D’Souza vs. Spencer: An Epilogue
Both Dinesh D’Souza and Robert Spencer follow up yesterday’s debate. D’Souza sums up the debate from his perspective:
Our topic was essentially, Is Islam the Problem? My book The Enemy at Home says no, locating the problem in the way that liberal foreign policy and liberal values projected abroad have strengthened radical Islam and emboldened it to attack us. Spencer’s books collectively answer yes, the problem is with Islam itself.
D’Souza’s historical argument is persuasive:
But his historical argument is dubious. It emphasizes violent passages in the Koran, while downplaying the passages that urge peace and goodwill. It applies a moral standard to Islamic empires (they didn’t give minorities full rights! they reduced Jews and Christians to second class citizens!) that certainly could not be met by the Roman empire or the empires established by the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French and the British. In the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, for example, Jews had three choices: convert to Christianity, leave the country, or be killed. No Muslim empire legislated or systematically enforced such a policy toward its religious minorities. Yes, the Koran says “slay the infidels” but no Muslim empire actually did that. For example the Muslims ruled North India for two centuries before they were displaced by the British. The Mughal emperors could have killed the tens of millions of Hindus under their control or at least forced them to become Muslims? They did nothing of the sort.
Spencer glibly jumps over entire centuries in linking, say, the savagery of the Ottomans in Constantinople with the savagery of Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Taliban in Afghanistan. How different is Spencer’s one-sided reading of Islam from, say, the works of historian Bernard Lewis. Lewis is hardly uncritical of Islam. But he knows that world, speaks the local languages, and exhibits in his work a nuance, judiciousness and balance that, alas, I don’t find in Spencer or other conservative Islamophobes.
Spencer [via Pajamas Media] counters with his most potent weapon, the words of the Koran:
D’Souza several times accused me of “cherry-picking” violent passages from the Qur’an and applauding bin Laden; he ignored my explanation that all the Sunni madhahib, as well as the Shi’ites, teach warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers, and that it is not I who originated the idea that the violent verses take precedence over the peaceful ones, but this is founded in the mainstream Islamic doctrine of naskh, or abrogation. D’Souza drew some boos from the crowd when he acknowledged that, yes, you can find the phrase “kill the unbelievers” in the Qur’an, but you can also find it in the Old Testament. And he deserved those boos, since there is no such passage in the Old Testament. The violence in the latter book is undeniable but nowhere does it contain a mandate for believers to make war against unbelievers on a generalized and indefinite basis. The Qur’an, however, does.
