Spencer and Pipes Explain Jihad
Originally published April 22, 2008 (front page)
French translation available here, thanks to a kind soul by the name of Naibed.
This article was picked up by Campus Watch.
Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes spoke at length on April 8 about why they believe ["holy war"] is a much more accurate definition [for jihad]. Spencer and Pipes were invited to speak at Stanford by Students for an Open Society, in an event co-sponsored by The Stanford Review and the Stanford College Republicans.
[...]
Perhaps the most important point of the lecture, which both Spencer and Pipes agreed upon, is that the jihadist ideology cannot be defeated if the West continues to explain it away as unimportant, allow obfuscation by certain groups to replace candid investigation of it, or ignore it entirely. Recognition of the threat that this ideology poses to Western civilization is essential if victory is ever to be attained.
Is this the same Daniel Pipes who alleged that European Christians have a predisposition toward genocide? And who argued that Muslims would be the next subject of a European genocide. And that European Muslims deserved genocide?
Is this the same Robert Spencer who refuses to acknowledge that there are substantial cultural (and therefore theological) variations between Muslim communities across the world?
Why should we take these people seriously? Are they not just polemicists seeking to attribute group responsibility to a group (the so-called “Muslim world”
whose existence is about as meaningless as the “Christian world”? And why should we take you seriously when you actually believe this tripe?
MM,
Where and when has Daniel Pipes ever argued that European Muslims “deserve” genocide?
And where and when has Robert Spencer explicitly refused to acknowledge that there are substantial cultural variations between Muslim communities across the world?
I do not suggest blindly accepting the statements of Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, or any scholar of Islam for that matter. But rather than dismissing them out of hand as “polemicists,” I would encourage you to examine their arguments and see if they hold up to scrutiny. I believe that, for the most part, they do.
In the case of Robert Spencer especially, he consistently goes out of his way to point out that he presents nothing but facts. He makes absolutely no assertions of his own with regard to Islam itself. He simply quotes the Qur’an, the Hadith, and Islamic scholars over the centuries.
And I would argue that the term “Muslim world” is far from meaningless. The Islamic concept of the umma, or community of believers, is much stronger than any notion of Christian unity and is apparent every time an Islamist mentions the “more than 1.2 billion Muslims” who have been “offended” or “outraged” by a comment, cartoon, or what have you. When was the last time you heard a priest claim that any particular act offended or outraged “more than 1.5 billion Christians”?