re: #222 MrPaulRevere

Absolutely correct. With Spencer and Geller its always ‘Islam does this and Islam did that’. Not only is that simplistic tripe, it discourages people from investigating radical Islam and understanding the difference between it and what Daniel Pipes refers to as normative Islam.

I once read a rather interesting piece of Spencer’s about an article written by a Muslim woman academic, from some US college or other. She wrote a piece that essentially said that although she herself covers her hair for social and traditional reasons, she doesn’t believe it’s mandatory in Islam. Spencer basically argued that it is mandatory, and she was wrong, which struck me as very odd. How can a scholar who is not himself a Muslim take sides in a theological debate? It’s like me getting a PhD in Christian theology and then deciding to write about what is and is not real Southern Baptist behavior.

But looking at what he wrote, I realized that the idea of Islam as internally divided or pluralistic, or developing in new directions, is threatening to his whole theory of Islam.