Scrutinizing Muhammad’s example and teachings

THE TRUTH ABOUT MUHAMMAD

By Robert Spencer

Regnery, $27.95, 224 pages

REVIEWED BY ANDREW G. BOSTOM

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch Parliamentarian and secular Muslim reformer, has courageously identified the taboo discussion which must take place to understand, and defuse, the scourge of modern jihad terrorism:

“In their thinking about radical Muslim terrorism most politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other commentators have avoided the core issue of the debate, which is Muhammad’s example.”

This taboo is all the more puzzling, and dangerously delusional, given the public pronouncements of Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual” leader, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential contemporary Muslim thinkers.

The immensely popular Qaradawi reaches an audience of tens of millions of Muslim sympathizers across the globe with his regular appearances on Al-Jazeera television. During a June 19, 2001 broadcast, Qaradawi delivered a sermon entitled, “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model,” proclaiming: ” … Allah has … made the prophet Muhammad into an epitome for religious warriors [Mujahideen] since he ordered Muhammed to fight for religion … ”

Consistent with the hadith (words and deeds of Muhammad recorded by pious followers), and earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad, Qaradawi further acknowledged that Muhammad launched aggressive jihad campaigns, and also maintained that there is in fact a “jihad which you seek,” i.e., invading other countries in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove, by force of arms, “obstacles” standing in the way of this coercive Islamization.

More ominously, Qaradawi has made specific unabashed appeals for Muslims to wage a “jihad re-conquest” of Europe, recalling the millennial legacy of jihad wars waged by Arab, Berber and Ottoman Muslim conquerors and colonizers.

Disregarding murderous threats, and the prospect of social ostracism, the intrepid author Robert Spencer — a serious independent scholar of Islam for the past two decades — has taken up Hirsi Ali’s challenge in his compelling new book, “The Truth About Muhammad.”

Mr. Spencer’s stated purpose in writing the book was to elucidate, in particular, those aspects of Muhammad’s life used by Muslims today to rationalize violence, or other behaviors incompatible with Western constructs of human rights and dignity. And Mr. Spencer, whom I have come to know through my own independent research on Islamic doctrine and history, fulfills admirably his pledge not to “deride,” “lampoon” or “mock” Muhammad, but instead compose “a scrupulously accurate account of what he [Muhammad] said and did” regarding these critical matters.

A salient feature of “The Truth About Muhammad” is its exclusive reliance on pious Muslim sources: the earliest (and most respected) Muslim biographers of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq (died 773), Ibn Sa’d (845), and the great historian al-Tabari (923); the “gold-standard” canonical hadith collections of Bukhari (870), and Muslim (875); and the Koran itself.

As Mr. Spencer notes, these are the same sources contemporary Muslim biographers have relied upon, both respected scholars (such as the late Martin Lings, aka Abu Bakr Siray Ad-Din), and popularizers (Javeed Akhter, Yahiya Emerick).

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