? Will they learn about the figure of Muhamamd, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, or will the figure be described vaguely as “one of the great inspired leaders of history” with no attention to what counts – the details of that “great inspired leader’s” life.

They are much more likely to be treated to modish fantasies of the type that Maria Rosa Menocal, not a historian but a student of literature, produced in her feel-good fairy-tale “Ornament of the World,” thus contributing not to history but rather to the romanticized version or “myth” of Andalucia that got its start with two Romantic writers, Washington Irving with his “Tales of the Alhambra” and Chateaubriand with “Le dernier des Abencerages.”

He will do his best to undercut, in advance, to poison minds, in advance, so that they cannot possibly encounter without their minds already having been affected, any of the trustworthy, non-apologetic scholars of Islam. But one hopes you will be able to resist, and to supplement what he force-feeds you by quiet investigations and research of your own. It is Carl Ernst, who wishes to ensure that you are exposed only to his, carefully-crafted, received version of Islam and of the history of Islam, who insults – quietly, sweetly, implicitly – you, who wishes to carefully direct your reading – giving new and sinister meaning to that phrase “directed reading”; it is we who would have you read everything you can, and find out everything you can, from the hundreds of books, and thousands of articles, by the great scholars of Islam.

Toward that desired end, here is a list of about two dozen authors. See what you can find. See what appeals to you. See what sense it makes, or fails to make. The more you read, the more widely you read, the less likely it is that you will be taken in, and the more likely it is that what you read will help you not only to better understand the past, but also what is happening today, in southern Sudan and southern Nigeria and southern Thailand and southern Philipines, in Darfur and among the Berbers of the Kabyle and Morocco, and among the Muslim populations everywhere, who are raised on precisely the same texts, inculcated with the same ideas, impressed with the need to fulfil the same central duties, and who exhibit remarkably similar attitudes, toward the idea of human freedom and individual autonomy, toward the idea of free and skeptical inquiry, toward the idea of untrammeled artistic expression, and toward the very idea that non-Muslims, too, deserve to build, and preserve permanently, their own legal and political institutions and social arrangements, free from the pressure from Muslims to change or surrender them in order to please Muslims and meet Muslim demands.

Here is that list. Read around, whatever you can, whenever you can. As a "corrective" to the pabulum I assume you will be fed in the official syllabus:

1) Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, Free Press
2) Tor Andrae, Mohammad: The Man and His Faith (Routledge)
3) M. M. Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature (American Trust Publicatons)
4) Andrew Bostom (ed.), The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Press
5) Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought(Cambridge University Press); The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press)
6) Ali Dashti, Twenty-Three Years, Mazda Publishers)
7) Sita Ram Goel (compiler and editor), The Calcutta Qur’an Petition (Voice of India)
8) Antoine Fattal, Le status legal des non-Musulmanes en pays d'Islam[for French speakers only] (Dar al-Kitab, Beirut)
9) Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton University Law
10) Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge University Press)
11) Ayatollah Khomeini, A Clarification of Questions, Westview Press
12) Hans Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (Cornell University Press)
13) Arthur Jeffery, Islam: Muhammad and his Religion (Liberal Arts Press)
14) Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Johns Hopkins Press)
15) K. S. Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India; Theory and Practice of the Muslim State in India (both reprinted by Aditya Prakashan)
16) Henri Lammens, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions(St. Joseph’s University, Beirut)
17) Bernard Lewis; The Political Language of Islam (Oxford University Press); Islam In History (reprint: Open Court Press); Islam and the West (Oxford University Press), The Multiple Identities of the Middle East
18)David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam; The Early Development of Mohammedanism (both Oxford University press)
19) V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers (Vintage Press); Beyond Belief (Vintage Press)
20) Xavier de Planhol, The World of Islam (Cornell University Press)
21) William St. Clair Tisdall, The Sources of the Koran (on-line at truthnet.org)
22) Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism; Jihad In Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton Studies in Islam)
23) Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed (Vintage Press)
24) Joseph Schacht, Mohammedan Jurisprudence; An Introduction to Islamic Law (both Oxford University Press)
25) C. Snouck Hurgronje, Islam: Origin, Political Growth, and Its Present State (Manohar Publishing—Indian reprint house
26) Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and The Prohibited in Islam (Al-Halal wal Haram Fil Islam), Shorouk International.
27) Ibn Warraq, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad; What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary ; The Origins of the Koran(all Prometheus Press)

