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84 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wake-up call for those concerned with human rights, 15 Dec 2004
The recent Parliamentary Bill that includes a section on incitement to religious hatred has dismayed me. Given suitable existing laws, this new one is obviously a sop to Muslims to win votes in the next election. But how serious is the problem of Islam in the UK? I have read various scholarly works on Islam, and an English translation of the Koran itself, over the last 20 years. But I had previously found it hard to translate Islam's complexity into lessons for the UK. I read this book in an attempt to grasp the potential impact. It served this purpose well. The author uses a pseudonym, and I worried that this concealed a forgery similar to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which was a cynical action to discredit Judaism. So, where possible, I followed up the references elsewhere, to get second opinions. In fact, this book appears to tell it like it is. I used to be "vaguely Christian", (just because that was the prevailing climate when I was at school). I no longer am. Had I been "vaguely Muslim" in an Islamic society, and ceased to be, the prescribed penalty, according to Islamic Law, would be death. I am now strongly atheist. I learn from this book that, under Islam, the prescribed penalty for that is "conversion or death". It is disconcerting to discover that one-fifth of the people in the world follow a faith that would condemn me to death! And that many of them want to achieve the "global Islamic state" that might enable that to happen. The tone of this book accords with my own views. Islam is a massive problem for Muslims as well as the rest of us. It is Islam we should resist, while having sympathy for many of the Muslims who are oppressed by Islam, and for non-Muslims living in Muslim-oriented states. Just as Communism proved incompatible with the needs of the 20th Century, so I believe Islam is incompatible with the needs of the 21st Century. This book identifies the problems with (the lack of) human rights, antipathy towards science & technology, and hence with economic viability, and the contradictions between Islam and the secular values, based on reason, not revelation, which many of us hold. (I marked the book down because of various structural and grammatical problems).
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by Ibn Warraq
by Ibn Warraq
