An Important Battle

A small part of one of Ibn Warraq's answers:

One must get away from this absurd thought that only an Islamist can criticize Islamism. It leads to an absurd situation, where only a Fascist can criticize Fascism. Of course, Islamists are the first to criticize, for example, Christianity. So we must not fall into this power scheme. We must look at the evidence and weigh the validity of the arguments. This is, in effect, throwing out charges of Islamophobia. Anytime that anyone criticizes Islam, he is considered an Islamophobe. This is just a way of silencing criticism. We must keep on criticizing.

[Italics mine.]

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Francis W. Porretto]

This puts me in mind of an incident cited by Dr. Serge Trifkovic in his book The Sword of the Prophet:

CITATION BEGINS:

An example of the Muslim attitude to interfaith dialogue was provided by the 1980 conference of the Society for the Study of Theology in Oxford. The delegates were told that one Abdus-Samad Sharafuddin of King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, while unable to attend in person, requested the organizers to distribute his paper, entitled About the Myth of God Incarnate: An Impartial Survey of Its Main Topics. The author explained that his work was of monumental importance, as "it shatters age-long darkness like a bolt from the blue; like a rational, God-sent lightning it strikes the London horizon to explode an age-long blunder in Christian thought."

(The notion that Islam has a wonderfully clear simplicity compared to the cluttered complexity of Christianity is not new. This was answered decades ago by C. S. Lewis: "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.")

Sharafuddin started his study by declaring that the Christian worship of Jesus as Lord is an act of open idolatry. He concluded it by explaining that the true understanding of Jesus is given in the Koranic verse: "The Messiah, Son of Mary, was nothing but a messenger. Messengers have passed away before him." The concept of the Trinity was "refuted" with a Koranic quote!

CITATION ENDS.

So I don't think I'd rely on Muslims, Islamist or not, for my criticisms of Islam.