And Yale University Press Has Run Out of Courage
The craven capitulation of Yale University Press—which has excised the banal cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad from Klausen’s forthcoming (and likely apologetic, if not downright warped) book on the Danish cartoon “affair”—stands in stark contrast to my own experience in 2005 with Prometheus Books.
Muhammad’s timeless inspiration to Muslim jihadists of all ilks, and across the spectrum of Islamic fanaticism including mass murdering homicide bombers and their dispatchers, is precisely what was being lampooned—ever so mildly—in the benign Danish cartoons published by Jyllands Posten
The great modern scholar of Islam, Arthur Jeffery, over five decades ago, in his review of “The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah” by A. Guillaume, from : The American Historical Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (July, 1956), pp. 946-947, published shortly after the release of this seminal work, made this trenchant obervation:
Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic biography of the prophet. In this present volume such a translation is put into our hands in a beautifully printed and produced book.
…Byzantine, Syriac, and Armenian writers who mention him say only that he was a merchant who appeared as a prophet and sent the Arabs out on their wars of conquest
Robert Spencer’s outstanding recent biography of Muhammad (which I reviewed here)—based exclusively on the pious Muslim sources, confirms the openly professed description of the Muslim prophet warrior by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a pre-eminent contemporary Muslim scholar, in his modern sermon, “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model”.
Thus the cover my 2005 The Legacy of Jihad featured this image (below) of Muhammad—directing the jihad massacre of the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza—reproduced exclusively for the book cover art, accompanied (within) by a full description of the scene depicted.
The unconscionable cowardice and self-imposed dhimmitude of Yale University Press reminds me of the great debt I owe to Prometheus Books, and its intrepid staff.
