In late 2001, I was sitting in the private library of the late David Littman, husband of the distinguished historian Bat Ye’or, in their beautiful villa overlooking Lake Geneva (Switzerland), when David received a phone call from his friend the official biographer of Sir Winston, Sir Martin Gilbert. Gilbert cited a memorable passage from The […]
Umberto Eco, Carl Jung, Karl Barth and Hitler on Islam and Nazism
In a speech that he gave at Columbia University, Umberto Eco spelled out fourteen features that he considered were typical of “Eternal Fascism” (which he also calls Ur-Fascism), and I have shown that all fourteen features were present in Islam.[1] Charles Watson,[2] and G.-H. Bousquet[3] refer to Islam as a totalitarian system tout court, while […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 8)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 To bring the story to the present, one cannot leave out the case of John Esposito, a Catholic, and Professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is also the director of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 7)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Throughout his article Religion and Anti-Religion, Professor Watt can barely disguise his contempt for secularism. “The wave of secularism and materialism is receding,“ notes Watt with approval, “most serious minded men in the Middle East realize the gravity of the problems of the present […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 6)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 2. Dogmatic Islamophilia of Western Islamologists Consider the following remarks, and try to guess in what sort of publication they might have first appeared: “Archaeologists increasingly have questioned accepted assumptions about biblical history and the biblical narrative….“ “Archaeological finds, however, at times call into question […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 5)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Bruce Lincoln, Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, has conveniently laid out thirteen theses35 for any historian of religion to follow in order to fulfill the duty of a historian. The historian must keep to the methods of historical research […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 4)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The provenance of an argument is not relevant, as long as it is submitted to rigorous examination. Now I personally have been accused of having some hidden agenda by a distinguished professor who teaches at a university in a city, which the British satirical journal, Private Eye, would describe […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 3)
Part 1 Part 2 Troeltsch formulated three principles on which he believed the critical historical inquiry was based, and which were incompatible with traditional Christian belief: (1) the principle of criticism: our judgments about the past are provisionally true, open to revision in the light of criticism by peers, by the discovery of new evidence, […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 2)
Part 1 Pace Cook and Crone, the implications of their theses are indeed “devastating“. Any research that casts doubt on the traditional Muslim account of the Koran, the Rise of Islam and the life of Muhammad is totally unacceptable to Muslims. The two final letters reveal the enormous gulf between the attitudes to research in […]
Historical Methodology and Dogmatic Islamophilia (Part 1)
(English Original of „Historische Methodologie und die Forderung nach Wohlwollen gegenüber dem Islam“) Historical Methodology and the Believer A few years ago I was invited to a conference at The Hague by Professor Hans Jansen, the great Arabist. After listening to series of grim papers all day long, Hans and I headed for the nearest […]