The book hasn't been released yet and there are death threats already? I hope the publisher doesn't capitulate and decide not to release the book. What a great interview and what great insight!

Posted by: 3812Michelle at May 14, 2008 5:03 PM

Don't look for this book to be made into a movie unless they can find a way to turn the "bad guys" into Republicans.

Posted by: omvi at May 14, 2008 6:23 PM

More, More, MORE well-deserved criticism of Islam, Mohammed and the Qur'an.

"Thor" --Norse god of Thunder! Thunder away, Brad Thor!

Posted by: darcy at May 14, 2008 6:33 PM

An excerpt from an article I posted here last year, with an additional comment at the same thread:

"One can imagine that somewhere -- in the depths of the British Museum, or the Cairo Museum, or even in the rubble of the Baghdad Museum, deep in some sanctum sanctorum, there exists an early Qur'anic text written in -- yes, Syriac -- with quotations from Efrem the Syrian. Or perhaps such a text long ago made its way into the collection of a freethinking, fabulously rich Kuwaiti, who naturally keeps the text not in Kuwait, but in one of his many homes (let us say, in a fire-proof safe, in an innocuous-looking house on his estate in Kent, or Surrey), and shows it to a handful of fellow Arab freethinkers sworn, on pain of death, to secrecy. They know what such a text would imply not only for the history of early Islam, and for Believers today. If publicly known, if analyzed, it would shake the foundations of Muslim belief, or at least the beliefs of that small, but significant, number of Muslims who retain the capacity for independent thought."

[Posted by Hugh at August 30, 2007]

"I suggested long ago at this site that someone might discover, deep in the dust-covered corner, of a neglected basement, in the small building once housing a long-gone alfarrabista in a back-alley in Lisbon, an Ur-Qur'an. And that Ur-Qur'an, that is a text much more of which would be in Aramaic, or rather Syriac (the Aramaic of Edessa), and would clearly demonstrate its origin in what was originally (as Luxenberg suggests) a Christian lectionary.

While few scholars in the world would be capable of judging such a find, the few who are would at first be skeptical and then, one by one, even the timid, be forced to recognize -- and there would be carbon-dating, and all the rest of it -- that this was indeed an Ur-Qur'an, from the late seventh century. And when everyone, when Michael Cook and Patricia Crone decide that they must go along with Alfred-Louis de Premare and Andrew Rippen and Gerd Puin and many others from every country, and then a few brave Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims begin to write, first in the Arab press in London, and then elsewhere, that "we Muslims must allow Islam to be subject to scholarly investigation just as Jews and Christians have allowed" and the all-hell-that-breaks-loose turns out to be not quite so hellish, and the Aga Khan endorses the idea, and then some maghrebin intellectuals follow suit, and so do a handful of disaffected (but carefully not yet declared apostates) Pakistanis living in the West, and then it turns out that that Ur-Qur'an is not only the missing link between that posited lectionary and the received, Muslim version (there are, or were, actually two, but very close, so let's leave that out of it) but has the little added benefit of possibly making Muslims capable of living in peace, rather than in a state of permanent war (though not necessarily warfare) with Infidels, and it no longer will have to be done through hocus-pocus smoke-and-mirror appeals that may in any case be made by so-called "reformers" who wish mainly to get the Infidels off of Islam's case but now, if they wish, can use this Ur-Qur'an to make the case better.

And World Peace will reign. And Harmony, Universal Harmony. And the World's Great Age will begin anew.

You heard it here first.

Hollywood: what about that movie deal? Write to me c/o Robert.

[Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2007 1:45 PM]

I trust I will be getting a share of the royalties.

Posted by: Hugh at May 14, 2008 6:53 PM

Another cogent quote along this line, from Bruce Thornton, courtesy of Andrew McCarthy:

"The problem with Islam, however, is not a lack of self-esteem but too damned much."

Posted by: Papa Whiskey at May 14, 2008 7:21 PM

Are you just dreaming Hugh, or do you really think there is some possibility of this?

