In normal circumstances, it is not a court's business to pronounce on matters of history, but then whom else could you trust to give a fair opinion w… - Koenraad Elst

According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.

The clearest eye-opener is the birth-rate in the relatively affluent Muslim-majority district of Malappuram in highly-literate Kerala; at 75.22%, the female literacy rate in Malappuram is twice as high as for most Hindu communities in the Hindi belt. In the decade 1981-91 its population grew by 28.74%, well above the national average of 23.50% and more than twice the Kerala average of 13.98%. This disproves the usual excuse that the birth-rate automatically follows the poverty rate and the illiteracy rate. Most Hindu Scheduled Caste people whom I know have settled for smaller families, but by and large, Muslims have not changed their appetite for large families. Ever since the propagation of birth control among the Hindu masses, rich and literate Muslims have more children than poor and illiterate Hindus.

People like the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, RK Mission and Mahatma Gandhi remained totally blind for the scholarly deconstruction of the Bible which was going on in the West,showing how spurious Christian historical claims often were, or how borrowed "Christian" customs often were. Instead, they swallowed the missionary idealized image of Jesus and of Christian history hook, line and sinker and even made it part of their worldview and ritual.