Relax: Duke professor Bruce Lawrence says Islam has no connection with terrorism

“In a career spanning nearly four decades, Dr. Lawrence has pioneered cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarly work on Islam and Muslim societies with disciplinary synergies in the humanities, social sciences, law and theology.”

Four decades of “cutting-edge interdisciplinary …disciplinary synergies” - quite the huge steaming pile of BULLSHIT you’ve produced, Bruce!

It sounds like Prof. Bruce Lawrence is as much morally corrupt as his favourite religious fanatics of Islam. His agenda is clear and simple: promote every religion no matter where that lead to. His motto is to make mega bucks from every religious corner.

What actually caught my attention "Prof. Lawrence who is called as “a Christian who believes in the Qur’an” asserted that being a Christian he is in a position to logically claim that the Holy Quran is superior to Bible.". What a lode of horse stink! These kind of statements normally come directly from a Christian hating vile Islamic mouth.

I'm very glad to see JW back on the track again Robert. Many thanks from me for fighting and wearing the devil down.

Dr. Lawrence’s translation of the statements of Osama bin Laden, led government leaders to seek him out as a policy advisor.

For a moment I thought that the US government wanted Osama bin Laden as a policy advisor.

On second thought, its not so far fetched.

Wow it's hard to even refer to this man as a "professor"; since he is wrong about islam and Christianity, and on so many levels.

"Prof. Lawrence who is called as 'a Christian who believes in the Qur’an' asserted that being a Christian he is in a position to logically claim that the Holy Quran is superior to Bible."

LOL!!! excuse while I laugh myself silly ...

Hey if you believe that he's a Christian then you'll also believe that I'm the Queen of England guys!

No Christian worth his/her salt would ever level such a false claim either about the quran OR the Bible. First of all, the quran is not holy, but instead it's a manual 4 murder and a road map to hell; whereas the Bible tells the story of our Savior from both the old and new testamest, and offers a road map to salvation through Jesus Christ.

This "professor" is essentially a pathological liar, plain and simple. He should be fired for spreading such garbage about islam and company. It's a dangerous cult, and he's a danger to society. Can this man!

Siasat Daily is a Muslim Newspaper published from Hyderabad, the city with two previous terrorist attacks and the latest victim of Islamic jihadic peace atrocity inflicted yesterday. What else would you expect in this newspaper but the garbage peddeled by this two bit moron from Duke!! He has to be a Muslim or a secret Muslim - only those can be such morally and intellectually dishonest and corrupt.

Wakademia is cheap and corrupt.

There is a reason why Islam is called the 'religion of the professors'.

Most are red ratbags and social engineers and they jump on any perks they can get, like 'globull worming' and Islam, which gets them free trips to Dubai or other Islamic 'hospitality countries' of their choice.

Check Duke professor Bruce Lawrence out: how many times has he been on free trips, paid for by Arab sheiks?

He should read Prof Joseph Campbell's "Masks of God" series of books.

Religion has always been capable of violence. There are two main ways of inducing mystical experiences: The way of the warrior and the way of the priest.

"Prof. Lawrence who is called as 'a Christian who believes in the Qur’an' asserted that being a Christian he is in a position to logically claim that the Holy Quran is superior to Bible."

It's called Progressive Revelation..

Baha'i Faith

I've mention their subversive activities before.

Smarten up people.. messianic muslim Baha'i want to erase Christians and Jews and any other non-muslims so that there is no way out of islam but to become a Baha'i

The Baha'i Faith is the most evil ideology of all

Lawrence wouldn't be the first teacher at Duke unable to recognize the truth.

No, Group [Gang] of 88 (2006), we haven't forgotten (or forgiven) you,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_88#Signatories

Islam has no connection with terrorism? Very funny. I did not know Lawrence was studying to be a comedian for 50 years.

There are at least four sources of evidence that I can think of which directly contradict these absurd and over-the-top denials and deception made by Lawrence as attributed in the Indian press article.

1. The Islamic core texts, Quran, Sira, and Hadith.

2. Classical Islamic law.

3. History of Islam.

4. Present-day practices and beliefs of Muslims.

For the first, we have numerous quotes from the Quran where Allah is ordering Muslims to violently terrorize the non-Muslims. Terror is Allah's way of doing business, his way of communicating with and regulating people on earth. In the Hadith, Muhammad glorifies terrorism, orders terrorist acts, and his followers carry out these acts of terrorism. In the Sira, numerous instances of Islamic terrorism are described, ranging from large-scale attacks, to small-scale thuggery designed to intimidate. The main forms of terrorism used by Muslims in these cases involve killing, rape, torture, plunder and destruction, and enslavement, or the threats of such acts.