And if such an alternate “peaceful” Qur’an were found, what of the Sirat and the Hadith which both convey a far different message? Which Qur’an would the Ulema and the Ummah chose, the one they have always known, or the new one the Infidels found somewhere? Even if such a thing were found, it would not affect Jihad one whit.

I guess we can take a flight of fancy for our pleasure and entertainment, but we should take care that some don’t confuse this for reality.

Posted by: Davegreybeard at May 14, 2008 7:38 PM

Hugh,

Were you aware of the ancient Quranic find at a construction site in Yemen a couple of years back?

Posted by: Cornelius at May 14, 2008 7:49 PM

Hugh: "One can imagine that somewhere -- in the depths of the British Museum, or the Cairo Museum, or even in the rubble of the Baghdad Museum, deep in some sanctum sanctorum, there exists an early Qur'anic text written in -- yes, Syriac -- with quotations from Efrem the Syrian.

Workman were repairing an old mosque and found a hidden space where there were mounds of paper, it was Quran's that had become old tattered and old. They were deposited in this space over centuries, until sealed up. In the meantime the roof leaked and the discarded Qurans got wet numerous times, so the mound was pretty much cemented together, and painstaking work is involved in separating the pages. Some of the earlier discarded Qurans may be just what Hugh was referring to...I sent Robert an article on the subject...

Posted by: duh_swami at May 14, 2008 8:32 PM

Snap out of it! Wake up! Anyone who seriously thinks that islam could even possibly be reformed by evidence, no matter how authentic is dreaming. The only thing the interested parties of islam understand is brute force, PERIOD. Everything except their beloved, satanic, and violent 'religion' is recieved as some sort of conspiracy. They will absolutely not be bothered with facts or truth, no matter how obvious. Heck, even 20% or so of AMERICANS believe the government had something to do with 9-11. An absolute prerequisite for any 'reform' is military humiliation. They would have to be humiliated, not defeated, no, much more, I'm talking serious humiliating defeat on all fronts for an extended period. Anyone who dosn't understand what i've just said dosn't understand the world situation today. My opinion.

Posted by: CJK at May 14, 2008 8:40 PM

"Are you just dreaming Hugh, or do you really think there is some possibility of this?"

All kinds of things are possible, but the main thing here is that boys just want to have fun.

As for a find in Yemen, I read something a while back at some Muslim website once, about material found in the Great Mosque in San'a that supposedly predated all known Qur'anic material, and the point of the claim was to establish an earlier date for the Qur'an -- God knows what Qur'anic scholars (the real ones), think of it. That's all I recall.

Posted by: Hugh at May 14, 2008 8:40 PM

Thor the Naive,

You don't invent things about Mohammad that get him assasinated and call it entertainment, not when the world is full of Islamozombies who for all intents and purposes worship Mohammad as a kind of demi-god and are more than willing to kill infidels like you as is, and not because you hope to profit from writing fiction that besmirches Mohammad's "holy" honor.

On the other hand, go for it, and let the Islamic "moderates" try to convince the world that your execution in broad daylight by some Qur'an quoting zealot from Detroit, a la Theo van Gogh, is not representative of Islam, the religion of peace and tolerance.

Thor, meet Loki, your Executioner.

Posted by: Lex at May 14, 2008 8:44 PM

CLK wrote:

"Snap out of it! Wake up! Anyone who seriously thinks that islam could even possibly be reformed by evidence, no matter how authentic is dreaming."

I think this is correct. Why Islam has lasted 1300+ years must be that it is a tool--for people who want cult power or for people who want cult rules. Viz. it was perfect for psychopaths and dependent personalities...which is about equal to one fifth of the world's population. About what is extant today.

Imagine its first converts being told they could keep 4/5 of the loot and have infinite sex and booze in heaven if they would only conquer all the neighbors. Pretty seductive. And, oh, by the way, let's keep the women out, they're too sensible.

Posted by: EugeneNow! at May 14, 2008 10:56 PM

The minute this book comes out expect to see riots in Pakistan and death threats from Iran. After all Muslims have to live up to their title:

"The Religion of Peace."

