EXTREMIST: A Response to Geert Wilders & Terrorists Everywhere
In EXTREMIST: A Response to Geert Wilders & Terrorists Everywhere, Qasim Rashid has done a great service to Muslims and non-Muslims alike by challenging the scurrilous attacks on Islam by an influential Islamophobe. The only answer to Islamophobia, which promotes, hatred, fear, and violence, is scholarship and debate. Geert Wilders and his ilk must now respond to EXTREMIST or concede defeat in the field of debate and scholarship. --Professor Akbar Ahmed Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University, and author of The Thistle and the Drone: How America s War on Terror became a Global War on Tribal IslamQasim Rashid deserves commendation for paying critics of Islam the compliment of responding to their objections in a patient point-by-point manner. There are, of course, multiple traditions of Islam and differences of opinion among Muslims as to the meaning of its authoritative teachings. So Rashid cannot, and does not claim to, speak for all Muslims. (Indeed, Rashid and his fellow Ahmadis have been persecuted by their less tolerant co-religionists in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for being the wrong kind of Muslim. ) But his interpretations of Islamic teaching, here lucidly set forth and rigorously defended, give those of us who are non-Muslims a window into an important school of Islamic thought that eschews extremism, violence, and repression and seeks harmony between Muslims of different traditions and with people of other faiths. --Dr. Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University --ReviewQasim Rashid deserves commendation for paying critics of Islam the compliment of responding to their objections in a patient point-by-point manner. There are, of course, multiple traditions of Islam and differences of opinion among Muslims as to the meaning of its authoritative teachings. So Rashid cannot, and does not claim to, speak for all Muslims. (Indeed, Rashid and his fellow Ahmadis have been persecuted by their less tolerant co-religionists in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for being the wrong kind of Muslim. ) But his interpretations of Islamic teaching, here lucidly set forth and rigorously defended, give those of us who are non-Muslims a window into an important school of Islamic thought that eschews extremism, violence, and repression and seeks harmony between Muslims of different traditions and with people of other faiths.  Dr. Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University --Dr. Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University