In addition, it is important for students to familiarize themselves with at least three different translations of the Qur’an, such as those of Yusuf Ali, A. J. Arberry, and Dawood. They can be found, presented synoptically, at various web-sites. Such concepts as “naskh” should be grasped before students begin to try to make sense of seeming contradictions in the text; impenetrable parts of that text should not phase students, but they should be aware of the work of Christoph Luxenberg and others who attempt to explicate the approximately 20% of the text that remains unclear.

In order to grasp the concept of the Sunna, the customs and manners of 7th century Arabia that act as a kind of gloss on the Qur’anic texts, students should familiarize themelves not only with the life of Muhammad, from the various biographies listed above, but also familiarize themselves with the collections of Hadith by Bukhari and Muslim, and read, in no particular order, at least several hundred of the Hadith until they feel familiar with them. The text by M. M. Azami above will explain the concept of “isnad” and how the muhaddithin assigned their ranking of authenticity to the tens of thousands, of Hadith (properly, “ahadith”) that they collected.

Students are asked to familiarize themselves both with Muslim websites, especially those in which fatwas are sought and given, and with the websites of those who grew up in Islam but have left it, such as the sites www.faithfreedom.org and www.answering-islam.org.

Posted by: Hugh at August 31, 2007 10:51 PM

All the students of Ernst need to do is:

- be intellectually honest.

And scholastically rigorous.

And philosophically exact.

By going "to the things themselves".

In this case: READ THE KORAN.

It's shorter than the New Testament and as violent as a video game.

Nuke some corn, pop a few, and spread the dread.

RoobartSbansar, you said:

I hate to point this out, but Mr. Spencer isn't entirely innocent when it comes to name-calling. As I recall, it was he who called Dean Esmay a "yapping chihuahua" and Jimmy Carter a "sanctimonious windbag."

profitsbeared "All the students of Ernst need to do is..." in order to understand Islam is correct of course. But any of them who do that will fail the subject.

Let's face it - Jimmy Carter brought the US many things - double digit inflation and interest borrowing rates, the original problem with the Iranians, the downfall of the US industrialization (read auto, steel, manufacturing), and the countries direction that was anything but forward.

Besides nuclear engineering, he was and is a total failure as a diplomat. He is an attention whore by simply attempting to be counter everything that makes the US a sovereign nation.

Regarding the reading list from above, why are there no publications called out regarding the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire? Or the Barbary Pirates? Or directly on point how Thomas Jefferson handled the issue of hostage taking, random attack, and the mandatory tribute that all of the "established"countries (read UK, Europe, etc) were more than willing to pay.

This guy reeks of propaganda. A true scholar can stand up to scrutiny without crying foul because someone saw through the "pretty" and "just" ultra thin veneer.

When are these assbags at Universities in the US going to figure it out that their accountability is coming soon? More and more specialized schools are popping up that get better responses when looking for employment.

One day, the government tit will run dry and they will have to make their living directly from their actions and statements.

In the US you have every right to voice your opinion, and I have every right to judge you by what you say.

I'm really mystified by the basic problem here. The man was a mass murderer, a serial rapist, a child molester, a torturer, an oathbreaker, a liar, and a thief.

Why are we arguing about fine points of this monster's ideology? Isn't his behavior, carefully preserved in Islam's holy texts - and played out every day by his followers -- isn't that enough?