Posted by: Mystical Time Traveler at May 14, 2008 10:59 PM

In Australia, SBS aired a series called East West 101 -- all about a good, loving Muslim cop and his pretty veiled wife, versus a shambling, alcoholic Anglo cop-- all the non-Muslim women were tough, hardened bitches -- basically it taught that Muslims are good and Australians are bad...
It was Islamic propaganda -- all dished up as drama

Posted by: jewcat at May 14, 2008 11:14 PM

I can't wait to read this book. And I pray for this man's safety.

It stuns me to have to say this in America.

Posted by: Mo at May 15, 2008 12:21 AM

And wow, he is from Chicago! I hope I can get in to his book signing. Not for autographs, as that doesn't mean anything to me. But just to say thanks for having the courage to speak up.

I cannot *believe* I am sitting here writing about this man getting death threats - here, in my own city.

I have not written a book, but I have said plenty about Islam. This could so easily be me. Or any one of us.

When are we going to start fighting back against this madness?

Posted by: Mo at May 15, 2008 12:28 AM

He's so right about those who think they have a right not to be offended also haters of civil society.

When is the movie coming out?

Posted by: James Martel at May 15, 2008 12:46 AM

Probably worth a repost, to refresh memories:

from:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/017972.php

(1st comment)
"By the way, what do the Yemeni fragments have to do with Luxenberg? Anything? Nothing substantial?

(2nd comment)
How about the long article in the Atlantic Monthly about 10 years ago on the original version of the Quran? Does that article have anything to do with Luxenberg?"

(3rd comment)
Not clear from that January 1999 subscriber-only piece by Toby Lester. A few brief extracts from a very long article give some clues, nothing more:

"The first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrcken, Germany. Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests-versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.[...]

To date just two scholars have been granted extensive access to the Yemeni fragments: Puin and his colleague H.-C. Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic-art historian also based at Saarland University. Puin and Von Bothmer have published only a few tantalizingly brief articles in scholarly publications on what they have discovered in the Yemeni fragments. They have been reluctant to publish partly because until recently they were more concerned with sorting and classifying the fragments than with systematically examining them, and partly because they felt that the Yemeni authorities, if they realized the possible implications of the discovery, might refuse them further access. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 finished taking more than 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has recently brought the pictures back to Germany. This means that soon Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely-a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this." [...]

In 1996 the Koranic scholar Gunter Lling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." [...]

Gerd-R. Puin's current thinking about the Koran's history partakes of this contemporary revisionism. "My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad," he says. "Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants." [...]

GERD-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims-and Orientalists-will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible-if it can't even be understood in Arabic-then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not-as even speakers of Arabic will tell you-there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on." "

Posted by: MBR at September 2, 2007

Hugh, a question. You refer to a possible find in the rubble of the Baghdad Museum. I take it you do not mean the more celebrated Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, which, according to Matthew Bogdanos ("Thieves of Baghdad") was relatively unrubbled? Unless, of course, it has been seriously damaged since. Whatever, Bogdanos discovered that cataloging and record keeping pre-2003 was a shambles. They may not still know in detail what they have, or once had.

Posted by: MBR at May 15, 2008 1:02 AM

"Islam needs more criticism, not less"

Agreed.

But this criticism shouldn't be based on fiction, it should be reality based. If this good fellow puts his life on the line he shouldn't do it for fiction, but stick to reality.

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at May 15, 2008 1:15 AM

Based on Mr. Thor's description of his book "The Last Patriot", I offer him my sincerest praise; our country needs more people like him who realize the terrible threat that Radical Islam represents to this and all other free countries. But I don't think that he's taking the threats against his life seriously enough. I have to wonder why anyone in his position would advertise on this site the locations and dates of the book signings that he plans to attend. These signings give any offended Muslim the ideal opportunity to carry out their threats to end his life. And I certainly hope that he is taking the most elaborate measures to protect his wife and children as they are in as much danger as he is. Doesn't he realise that the bad guys watch this site too?

