Last week, "Saudi Arabia's religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for casting a magic spell on a local family and 'turning its life upside down.'" The maid "confessed" to using sorcery, and "commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell." Far from being absurd aberrations to be dismissed, such accounts, which are … [Read more...]
St. Francis of Assisi, Fr. Zakaria Botros, and Islam
Polish While not formally connected, two books I recently finished reading -- St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of Muslims and Defying Death: Zakaria Botross, Apostle to Islam -- complement each other very well, specifically by establishing continuity between medieval and modern Islam, and, in so doing, demonstrating that Islamic intolerance has a long pedigree. For … [Read more...]
Jonathan Schanzer, Middle East Quarterly
The Al Qaeda Reader by Raymond Ibrahim New York: Doubleday, 2007. 352 pp. $15.95, paper. Reviewed by Jonathan Schanzer Middle East Quarterly Ibrahim, an Arabic language specialist at the Library of Congress at the time he wrote The Al Qaeda Reader, has compiled a collection of screeds by Al-Qaeda's top figures, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, that reveal in … [Read more...]
Tristan Abbey, The Stanford Review
The Al Qaeda Reader by Raymond Ibrahim New York: Doubleday, 2007. 352 pp. $15.95, paper. Reviewed by Tristan Abbey The Stanford Review "Stop hurting us and we'll stop hurting you." That is the message Americans get from al Qaeda. In his fascinating new book, historian Raymond Ibrahim explains that the jihadists say one thing to CNN, and quite another to fellow … [Read more...]
Gary H. Johnson, Jr., American Thinker
The Al Qaeda Reader by Raymond Ibrahim New York: Doubleday, 2007. 352 pp. $15.95, paper. Reviewed by Gary H. Johnson, Jr. American Thinker Recently, Raymond Ibrahim edited and translated into English a decade's worth of public releases by al Qaeda's leadership. Published by Broadway Books, with partial proceeds donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists, … [Read more...]