The tribesmen did not know the Koran simply because it did not exist, for it was put together piecemeal at a much later date. In other words, all the… - Ibn Warraq

His work will one day be seen as the moral and intellectual breakthrough that led to the Islamic Aufklarung.

Hadiths were liable to be fabricated even for the most trivial ritualistic details. Tendentiousness included the suppression of existing utterances friendly to the rival party or dynasty.

Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew "of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie's] kind of statements would be explosive." That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm's previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.