For 2, Islamic law mandates unprovoked offensive warfare against peaceful civilian populations who are non-Muslim, who must be fought, raped, and plundered until they submit to Islamic law. In addition, Islamic law, following Muhammad's example, allows individual Muslims to take matters into their own hands and kill and threaten critics and apostates of Islam.

The (non-whitewashed) history of Islam is replete with examples of large and small-scale terrorist acts committed by Muslims who are following the instructions laid out in 1 and 2. (See Andrew Bostom's The Legacy of Jihad--which, no doubt, Lawrence has never read--for some examples).

Fourthly, throughout the Islamic world today, there are innumerable Islamic terrorist groups who consistently appeal to Islamic texts to motivate and justify their violent acts against non-Muslims, and all of whom demand the implementation of sharia as one of their main long-term goals. According to polls I've read over the years, I would estimate that the majority of Muslims worldwide support at least one explicitly Islamic terrorist group, such as HizbAllah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, Jamiat-e Islamiyah, Lashkar-e-Taiba, etc., etc.

Anyone anywhere in the world today who tries to criticize Islam or Muhammad in public knows that terrorism is fundamental to Islam and that it is widely accepted and practiced by large percentages, including majorities, of Muslims; otherwise, there would be no fear of violence for criticizing Islam. The threat to kill and the act of killing critics is terrorism.

Qaradawi himself effectively admitted that the survival of Islam itself depends on terrorism, the terror of being killed for openly leaving and rejecting Islam. Killing dissidents is terrorism.

I don't care how many years Bruce Lawrence claims he's been studying Islam. The evidence is simply and overwhelmingly contrary to what he claims, and no amount of symbolic credentials or years logged can change the reality he hopes to deny and obfuscate.

From Discover the Networks -

Born in August 1941 in Newton, New Jersey, Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke University, where he has taught since 1971. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1962, a Master of Divinity from Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge) in 1967, and a doctorate (in History of Religions) from Yale University in 1972.

Lawrence is also a member of the student/faculty activist group Duke Divest, which advocates the university's "divestiture" from Israel and from all companies that conduct any business whatsoever with the Jewish state.

Lawrence contends that in Islamic tradition, genuine jihad is not characterized by violence or conquest, but rather by an effort to become “a better student, a better colleague, a better business partner. Above all, to control one's anger.”

Counseling Americans to look in the mirror if they wish to find the source of the foreign hatreds aimed at the United States, Lawrence has called for a domestic "jihad that would be a genuine struggle against our own myopia and neglect, as much as it is against outside others who condemn or hate us for what we do, not [for] who we are."

According to Lawrence, the 9/11 attacks were not acts of unprovoked Arab aggression against the United States, but rather acts of defense against American imperialism.

In 2006 Lawrence authored a paper titled, “Osama bin Laden as Media Star: The Making of an Information Age Anti-Hero.” In that piece, the professor made the case that the al Qaeda leader had become a media sensation with whom George W. Bush was excessively preoccupied. Lawrence concluded, “From his [bin Laden’s] perspective, he is not a terrorist seeking a target, but a leader avenging his victimized community. ‘Our’ terrorist becomes ‘their’ freedom fighter ...”

On November 13, 2007, Lawrence was a featured speaker at a “Jihadi Islam Conference” held at UCLA. The focus of the conference was to take “stock of the various approaches applied to the study of jihadism and jihadi movements”; to “discuss the assumptions and methodological problems encountered by researchers”; and to “propose alternative approaches to the study of these phenomena that conform to more broadly applicable historical and social science practice.” Fellow speakers included James Gelvin and Rola El-Husseini.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1070

Contrast the above with the transcript of the 1993 Philadelphia Meeting which will be 20 years old this October.
http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2040.pdf

A search for the term "jihad" brings 16 results, all in the context of an armed insurrection.

Likewise, a search for the term "Hamas", yields 16 results.

Search for the term "derail", and you will find the participants discussing interfering with American foreign policy so as to carry on their jihad war against Israel.

