As promised in last week’s Publishers Weekly interview with me, this week’s issue contains “a contrasting view of Muhammad and Islam,” courtesy of Amir Hussain, author of a new introduction to Islam intended for a Christian audience, entitled Oil & Water: Two Faiths, One God.
RBL: What do you have to say about author Robert Spencer’s assertion (RBL Q&A Sept. 6) that Muhammad founded the world’s most intolerant religion?
Hussain: The Muhammad that he describes is not my Muhammad.
Very well. But the Muhammad I describe is the Muhammad of the earliest biographers of the Prophet of Islam: Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa’d, as well as of the hadith collections Bukhari and Muslim, which Muslims generally consider most reliable. So if Amir Hussain’s Muhammad is not this Muhammad, from where is he drawing his information?
RBL: Do you think he faces danger in writing a biography of Muhammad? And do you, in writing this book, put yourself in peril?
Hussain: If the book puts me in peril, it’s only because it puts me in touch with a larger audience. I think there might be people that are offended by the portrayal Spencer makes of Muhammad. Is there danger? Yes, there is. Will it happen? Probably not in North America.
I appreciate Amir Hussain’s concern, and invite him to undertake large-scale efforts to convince his coreligionists that his benign picture of Muhammad is the accurate one, and that it is imperative for the survival of civilization itself that criticism even of Muhammad and Islam be allowed with no violent response.
