Whatever the wisdom of the Calcutta petition, it was a sincere attempt to address a problem that has existed since the first days of Muhammad’s proph… - Robert Bruce Spencer

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.

Whatever the case, the records make clear that toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the Umayyads began to speak much more specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book.

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.