People in glass houses..... - Rated 
I haven't read this book yet - just bought it. A thought though: I couldn't help noticing that the reviews written by people who describe it as badly written, are all atrociously written. Could there be anything in this, or is it a coincidence?
Extremely thorough - Rated
This is a long and detailed book. It goes through everything from the origins of the Qur'an to the life of Mohammed to the effect of Islam on other conquered countries. He is not a polemicist; unlike Ali Sina, Robert Spencer or Salman Rushdie, Warraq does not ridicule people or their beliefs. Warraq admits that there are differing opinions on wife-beating; whilst Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes out that Islam always allows it, Warraq points out a contradiction between the Qur'an and the Hadith, which has been resolved in various ways. The worst that he says about Mohammed is that he finds the heroes of other religions to be better role models. The book could do with a bit of humour sometimes; the only bit that I picked up on was when he said that Muslim countries are probably better off without Winnie the Pooh. [No argument was giving for this anti-Pooh stance]. The final words in the book state that the next battle is more likely to be between those who favour freedom and those who do not rather than between Islam and the West. This illustrates that his aim was to safeguard free enquiry and liberty against fundamentalists rather than to simply insult religious faith.
This was written almost fifteen years ago now, but is enjoying a revivial due to its being quoted by lots of atheists. His argument may even have been vindicated by the actions of those last fifteen years.
Some of the other reviews in this section appear to be by people who have not read the book. This can be shown by how they just pick insults out of the sky.
Everyone living in the West should read this book - Rated
I admire and am grateful to the writer who told us the religion in a way that no one else has done before him. The majority people living in the West are dangerously naive about Islam, they think it a little exotic addition to the multi culture thing the Left theologiest have tried so hard to adopt to the Europe. I often thought that there must be a consparacy in this: how come that in Europe that we are not allowed to talk about the history whenever it is about the Islam? We are foced to forget our history, and the younger generation are not allowed to read what really happened in the history. Why?! Are our government officials sold themselves to the Oil Shehks?
Why are we not allowed to remember our own history? Why?!
To talk about history, well... let us read some passages from the book, THE FORCE OF REASON which is called the most important book since the French Revolution, written by the world-famous writer, journalist and expert on Islam Fallaci.
It was 635 AD, 3 years after Mohammed's death, the armies of Crescent Moon invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine. It was in 638 that they took Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre. It was in 640 that after conquering Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, they invaded Christian Egypt and overran Christian Maghreb which is the present day Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. It was in 668 that for the first time they attacked Constantinople and laid siege that would last 5 years. It was in 711 after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar they landed in the most Catholic Iberian Penisula, took possession of Portugal and Spain.
And whoever believers in the myth of peaceful coexistence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors should reread the history of the burned convents and monasteries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian or Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems. The beheadings of Toledo, Barcelona, Serville and Zamora ordered by Mutamid; the Muslim king who used the heads of Jews and Christians to decorate his palace. And anyone mention the name of Jesus would be killed instantly. When any Muslim passed by, Christians and Jews were obliged to step aside and bow. Anyone who is converted to Islam did not need to pay taxes.
From France, in 721 AD, the Muslim invaders went to the Catholic France. There they massacred the entire male population in Pyrenees and took Narbonne, enslaved all the women and children. From Carcassonne they went to Nimes and went into Lyons and Dijon where the Muslim invaders pillaged every single church. In 731 AD, a wave of 380,000 Muslim army invaded Brodeaux. If it was not because the Great Charles Martel led his army won the battle of Poitiers-Tours aginst the Muslim invaders, today France would still be an undemocratic Muslim country.
In 827, the Muslim invaders landed in Sicily, another target of their voraciousness. Massacring, beheading, impaling, crucifying as usual, they conquered Syracuse and Taormina, and then Messina and Palermo, and in ¾ of century they Islamized the island. They stayed for over two centuries in Sicily until they were wiped out by the Normans. But in 836 the Muslim invaders landed at Brindisi, in 840 at Bari. And they Islamized Puglia too. In 841, they invaded Ancona, in 846 invaded Ostia. The Muslims sacked it, burned it, and moved upriver from Tiber they reached Rome. They laid siege to Rome and one night the Muslim invaders burst in. They sacked both the St. Peter and St. Paul's churches. The Pope Sergius had to pay the Muslim invaders heavy ransom to prevent further attacks.