Don't anyone expect intellectual independence or sincere academic inquiry from Ernst's students. These children are chasing the GPA and are good test takers, that's all. If these kids are taking this course as an elective, expect them to suck up to the Prof and get that A, keep that stipend, and grab that scholarship. Any essay that these kids write must parrot what the prof says; it will pump his ego, and solidify their good standing.

The only scholarship that is truly earned at any college or university is an athletic scholarship. The athletes actually have to perform to keep it.

P.S. Any Prof that is teaching with an attitude or from point of view will flunk you in a heartbeat if you disagree, I have personal experience in an economics class to that effect, an F on my transcript to proove it.

"I'm really mystified by the basic problem here. The man was a mass murderer, a serial rapist, a child molester, a torturer, an oathbreaker, a liar, and a thief."

I'm no Christian, but I'm pretty sure that Jesus never had sex with any nine-year-olds. Contrast this with Muhammad's consistently appalling behaviour during his lifetime. Explains a lot about the differences between the two religions.

What's most striking about Carl Ernst's course syllabus (cited in Robert's post) is what's missing from it.

I see nothing on Ernst's list about the approximately 1350 years of slavery under Islamic law, which was in accordance with the Quran and which followed Muhammad's example conduct (yes, according to the Islamic texts, Muhammad owned slaves).

I also see nothing on Ernst's list that deals with the Muslim invasions of south central Asia (chiefly, India), which, according to some estimates, involved the slaughter of 60-70 million Hindus.

How can a course entitled "Introduction to Islamic Civilization" not cover those major issues and events? This sin of omission is all the most serious when one considers the kinds of specialized and esoteric materials that Ernst has managed to cram into the introductory course, e.g., about poetry and literature, art, architecture, "spiritual mediators," Sufism, etc. These are the sorts of things that are of primary interest to Ernst himself, but which are not so important that the topics of 1350 years of slavery and the slaughter of 60-70 million Hindus should be bumped from the curriculum. Perhaps those topics were never even considered for inclusion by Ernst in the first place.

Some sources on Slavery in Islam

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html
Bernard Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East
Oxford Univ Press 1994.
Chpt. 1 Slavery
Lewis: “A Muslim slaveowner was entitled by law to the sexual enjoyment of his slave women. While free women might own male slaves, they had of course no equivalent right.”

[Note: Ernst claims that Lewis is "anti-Islam"]

Recent news sources on slavery in the Islamic world today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6455365.stm.
No return for Sudan's forgotten slaves. Friday, 16 March 2007

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L18334379.htm
FEATURE-Slavery still exists in Mauritania. 21 Mar 2007 18:04:58 GMT
Source: Reuters. By Pascal Fletcher.

On Islam's imperialist genocides in India

http://www.indiastar.com/wallia10.htm

"Gautier focuses mainly on the Muslim period of India's history. "Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese." "

"Gautier cites two eminent historians who wrote free of any colonialist or ideological agendas, basing their accounts on documents by contemporary Muslim chroniclers themselves: Alain Danielou in Histoire de la Inde: "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races." And the well-known American historian Will Durant in The Story of Civilization: "...the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." " [Source]

Also see K. S. Lal and others on this topic.

K.S. Lal. "Growth of Muslim population in India",
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Islamic_invasion_of_India

..."the bloodiest story in history" is not on Ernst's syllabus, but "spiritual mediators" are on his list. That say a lot about Ernst's agenda.

..."the bloodiest story in history" is not on Ernst's syllabus, but "spiritual mediators" are on his list. That says a lot about Ernst's agenda.

Sorry for the double post.

I will add that the inclusion of Ernst's personally-motivated digression against Jihad-Watch* in the course syllabus, combined with the exclusion of the 1350 years of slavery and the massacre of 60-70 million Hindus, raises questions not only about Ernst's agenda, but also, frankly, about his ability to make sound, pedagogical decisions.

*...which is, as Robert pointed out, primarily a news site, not an "attack site" as Carl Ernst claims.

Ernst doesn't seem to grasp the connection between the words and actions of Osama bin Laden et al and those of Islam's founder. Let's see if we can help Ernst make the connection. (We can't, but it is instructive to try).