Prof. Lawrence is also a collaborator with Carl Ernst.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lawrence

what name did he take on his 'reversion'?

What is his muslim name?

Phew, what a relief! For a minute there I thought terrorism and islam were inextricably and unequivocally linked. And that jihad really meant holy war against the infidels. But gosh, here it's been OUR fault all along--who knew? Thank goodness we have academics like Prof. Lawrence to clear these things up for us!

From the Jihadwatch archives, here's what Bruce Lawrence had to say about Osama bin Laden:

“If you read him in his own words, he sounds like somebody who would be a very high-minded and welcome voice in global politics."

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/09/duke-prof-osama-bin-laden-a-very-high-minded-and-welcome-voice-in-global-politics.html

Evidence of Lawrence's quackery and/or intellectual dishonesty...He claims Quranic verses have curative properties:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/29/society

"[Quranic verses may be] [w]ritten on an alphabet or prayer board, they can also be washed off and drunk for curative purposes."

Not "Some Muslims (erroneously) believe the verses have curative properties," no, he is saying straight out as a factual claim that the verses have curative properties.

Likewise, in the same article, this "scholar" presents as objective fact that Muhammad is a prophet who received revelations and so forth. Not "Most Muslims believe..." but rather he presents as objective fact his claim that "The revelations [...] came to the Prophet Muhammad via a divine mediary (the Archangel Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE."

In other words, this Lawrence character is not only a hostile anti-Western, anti-Israel ideologue who is attempting to bamboozle the public about Islam in order to promote his own political views, but he is an out-and-out charlatan. He is a raving lunatic who thinks the Quran's verses have curative properties. He is no scholar at all. He's just a pious Christian-Muslim (by his own account, claims to be a Christian who believes the Quran) with a degree who has been hanging out with some like-minded pals for the past 4 plus decades.

In the Guardian article he writes:

"The Prophet's young wife 'A'ishah became a major figure in its transmission,"

Whitewash alert, intentional deception by omission. The most important thing about the "young" Aisha described in the Islamic texts is that she was reportedly 6 years old when middle-aged Muhammad married her, and 9 years old when he "penetrated" her. There's young, and then there's young--as in Muhammad-raped-a-child young.

Our demented "professor" continues:

"During Muhammad's lifetime, but even more after his death in 632, Muslim armies fanned out in all directions from Mecca. They confronted long-established empires adjacent to Arabia. To the east they attacked Hindu coastal cities in Gujarat and Sind. To the north they swept through the Persian Sassanian empire. They swiftly toppled it, claiming Iraq and Iran as part of a new Islamic polity by the mid-650s. To the west, Muslim armies quickly conquered Egypt but then moved less rapidly across North Africa, fighting both Berbers and Byzantines until they reached the Atlantic Ocean in the 680s. It was a military conquest that occurred faster, and with more consequence, than the spread of the Roman empire 700 years earlier. It made Arab armies and navies the major controlling forces of both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It also expanded the audience for the Qur'an beyond what could have been imagined in the lifetime of the Prophet."

Well, isn't it amazing how all those early Muslims just kind of "fanned out" without ever committing any offensive warfare or any acts of terrorism. And isn't nice for Lawrence to emphasize what he sees as the positive: all of this military conquest in the cause of Islam was justified because now people were exposed to the true word of Lawrence's God. How nice. Surely that overrides any concern about all the butchery of civilians, rape of women and girls, enslavement, mass killing, torture, cultural stagnation for centuries, right Lawrence?

What an evil, depraved scumbag this Lawrence character is. There are no excuses for this level of evil and deception. He is no scholar; he is a pious Islamic propagandist. Go drink some Quranic verses, Lawrence, you phony-baloney crackpot.

The claim that Islam has no connection with terrorism could only be defended if the source doctrine itself stated a position against terrorism or was at least neutral or silent on the subject. Of course, this is not the case; the source texts specifically promote terrorism. A useful comprehensive guide to terrorism in the foundational Islamic texts is provided by Abul Kasem, "The Root of Terrorism a la Islamic Style" (20 Chapters, documenting the terrorist careers of Muhammad and his men as described in the Islamic texts):
http://www.islam-watch.org/AbulKasem/RootsTerrorism/RootsTerrorism0.htm

Some examples of terrorism glorified or commanded in the Quran, Hadith, and Sira:

8:60. “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly.”

