��Notes
Prologue: The Clash of Monotheisms
The Reverend Franklin Graham made his comments regarding Islam on November
16, 2002, while appearing on the NBC Nightly News. “We’re not attacking Islam, but
Islam has attacked us,” he said. “The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the
son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I
believe it [Islam] is a very evil and wicked religion.”
Anne Coulter’s article “This Is War: We Should Invade Their Countries” was
posted on National Review Online on September 13, 2001. Jerry Vines’s speech was
given at the annual Southern Baptist Convention, June 10, 2001. A text of James
Inhofe’s disturbing Senate address delivered on March 4, 2002, is available at the
Middle East Information Center; see http://middleeastinfo.org/article316.html.
Barry Yeoman has written a wonderful article about undercover missionaries in
the Muslim world, titled “The Stealth Crusade,” in Mother Jones (May/June 2002).
- The Sanctuary in the Desert
Whenever possible, references to English translations of Arabic texts are provided
for the convenience of Western readers.
My description of the pagan Ka‘ba relies on the writings of Ibn Hisham and al-
Tabari, as well as The Travels of Ali Bey al-Abbasi as recounted in Michael Wolfe’s
excellent collection of pilgrimage accounts, One Thousand Roads to Mecca (1997). I
also suggest F. E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994).
For the English translation of Ibn Hisham, see Alfred Guillaume’s The Life of
Muhammad (1955). For an English translation of al-Tabari, see the multivolume set
edited by Ihsan Abbas et al., The History of Al-Tabari (1988).