Having debated Robert Spencer at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington D.C. a few days ago, and Serge Trifkovic on a radio show just yesterday, I have gotten a full and repulsive dose of the anti-Muslim hatred masquerading as scholarship that these guys represent. Authors of books with titles like Islam Unveiled and Sword of the Prophet, Spencer and Trifkovic contend that radical Islam is the true and only Islam. They deny that there is such a thing as a traditional Muslim--at one point Spencer challenged me to name a single traditional Muslim. Trifkovic compares Islam to Nazism and Bolshevism, and he'd like to see the earth rid of this menace. For them Islam is the problem and the only good Muslim is a Muslim who has renounced Islam.

This foolish doctrine that would make enemies of 1.2 billion Muslims--one in five people on the planet--is advanced in the name of an interpretation of Islamic theology that only a radical Muslim like Bin Laden would endorse. Bin Laden thinks that because the Koran says "slay the infidels," therefore Muslims are obliged to kill everyone who is not a Muslim. Bin Laden's doctrine is emphatically rejected by all the classical schools of Islamic teaching, and no Muslim empire from the Umayyads to the Abassid dynasty to the Mughals to the Ottomans, actually enforced a policy of slaying all the non-Muslims. Two thirds of Muslims in the world today live in democratic societies, and they certainly aren't wiping out the infidels around them, yet Spencer and Trifkovic have found their Koranic reference, and they are sticking with it all textual and empirical evidence to the contrary.

I'm Catholic and not Muslim, yet I have lots of first-hand knowledge of traditional Muslims--I grew up with many of these folks in India--and my mind reels from the one-sidedness and distortions of ideologues like Spencer and Trifkovic. Sometimes I wonder if Spencer and Trifkovic know any practicing Muslims. At one point in our CPAC debate Spencer referred by name to a Muslim "friend," giving people the impression that this fellow was on his side, but after the debate the very same man came up to me and said, "I agree with you completely. I don't know why Spencer mentioned my name in public. I think what he is saying is wrong and counterproductive."

I know that some conservatives have drunk deeply in the wells of anti-Islamic polemic, and recovery may take some time. For starters I'd recommend the detoxifying works of historian Bernard Lewis, who knows the Muslim world and speaks the local languages and exhibits in his work a judiciousness and balance utterly lacking among the rabble-rousers. Here, for example, is Lewis in a passage from his book Islam and the West. While firmly outlining the problems with Islamic toleration, Lewis shows that Muslims have throughout history coexisted with non-Muslims and he goes on to make the startling point that historically speaking Islam was more tolerant than Christianity.

"The level of willingness (of Muslims) to tolerate and live peaceably with those who believe otherwise and worship otherwise was, at most times and in most places, high enough for tolerable coexistence to be possible...The character and extent of traditional Muslim tolerance should not be misunderstood. If by tolerance we mean the absence of discrimination, then the traditional Muslim state was not tolerant, and indeed a tolerance thus defined would have been seen not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. No equality was conceded, in practice or even less in theory, between those who accepted and obeyed God's word and those who willfully and by their own choice rejected it. Discrimination was structural and universal, imposed by doctrine and law and endorced by popular consent. Persecution, on the other hand, though not unknown, was rare and atypical, and there are few if any equivalents in Muslim history to the massacres, the forced conversions, the expulsions, and the burnings that are so common in the history of Christendom..."