Stephen Suleyman Schwartz is a convert to Islam and author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism and The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony. He and I were on a panel together at CPAC in 2003 and have had some contentious exchanges in the past. In the course of one that appears unfortunately to have vanished from the Internet, he wrote: “Robert Spencer is an Edward Said turned upside down.”
Edward Said was the author of Orientalism. He and Orientalism did more to destroy honest study of Islam and jihad in academic settings than anyone or anything else. In Orientalism, Said, a viciously anti-Israel Leftist “Palestinian” Christian, ascribed any and all criticism of jihad terror and Sharia oppression to racism and colonialism, reflecting on the critic as a bad person, and showing Muslims to be poor, innocent victims.
Of course the academic establishment lapped this up like a starving cat finally being given a plate of milk. Orientalism became, and remains, not just the dominant perspective on Islam and jihad on college and university campuses, but virtually the only one that is allowed a hearing at all — witness my recent reception at Stanford University.
I can see Schwartz’s point to some degree, although he didn’t mean it as a compliment: I’m the opposite of Edward Said in that his work is false and mine is accurate, and he is a hero among academics today while I am demonized, shunned, and ostracized, solely for opposing jihad terror and Sharia oppression. This isn’t personal. This is what happens to anyone and everyone today who exposes the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists. Find out how pervasive this is, and how dangerous, in my book Confessions of an Islamophobe. Preorder your copy here now.