"I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no God but Allah.' " --Muhammad's farewell address in 632

“I shall cross the sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah" --Saladin, 1189.

"We will export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls 'There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the world" --Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

"…we will conquer the world, so that “[t]here is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah” will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris." --Iraqi ayatollah Ahmad Husseini

"I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah and his prophet is Muhammad" Osama bin Laden, 2001.

For more on this connection, see the work of
Efraim Karsh, on Islamic Imperialism
http://www.omegaletter.com/articles.asp?ArticleID=5905

As Muhammad said:

“...I have been made victorious with terror” (Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220).

“...Booty has been made legal for me.”” (Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 53, Number 351)

Also of concern are Ernst's omissions within the topics that he does include in the syllabus. For example, in his coverage of Khaldun's Muqaddimah, it happened that Ernst did not quite make it to pages 473 and 480 (see the translation by Franz Rosenthal, New York, Pantheon Books, 1958):

“In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. Therefore, caliphate and royal authority are united, so that the person in charge can devote the available strength to both of them at the same time. The other [i.e., non-Muslim] religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense. It has thus come about that the person in charge of religious affairs is not concerned with power politics at all. Royal authority comes to those who have it, by accident and in some way that has nothing to do with religion. It comes to them as the necessary result of group feeling, which by its very nature seeks to obtain royal authority, as we have mentioned before, and not because they are under obligation to gain power over other nations, as is the case with Islam. They are merely required to establish their religion among their own." "That is why the Israelites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority for about four hundred years. Their only concern was to establish their religion." "Thereafter, there were dissensions among the Christians with regard to their religion and to Christology. They split into groups and sects, which secured the support of the various Christian rulers against each other. At different times there appeared different sects. Finally, these sects crystallized into three groups, which constitute the sects. Others have no significance. These are the Melchites, the Jacobites, and the Nestorians. We do not think that we should blacken the pages of this book with discussion of their dogmas of unbelief. In general, they are well known. All of them are unbelief. This is clearly stated in the noble Qur'an. [To] discuss or argue those things with them is not up to us. It is conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death."

Now why would Ernst include all that other material, but not the above passage, which gives us, in a nutshell, Islam's "bottom line"?

I also wonder whether, in his coverage of Sufism, Ernst presents the views of al-Ghazali (1028-1111), a major Sufi theologian and Sunni jurist, who claimed that, in regards to killing non-Muslim women and children in jihad:

“...one may use a catapult against them when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…”

Al-Ghazali said the objectives and methods of Islam are to

"…suppress the enemies of religion through the jihad in His cause, and to gain their wealth, women, and lands until they surrender to Islam."

One also wonders whether, in his coverage of Shi'ism, Ernst covers mainstream policies such as this one from al-Amili’s manual of Shia law, Jami-i-Abbasi:

“Islamic holy war against followers of other religions, such as Jews, is required unless they convert to Islam."

One wonders whether Ernst will include, in his coverage of Islamic poetry, passages such as these:

Ishaq, p. 531.
"Get out of his way, you unbelievers, make way.
Every good thing goes with His apostle.
O Lord I believe in his word,
I know God’s truth in accepting it.
We will fight you about its interpretation
As we have fought you about its revelation
With strokes that will remove heads from shoulders
And make friend unmindful of friend."

Ishaq, p. 580.
“…By us God’s religion is undeniably strong.
We added a like number to the clan that was with him.
When we came to Mecca, our banner
Was like an eagle soaring to dart on its prey
(Riding) on horses which gazed upwards.
You would think when they gallop in their bits there is the sound of jinn among them,
The day we trod down the unbelievers
And found no deviation or turning from the apostle’s order.
In a battle mid which the people heard only
Our exhortations to fight and the smashing of skulls
By swords that sent heads flying from their base
And severed the necks of warriors at a blow.
Often we have left the slain cut to pieces
And a widow crying Alas! Over her husband.
‘Tis God not man we seek to please;
To Him belongs the seen and unseen.”