8:12: “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

7:4 “How many a township have We destroyed! As a raid by night, or while they slept at noon, Our terror came unto them.”

7:152. “Lo! Those who chose the calf (for worship), terror from their Lord and humiliation will come upon them in the life of the world. Thus do We requite those who invent a lie.”

59:2. He it is Who hath caused those of the People of the Scripture who disbelieved to go forth from their homes unto the first exile. Ye deemed not that they would go forth, while they deemed that their strongholds would protect them from Allah. But Allah reached them from a place whereof they recked not, and cast terror in their hearts so that they ruined their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. So learn a lesson, O ye who have eyes!

59:13. "You (Muslims) are certainly greater in being feared in their hearts than Allah; that is because they are a people who do not understand."

3:151. "Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority: their abode will be the Fire: And evil is the home of the wrong-doers!"

Ishaq, 395. “ ‘We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve,’ i.e., that by which I was helping you against them because they associated with Me that for which I gave them no warrant…”

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220: Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy), and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand." Abu Huraira added: Allah's Apostle has left the world and now you, people, are bringing out those treasures (i.e. the Prophet did not benefit by them). [Also see Sahih Muslim, Book 004, Number 1062, 1063, 1066, 1067; Sahih Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 87, Number 127 and 141].

Ishaq, p. 326 “…the apostle said: ‘I was helped by fear; the earth was made a place to pray, and clean; I was given all-embracing words; booty was made lawful for me as to no prophet before me; and I was given the power to intercede; five privileges given to no prophet before me.’”

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 73:
Narrated 'Abdullah bin Abi Aufa: Allah's Apostle said, "Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords." (Also see Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Number 4314.

8:67. "It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land. Ye desire the lure of this world and Allah desireth (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty, Wise."

Ishaq, pp. 326-327.
“God said, ‘It is not for any prophet,’ i.e., before thee, ‘to take prisoners’ from his enemies ‘until he has made slaughter in the earth,’ i.e., slaughtered his enemies until he drives them from the land. ‘You desire the lure of this world,’ i.e., its goods, the ransoms, the captives. ‘But God desires the next world,’ i.e., their killing them to manifest the religion which He wishes to manifest and by which the next world may be attained.”

33:26. And He brought those of the People of the Scripture who supported them down from their strongholds, and cast panic into their hearts. Some ye slew, and ye made captive some.

Ibn Ishaq, p. 468. “ ‘And he cast terror into their hearts; some you slew, and some you captured,’ i.e., he killed the men and captured the women and children. ‘And caused you to inherit their land and their dwellings, and their property, and a land you had not trod,’ i.e., Khaybar. ‘For Allah can do all things.’ ”

Ibn Kathir (33:27): “…(And He caused you to inherit their lands, and their houses, and their riches,) means, `He gave these things to you after you killed them.'
(and a land which you had not trodden.) It was said that this was Khaybar, or that it was the lands of the Persians and Romans. Ibn Jarir said, "It could be that all of these are referred to””

8:57 "If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember."

Ishaq, p. 326. “If you come upon them in war, deal with them so forcibly as to terrify those who follow them, haply they may take warning,’ i.e., make a severe example of them to those that come after, that haply they may understand. ‘And prepare what strength you can against them, and cavalry by which you may strike terror into the enemy of God and your enemy’…”

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz

Ivory Towers On Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America by Martin Kramer

Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom by David Horowitz

The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism by Andrew G. Bostom

The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew G. Bostom MD
A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden

Slavery, Terrorism and Islam and Holocaust in Rwanda by Peter Hammond

The following countries had Christians murdered by Muslims in the name of Islamic jihad in the past 18 months that amounts to thousands.

Iran,Iraq,Oman,Tanzania,Pakistan,Kenya,Egypt,Turkey,Nigeria,Algeri,Syria,Libya,Sudan,Somalia,Lebanon,Indonesia,Philippines,Kosovo,South Africa,Tunisia,Macedonia,Mali,India,Yemen,Tajikistan,Brazil, and Senegal.

Do you think there may be a little problem going on here?

If you don't then I've got a bridge to sell you.

Once again George Orwell's observation is quite apt, to wit, that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them.

Sad to say but there are a lot of Bruce Lawrences out there in Academic Land---very well educated, definitely intellectually oriented and yet stupid as shit.

Bruce Lawrence is in need of a sanity test. He has lost his marbles.