Posted by: nightlight at May 15, 2008 2:22 AM

Nice job, Brad. I hope he has a couple big bodyguards at his book signings.

Posted by: Bingo at May 15, 2008 5:47 AM

Sheik,

Whatever works. If Rageboy and his cronies riot in the streets yet again over this book, or anything else, it's just more bad publicity.

Posted by: ImNoDhimmi at May 15, 2008 7:00 AM

Indiana Jones meet Illinois Thor . . .

Perhaps Thor will consider a series of novels based on the actual The Mysterious once assumed lost/now found archives of the Koran

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along.

as well as the follow-up to this Conference On The Early History Of Islam And The Koran

The newly founded institute, Inârah Institute for Research of Early Islamic History and the Koran, in cooperation with the Religious Studies Department of the University of Saarlandes, Germany and the Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen, Germany held its first International Conference on the Origins of the Koran and Early Islamic History.

Posted by: heroyalwhyness at May 15, 2008 7:58 AM

An absolute prerequisite for any 'reform' is military humiliation. They would have to be humiliated, not defeated, no, much more, I'm talking serious humiliating defeat on all fronts for an extended period. Anyone who dosn't understand what i've just said dosn't understand the world situation today. My opinion. -Posted by: CJK

No matter how sinister this coming WAR with Islam is going to be, and from their point of view this war is already on, there will be no room for sentimentality of an idealized 'authentic' Islam. This 'religion' is a war cult for marginal psychopathic primitive minds to go and get booty, under the thin guise of religious sanction. The cult of Allah must be totally humiliated to be conquered of its evil doings, the Jihad going on for 1400 years of total body and mind control, both of subduing non-believers and subduing true believers, same Jihad. Islam is a war cult supremacy sworn to world domination. That's not an opinion, it's fact. Only total destruction will topple it.

There is no peace with this sinister 'religion of peace,' because it wants your freedoms destroyed, and take all else, women included, as booty for Mohammad's satanic god. If Islam cannot tolerate its criticism and be a 'world religion' like all others, then its utter destruction and humiliation as a sinister 'war cult' of Jihad is the only path open to us. Without proper criticism, they leave no choice.

Posted by: Battle_of_Tours at May 15, 2008 9:52 AM

I agree with both CJK and Lex above: you don't write a fictional account of Mohammed being assassinated, and even if you did, there is no way that even if real, that would reform Islam. Of course, Thor is no dhimmi, as evidenced by his comments, but his oblique attempts to reveal Mohammed as attempting to reverse one/some of his prior rulings looks more like an (unintentional) whitewash.

Instead of trying to maintain that despite Islam's ugly founding, Mohammed was at the cusp of reforming it, why not just accept that the entire enterprise is evil, and do whatever's possible to erode its presence in the US. And don't use the fiction defense - even the Satanic Verses was fiction, but that didn't stop the ummah from going at Salman Rusdie.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at May 15, 2008 11:07 AM

Dhimmi Tube took the video down.

You can find it here:

Brad Thor talks about his new book "The Last Patriot" - AOL Video

Posted by: joeblough at May 15, 2008 1:55 PM

OK so if there was an earliest copy found of the koran, does it say anything different and was it frozen in time open to any one verse.
Does anyone remember the 1000 year old psalms book found in Ireland two years ago frozen open in time to psalms 83. Looks like we will win.
I have been reading Epicenter by Joel Rosenberg. Very interesting. According to that there is nothing we can do to change what's in the works.

Posted by: maunalio at May 15, 2008 3:03 PM

A clear, acute, and concise defense of freedom of thought.

More power to Mr. Thor for his normal courage.

Posted by: profitsbeard at May 15, 2008 11:57 PM

If the Catholic Church called for what Islam calls for, the criticism would not end.

Why Islam gets treated as a sacred cow that is uncriticizable lest you be an "Islamaphobe" is beyond me.

Posted by: A Simple Sinner at May 16, 2008 12:07 PM