Child marriage is sanctioned in Islam.Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, an… - Robert Bruce Spencer

By now the attentive reader will have noticed a curious absence from the drama surrounding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the rise of Zionism, and the establishment of the Jewish state: through it all, the “Palestinians,” named as such, are nowhere to be seen. It is no accident that neither Mark Twain, nor any of the series of English travelers who visited the area, nor anyone else who traveled through desolate Palestine over the centuries ever mentioned the “Palestinian” people. They spoke of encountering Muslim Arabs, as well as Jews, Christian Arabs, and others, but no one, among multitudes of people who wrote about Palestine, ever refers to any Palestinians. Nor do the many British white papers and other documents the British government produced during the Mandate period ever mention the Palestinians. The opposing factions in those documents are the Jews and the Arabs. There is a very simple reason for this: there were no Palestinians.

There are, in short, very good reasons to be an Islamophobe, that is, to be concerned about Islam for the devastation that it brings into the lives of human beings both Muslim and non-Muslim. It is not hatred and bigotry to be the right kind of Islamophobe, that is, as opposed to one who attacks innocent Muslims, something that is never justified.

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.