Having left Rome, the Muslim invaders went to Salerno and they raped one nun every night right at the Cathedral's altar ! In 898, the Muslims invaded Provence. In 911, they crossed Alps to enter Piedmont. They occupied Turin and Casale, set fire to all churches and libraries, killed thousands of Christians, they went to Switzerland. They were put off by the snow and returned to Provence. In 940, the Muslim invaders occupied Toulon where they settled and ... Today it's fashionable to beat our breast over the Crusades. To blame the West for the Crusaders. To see the Crusades as an injustice committed to the detriment of the poor-innocent Muslims. ... the Crusades were the response to 400 years of invasions and occupations by the Muslims. At the conclusion of the Crusades, the sons of Allah resumed their persecutions as before and more than before.
I must refresh the memory of the oblivious and of the hypocrites. So here it is. In 1356, 84 years after the 8th Crusades, the Turks got Gallipoli, from there they occupied Macedonia, Albania and Serbia. In 1444, they invaded Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania which is now Bulgaria and Romania. In 1453, the Muslim invaders again put under siege Constantinople which on May 29 fell into the hands of Mehmet II who by the virtue of the Islamic Fratricide Law which authorized a sultan to murder members of his immediate family, had ascended the throne by strangling his 3 year old brother. Europe weeps only for Muslims, never for Christians or Jews or Buddhists or Hindus, it would not be Politically Correct to know the details of the fall of Constantinople. Its inhabitants who at daybreak, while Mehmet II is shelling Theodosius' walls, take refuge in the cathedral of St. Sophia and here start to sing psalms. To invoke divine mercy. The patriarch who by candlelight celebrates his last Mass and in order to lessen the panic thunders: "Fear not, my brothers and sister ! Tomorrow you will be in the Kingdom of Heaven and your names will survive till the end of time!"
By the hand of Turks, this time. The Turks who were about to prepare the birth to the Ottoman Empire. An empire that until 1700 would concentrate on the West all of its greed: turn Europe into its favourite battlefield. Do you know who Janissaries were ? The chosen troops of the Empire, the super-soldiers as capable of self-immolation as fighting and massacring and sacking. Do you know where they were recruited or rather pressed into service? In the countries subjugated by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and Italy. ( On the coastline of these countries where you can still see today the watchtowers used for spotting the arrival of the Muslim armies and for warning the town and villages. ) The Ottoman Empire's army abducted the youth at the age of 11 and 12, together with even younger children to put in the seraglios of the sultans and vizers and given to paedophilia, and they chose them from the best-looking and strongest of the important families's firstborns. After the conversion they shut them in the military barracks and here, forbidding them to have any kind of amorous or affectionate relations, marriage included, they indoctrinated them as not even Hitler would indoctrinate his Waffen SS. They turned these young kids into the most formidable fighting machine the world had seen since Roman times.
The children who cry in terror, their mother who give them heart repeating: "Hush, baby, We die for our faith in Jesus Christ! We die for our Emperor Constantine XI, for our homeland!" The Ottoman troops who were beating their drums step over the breaches in the fallen walls, overwhelm the Genovese and Venetian and Spanish defenders, hack them on to death with scimitars, then burst into the cathedral and behead even newborn babies. The Massacre lasted from dawn to the afternoon. The Muslim Janissaries raped and butcher 4,000 nuns in a few hours, put the survivors in chains to sell them at the market of Ankara, while the Muslims were preparing their Victory Feast. During the feast, Mehmet II raped a 14 year old child of an Grand Duke Notaras, and then killed all his family member one by one by beheading them. This Mehmet II also destroyed all altars, melt down all church bells, and turned all churches into mosques and bazaars.
Three years later, in 1456, Mehmet again conquered Athen and he again turned all churches into mosques. Greece was turned into ruin and remained under the rule of the Muslims for over 400 years. In 1476, the Muslims invaded Venetian Republic, on July 28, 1480, the army of Ahmet Pasha took Otranto, which was defended only by a handful of soldiers. The Muslims killed all the priests and bishops, their army raped all the nuns and women, then killed them or enslaved them. Finally they rounded up 800 young people aged between 15 and 18 and took them to the camp of Ahmet Pasha who presented the ultimatum: "Do you wish to convert or die?" "I would rather die" answered a 16 year old Antonio Grimaldo Pezzulla. Then the rest of the youth shouted: "Me too! Me too!"
