Raymond Ibrahim on Academic Myths About Islam by Marilyn Stern

The Violence of Faith, Part 1: The Islamic State

Ibrahim discussed the Palestinian Arab academic, Edward Said – a literary critic and "not a historian," – whose 1978 book Orientalism criticized "European academics who studied the Orient." Said claimed that Western scholars presented the "East as barbaric and ... primitive, especially Islam," and were therefore "not objective." At the time, the culture was ripe for Said's politicization of historical fact, including tarring the term "Orientalist" as a pejorative.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Islam is backward and the Qur'an is terrible.

Today, this trend has reached a zenith in the current climate among leftist academics and their fellow apologists. Western history is reframed largely as "racist ... imperialistic ... [and] xenophobic," while Islam's wars of conquest, which consisted of "nonstop violence," are minimized or justified. The culmination of the mythmaking has produced the "new" version of history in which Islam was "peaceful [and] progressive," while Western Europe was the "violent" aggressor.

Islamic conquests that began with "the Battle of Yarmuk in the year 636," and were halted temporarily in the Siege of Vienna in 1683, resumed their advance that included attacks by Barbary pirates against the "infidels" on American ships in 1785. It then hit a pause that was an "aberration," according to Ibrahim. "The Islamic world wane[d]" after Napoleon's entry into Egypt in 1799, an event marked "the [beginning of the] golden age for the Christian minorities of the colonial era."

Ibrahim said that jihadists like ISIS bolster their anti-Western rhetoric with quotes hearkening back to Islamic leaders of the distant past who fought against the "Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire" only a few years after the death of Muhammad, Islam's prophet and military leader. Ibrahim said, "So yes, to me, it's definitely a continuum ... even if [Islam] took one or two centuries" off.

Ibrahim experienced firsthand the consequences of questioning academia's mythmaking orthodoxy. After lecturing about his book on Islamic warfare at the U.S. Army War College, Ibrahim was attacked for disagreeing with those who charge that Islamic wars were entirely the fault of the West.

Ibrahim said the excuse academics assign to "Western machinations" is used as a rationalization "other than radical Islam to explain ... what we're seeing today [that] is an identical duplication of ... [what] Islam was doing ... for over a millennium." Myers referred to the plethora of centers devoted to the "propaganda of Islamophobia ... tied to intersectionality ... [as] part of the ... leftist push to silence critics." Ibrahim noted how the opposition, unwilling and unable to debate, is silenced when they are challenged with "objective truth."

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