How Islam became the darling of the western apologists

Often Muslims ask me, “If Islam is as evil as I portray, then why have so many western writers praised it?"

One person wrote, “will you also tell me that the Encyclopedia Britannica is also false and is being paid by the Saudi Govt. to tell lies?"

No, the publishers of the encyclopedias do not lie. However, these encyclopedias are not always accurate. The publishers ask experts to write short introductions in the fields of their expertise. Nevertheless most of the so-called experts of Islam may not be entirely honest. The Saudis spend 4% of their budget to promote Islam. That is billions of dollars. A lot of that money goes to those who help them in their quest. The recipients of these favors feel beholden to their financers and are reminded of this regularly. So what they write is only half the truth. The ugly half remains untold. Therefore the Islam that they teach is a sanitized version of it.

For example Prof. Michael Sells of the University of North Carolina wrote a benign version of the Quran, which omitted the violent verses that Muhammad wrote during the last decade of his life. This is not honest scholarship. I have no idea why Prof. Sells would do such a thing. I wrote him a letter asking for an explanation, but received no response.

I also invited Prof. John Esposito, the chief editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and The Oxford History of Islam to debate with me about the history of Islam and defend his position that Islam expanded peacefully. Dr. Esposito also did not reply.

The truth is not difficult to find. All we have to do is to read the original history of Islam written by the early historians, read the Hadith for historical information, and read the Quran. When you do that, you get to know the true Islam. This is the pure Islam as taught by the Wahhabis and practiced by the Taliban. Then, when you read the books written by these modern apologists of Islam, you can see that they are concealing the truth.

To find the truth we have to go to the source. The sources are the original histories written by Ibn Is-haq, al Waquidi, al Tabari and the Hadith. These are the early books on the history of Islam written by Muslim historians. All the later scholars must, or should have, consulted these books. There are no other sources on the history of Islam. So if what the modern Islamic writers say is contrary to what the above books say, are they telling the truth?

Why would the experts on Islam lie? The answer is complex. It is not just the greed that drives these modern day apologists to lie. Some of them actually have never read the original sources that I mentioned. They rely on what other, relatively contemporary, historians and apologists have written. This sanitized version of Islam is what is taught in the universities. If any professor dares to teach the truth, he or she risks the likely scenario of having Muslims flood that university with thousands of complaints and threats forcing him or her to back off. One glaring example of this Islamic hooliganism is the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and another is what took place just a few days ago when the publisher Amber Books of UK was forced to apologize for printing a picture of Muhammad that Muslims found offensive.

Many Muslims terrorize those who write books that reveal the ugly side of Islam. In such a repressive atmosphere, deceit is applied and truth is the casualty.

There is also another factor that has to be taken into consideration.

Political Correctness: The White Man's Repentance

In the last century, the Europeans started to dislike Christianity and found every other culture better than their own. Romanticizing Indian culture, Chinese culture, or Islamic culture became the vogue. To qualify as an intellectual, all one had to do was to criticize Judeo-Christianity and pay tribute to other cultures. This mentality actually gave birth to a cult that is now permeating the western mindset. It is called Political Correctness. To fit in the society you must belong to this cult. And to belong you must not tell the truth if that truth could offend someone from another culture. You are supposed to say things that are "nice" lest you hurt other people’s sensibilities. In other words, Political Correctness means expediently lying when truth is hurtful. Of course criticizing Judeo-Christianity is not considered to be politically incorrect. You can offend the Jews or the Christians but not others. Thus, influenced by this culture of self-deceit, many Westerners, and especially the Europeans, produced a lot of revisionist nonsense, lying about the historical facts.

Emerging from the dark ages of colonialism, when the newspapers started revealing the brutalities perpetrated by their own governments in the colonized countries and what their church had done, especially in Americas, the Europeans were shocked. They were disgusted at the inhumanity of their own ethos. Therefore, lauding other cultures and slandering their own was a form of repentance.

Subsequently a new ethos was created, as oppressive as a cult, where the apostates are labeled as racists and scorned. To be politically correct, they produced factually incorrect literature and even taught those lies to their children. Textbooks were rewritten to accommodate the non-Judeo-Christian mores. The idea was to educate the new generations to be tolerant and accepting of other cultures. The idea was noble; something that Muslims would not be able even to understand. However, the sad reality is that by doing so, the truth was sacrificed at the altar of Political Correctness. This provided the milieu for Islam to expand in the West. Islam thrives in an environment where truth is suppressed.

Political Correctness is the brainchild of the people with good intention. However, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

One of the objectives of Faith Freedom International (faithfreedom.org) is to combat the ethos of Political Correctness and uphold the truth even when the truth is less expedient. It is our conviction that only truth, informed by facts and not by beliefs, can set us free.