“When I began to write,” he says, “I had no real idea of the minefield I was stepping into. From various books about Muhammad I had assumed the sources were pretty solid and there must be contemporary sources for these stories. It was quite alarming when I discovered this wasn’t the case. I would keep going to the British Library and my jaw would drop at the implications of what I was reading.”
Monday, March 26, 2012
Elusive …
… Bryan Appleyard — The Truth of Islam. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Naturally as a Christian, I'm willing to believe the history of Islam and the creation of the Koran is full of holes and fabrications, but I hesitate because of Appleyard's frequent comparison to Christianity's history. Sure, scholars in the 19th century concluded the Bible was terrible history, but those scholars have since been shown to be wrong. I believe the Koran is fundamentally different than the Bible (so historical reference) in that the Bible goes out of its way to let you know exactly when the events it records happened. The Koran doesn't do that, if it records history at all.
ReplyDeleteThat was a good and interesting review, right up until he quoted Ed Husain, a good guy with good intentions but who hardly represents a plurality of Muslim opinion, even in the UK. It would have been more relevant to mention the handful of Egyptian reformers of the 40s and 60s who made the tiniest steps towards decoupling Islam from hard literalism and destroyed their careers as a result. And since then- nothing very much.
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