This Ahmet Pasha gave them what they wanted: he cut off all their heads, at 100 a day. It lasted for exactly 8 days. There was only one certain Mario Bernabei saved his life by choosing to convert but was later killed too.
In 1512, the Ottoman Empire was taken over by Selim the Grim. Again by the virtue of the Islamic Fratricide Law, he ascended the throne by strangling his two brothers, and five nephews, and from such a gentleman was born the far-sighted sultan who wanted to created the "Muslim State of Europe": Suleyman the magnificent. As soon as Suleyman was crowned, he formed an army of 400,000 men and invaded the Catholic Hungary. He burned down the city and sent 100,000 Hungarians to the slave market. The following year, in 1527, he enslaved 3 million slaves from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Algiers.
In 1529, the second army of Suleyman invaded the Catholic Austria in order to create the Islamic State of Europe. After 5 weeks of unsuccessful attacks, the Muslims decided to withdraw, and they then killed 100,000 Hungarian slaves because the price on the slave market had dropped sharply due to the 3 million slaves he captured and sold two years ago from Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Algiers.
As soon as he and his army went back to Istanbul, Suleyman started to rebuild his navy by entrusting the famous pirate Phayr Ad-din also known as Barbarossa, the Red Beard.
In 1565, Suleyman invaded the Christian stronghold Malta. In 1566, he died (hallelujah!) of a heart attack.
In 1571, the muslim general Lala Mustafa conquered the Christian Cyprus, and here his army committed one of the worst atrocities against the people in Cyprus.
On October 7, 1571, a very angry Republic of Venice allied with Spain, Genova, Florence, Turin, Parma, Mantua, Lucca, Ferrara, Urbino, Malta, the Papacy, defeated Ali Pasha's navy in the Battle of Lepanto. By this time, the Ottoman Empire was at its height of power, a successive sultans continued without hinders to attack the continent where the Suleyman the magnificent wanted to settle his Islamic State of Europe. They invaded Poland twice: in 1621 and 1672. And this dream of establishing the Islamic State of Europe was only halted in 1683 when the Grand Vizier Mustafa amassed 600,000 soldiers, 1,000 cannons, 40,000 horses, 20,000 elephants, 20,000 buffaloes, 20,000 mules, as wll as a 100 of Mustafa's wives and concubines to invade Austria. 25,000 tents plus his own were furnished with ostriches and peacocks and fountains. He reached Vienna which was for the second time under the siege by the Muslims.
The fact is that in 1683, the Europeans were more intelligent than they are today. And apart from the French who liked to fornicate with Islam (consider the Treaty of Alliance signed by Louis VIX, le Roi Soleil ) they all rushed to defend the capital by now seen as the bulwark of Christianity. All of them, yes, English, Spanish, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Italians (meaning Genovese, Venetians, Tuscans, Piedmontese, Papal State). On September 12, they scored the extraordinary victory that compelled Kara Mustafa to flee abandoning his camels, his elephants, his buffaloes, and his ostriches and peacocks, his wives and concubines. Worse, to prevent his wives and concubines from falling into the hands of the enemy, Mustafa killed all his wives and concubines by cutting their throats one by one.
Read it with open mind - Rated
I have studied most of the work by Ibn Warraq and his effort must be admired though it is impossible for muslims to do so. He is bluntly honest with facts and knows well what he writes. There is a feeling of repetition which could be forgiven due to the reason that originally all the stuff was in the form of articles. I wish if i could sit with him and talk about some points where i have difference of opinion. I would recommend this book to every muslim, if they could digest truth.
Who knows Islam better than an educated Muslim ? - Rated
To the muslim (who has probably never bothered to read the book)
and claimed :
"never will you find in history one islamic scholar ever converting to another religion(which is true because ive checked that fact,cant find any " do a search on Mark A Gabriel on Amazon and the Internet ... He is a former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt (the undisputed seat of learning for the ENTIRE MUSLIM WORLD !) he became, wait for it, a CHRISTIAN ! This is an excellent book and all non-muslims of every faith, should learn the truth about the so-called religion of peace
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