Ishaq, pp. 587-588
“…Our leader the prophet, firm,
Pure of heart, steadfast, continent,
Straightforward, full of wisdom, knowledge, and clemency;
Not frivolous nor light-minded.
We obey our prophet and we obey a Lord
Who is the Compassionate, the most kind to us.
If you offer peace we will accept it
And make you partners in peace and war.
If you refuse we will fight you doggedly,
’Twill be no weak faltering affair.
We shall fight as long as we live
Till you turn to Islam, humbly seeking refuge.
We will fight not caring whom we meet
Whether we destroy ancient holdings or newly gotten gains.
How many tribes assembled against us
Their finest stock and allies!
They came at us thinking that they had no equal
And we cut off their noses and ears
With our fine polished Indian swords,
Driving them violently before us
To the command of God and Islam,
Until religion is established, just and straight, and
Al-Lāt and al-‘Uzzā and Wudd are forgotten
And we plunder them of their necklaces and earrings.
For they had become established and confident
And he who cannot protect himself must suffer disgrace.”

Ishaq, p. 588.
“Don’t help al-Lāt for God is about to destroy her.
How can one who cannot help herself be helped?
She that was burned in black smoke and caught in fire,
None fighting before her stones, is an outcast.*
When the apostle descends upon your land
None of her people will be left when he leaves.”

* “Lit. ‘not one for whom bloodwit must be paid’.”

Ishaq, pp. 489-490.
“Do the bastards think that we
Are not their equals in horsemanship?
We are men who think killing no shame,
We turn not from the piercing lances.
We feed the guest with choicest camels’ meat
And smite the heads of the haughty.
We turn back the conspicuous warriors in their pride
With blows that quash the zeal of the unyielding.
With heroes who protect their standard,
Noble, generous, fierce as jungle wolves.
They preserve their honour and their goods
With swords that smash the heads beneath the helms.
Ask the Banu Badr if you meet them
What the brethren did on the day of battle.
Tell the truth to those you meet whenever you come out.
Conceal not the news in assemblies.
Say, We slipped away from the claws of the angry lion
With rage in his heart which he could not work off.”

One wonders whether Ernst will have his students "follow Muhammad" on his attack on the Khaybar Jews:

Ishaq, p. 510-511.
“…when the apostle looked down on Khaybar he told his companions…to stop. Then he said: ‘O God, Lord of the heavens and what they o’ershadow
And Lord of the lands and what they make to grow
And the Lord of the devils and what into error they throw
And the Lord of the winds and what they winnow,
We ask Thee for the good of this town and the good of its people and the good of what is in it, and we take refuge in Thee from its evil and the evil of its people and the evil that is in it. Forward in the name of Allah.’
He used to say this of every town he entered.”

Ishaq, p. 511. (Raid on Khaybar, continued)
“When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him…. We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammad with his force,’ and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ‘Allah akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.’”

Ishaq, p. 511. (Raid on Khaybar, continued)
“The apostle seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them. ...The apostle took captives from them among whom Safiya d. Huyayy b. Akhtab who had been the wife of Kinana b. al-Rabi‘ b. Abu’l-Huqayq, and two cousins of hers. The apostle chose Safiya for himself. …The women of Khaybar were distributed among the Muslims.”

Ishaq, p. 515. (raid on Khaybar, continued).
"Kinana b. al-Rabi, who had the custody of the treasure of B. al-Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came (Tabari: was brought) to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, 'Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?' he said Yes. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr b. al-Awwam, 'Torture him until you extract what he has,' so he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead. Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud."

