Robert Bruce Spencer Quotes

Offered with love to all the people of the world who love the Qur’an

There were, according to Muslim warrior Abu Sa’id al-Khadri, “some excellent Arab women” among the captives of the Banu al-Mustaliq. “We desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, [but at the same time] we also desired ransom for them.” The Qur’an permitted them to have sexual intercourse with slave girls captured in battle—“those captives whom your right hands possess” (4:24)—but if they intended to keep the women as slaves, they couldn’t collect ransom money for them. “So,” Abu Sa’id explained, “we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing azl”—that is, coitus interruptus. Muhammad, however, told them this was not necessary: “It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.” Conceptions and births were up to Allah alone. The enslavement and rape of the women were taken for granted.

I was surprised to see that there was indeed religiously sanctioned violence in it, as well as some others things which I found disturbing. But it was all intriguing, because I was entranced by the shorter, poetic chapters. I thought it very striking that this beauty could co-exist with clear mandates for warfare and violence against unbelievers.

As they did in other lands they conquered, the Arabs made a clean sweep of the Persian Empire. Islam holds the achievements of all civilizations before their conquest by Muslims to be worthless trash, jahiliyya, products of the society of unbelievers. And so in the fourteenth century the pioneering Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had to ask, “Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest?” The answer was that they had been obliterated at the hands of those who believed, as in a quip attributed to the Caliph Umar, that if books agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it, they were heretical—in either case, of no account.

Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other. Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning.

While human nature is everywhere the same and Muslims can, of course, act as tolerantly as anyone else, the example of Muhammad, the highest model for human behavior, constantly pulls them in a different direction.

This book represents the crown and summit of everything I have to say that anyone who doesn’t know me personally may care to listen to. I’ve written a guide to the Qur’an and a biography of Muhammad, and with this book, the case is complete—that is, the case that there are elements within Islam that pose a challenge to free societies, and that free people need to pay attention to this fact before it is, quite literally, too late. It is necessary for me to repeat yet again that this does not mean that every individual Muslim, or any given Muslim, embodies that challenge and is posing it individually, but as this book makes clear, the Islamic jihad imperative remains regardless of whether or not any Muslim individual decides to take it up.

But at first, the Arab empire did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and solidify its conquests. The earliest Arab rulers appear to have been adherents of a monotheistic religion centered around Abraham and Ishmael, which Crone and Cook dubbed “Hagarism.” They frowned upon the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—hence Muawiya’s letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine, calling on him to “renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham.”

It is no surprise that the is thrilled about Khizr Khan’s “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump,” even though Khan, not quite accurately, claims that Trump wants to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. In any case, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan today overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

However, there are so many grammatical errors and repetitions in the Qur’an as it stands that these cannot make the case for the inauthenticity of these two suras. The strongest case against them is based upon their relatively late appearance and clear apologetic intent, along with the fact that even though these passages are meant to establish the Shi‘ite case, the Shi‘ites reject them. Nevertheless, their very existence is noteworthy, as Islam’s theology of the perfection and unchangeable character of the Qur’an did not deter their author from making edits in the holy text; they could be the product of a time when the Qur’anic text was still undergoing revision, and one was not risking one’s life by making changes. If they originated later, that their author would have dared produce them is all the more striking in light of what were then and still are the prevailing beliefs and assumptions about the immutability of the Qur’anic text. In any case, even if they originated close to the time of the publication of Dabestan-e Mazaheb , and the Arabic version is no older than the Persian, they attest to the fact that in some quarters, changes were indeed made in the Qur’anic text, and that text has never been static.

Most local imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.” Why have they “found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State”? To Western leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and a host of others, it is patently obvious that the Qur’an teaches peace and that Islam is a religion of peace. So it ought to be child’s play for these imams in Dagestan to refute the twisted, hijacked version of Islam presented by the Islamic State. Here’s an idea: why doesn’t Barack Obama send Kerry to Dagestan to explain to young Muslims how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misrepresenting Islam? Or maybe Pope Francis could go there, or he could send some Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic bishop — say, one who knows that Islam is at its core a peaceful religion and who moves actively to silence and ostracize those who say otherwise — to the Islamic State, straight to Raqqa, to explain to the caliph how he is misunderstanding Islam. That would clear up this problem in a hurry. I volunteer to pay the bishop’s airfare.

It would be patently obvious to everyone that the Islamic State is Islamic—were it not for the fact that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, David Cameron, and virtually every other authority in the Western world insist that it’s not.

Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i.e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."

Inflamed by this mindset, Muslims all around the perimeter of the Islamic world are fighting their neighbors of other religions—Hindus in India, Communist and Buddhist Chinese, Jews, Christians in a score of countries, and pagan animists in Africa. In this light, it is wishful thinking to bracket Islam and peace.

Muslim feminists and their allies assert that any oppression of women in Muslim countries occurs in spite of Islam, not because of it, and that the genuine Islamic attitude toward women is one of unstinting respect.