- When The Times deigned to write its only (sneering) review of
Sookhdeoʼs work, they mocked him and Bat Yeʼor, presenting them as
“ridiculous” people. Sookhdeoʼs presentation of the permanence of
Islamʼs attitude of war towards unbelievers is backed up in the work of
Prof. Bernard Lewis, the Westʼs pre-eminent twentieth-century expert on
Islam: “Between the two [dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb] there is a morally
necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war, until the final
and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief” (from the chapter “War and
Peace” in Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, p.73). This expert opinion from Prof.
Lewis is even to be found two decades earlier, in his article “Politics and
War”, which appears in a collection of essays written by Western experts
on Islam, and published by the Oxford University Press. The esteemed
editors of this collection clearly did not think that Prof. Lewisʼ view on
the permanence of Islamʼs state of war with the world was anything other
than mainstream scholarship. See Joseph Schacht and C.E. Bosworth
(eds), The Legacy of Islam, Oxford, 1974, pp.156-209. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
#1