As D. S. Margoliouth described it,

“The taking of Khaibar marks the stage at which Islam became a menace to the whole world. True, Mohammad had now for six years lived by robbery and brigandage: but in plundering Meccans he could plead that he had been driven from his home and possessions: and with the Jewish tribes of Medina he had in each case some outrage, real or pretended, to avenge. But the people of Khaibar, all that distance from Medinah, had certainly done him and his followers no wrong: for their leaving unavenged the murder of one of their number by his emissary was no act of aggression. Ali, when told to lead the forces against them, had to enquire for what he was fighting: and was told that he must compel them to adopt the formulae of Islam. Khaibar was attacked because there was booty to be acquired there, and the plea for attacking it was that its inhabitants were not Moslems. That plea could cover attacks on the whole world outside of Medinah and its neighborhood: and on leaving Khaibar the Prophet seemed to see the world already in his grasp….Now the fact that a community was idolatrous, or Jewish, or anything but Mohammadan, warranted murderous attack upon it: the passion for fresh conquests dominated the Prophet."

--David S. Margoliouth, (1905) in Mohammad and the Rise of Islam, pp. 362-363, quoted in Andrew Bostom’s (2005) edited volume The Legacy of Jihad, p. 250.

In his coverage of the criteria used to rank the validity of ahadith, will Ernst discuss the following examples, which are considered mutawatir:

Sahih Muslim, Book 1, Number 33 (see 30-35): "It has been narrated on the authority of Abdullah b. 'Umar that the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and they establish prayer, and pay Zakat and if they do it, their blood and property are guaranteed protection on my behalf except when justified by law, and their affairs rest with Allah."

Hadith number in Sahih Muslim (Arabic only: 812)
Abu Hurairah, may Allah be pleased with him, reported:
The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: I have been given superiority over the other prophets in six respects: I have been given words which are concise but comprehensive in meaning; I have gained victory by terror (in the hearts of enemies): spoils have been made lawful to me; the earth has been made for me clean and a place of worship; I have been sent to all mankind; and the line of prophets is closed with me.
http://hadith.al-islam.com/bayan/Index.asp?Lang=ENG&Type=3

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 3, Book 46, Number 731:
Narrated Abu Huraira and Zaid bin Khalid: The Prophet said, "If a slave-girl (Ama) commits illegal sexual intercourse, scourge her; if she does it again, scourge her again; if she repeats it, scourge her again." The narrator added that on the third or the fourth offence, the Prophet said, "Sell her even for a hair rope."

Critics of Mr. Spencer point out that he may at times be "sardonic and patronizing." Well gee wiz! Did those critics think for a moment that Mr. Spencer is human too? That even the erudite become frustrated when "intelligent academics" refuse to use logic and unbiased fact in their dealings with Spencer! Having read a number of Spencer's books, and having checked his sources, I can say without reservation that he does his research, drawing upon unbiased sources, and at times pays attention and respect to sources biased/aligned against him! That is why Ernst and his ilk are so frustrated with Spencer...he presents the unvarnished truth about that dangerous and evil anacronism called Islam, without having to overtly call Islam dangerous and anacronistic. He merely presents the facts, and the facts do the "calling." There must be some way to prove to Ernst and his followers that if a current-day Zarqawi had his choice, their heads would be the first to roll!

Spencer? Human? Don't make me laugh. He is a machine sent from another dimension to destroy jihad.

Suziq
-

Could you date your videos?

I had not seen this one before and wonder when it was made.

http://islamwatchers.blogspot.com/2007/08/muslim-victory-in-europe-and-america.html

Funding "education" and building/ supporting mosques
were one of the orig strategeries laid out to "influence" western thought and "condition" the citizenry to the point they willingly accept Sharia.(yeah right) This was part of the plan laid out years ago during the inception of the Islamic Brotherhood. The idea was to if possible avoid much of the bloodshed caused during the last failed attempts to rule Europe. Specific groups of people were stated to be the ones who put up the greatest resistance to "world peace" and these societies were the ones targeted. These "professors" are simply fighting on the field of battle in support of Jihad. While they may not be chopping off heads they are just as much enemy combatants as those wielding the blade against the necks of Infidels.
The idea was they educate us and we all see the light and accept "world Peace", how noble.