Mr Fregosi says that it was [the publisher]
Little Brown’s decision to seek an expert
opinion from Dr Roger Boase, an English
academic converted to Islam, that turned the
publisher against his book. Dr Boase reported
that he [Fregosi] had written an unbalanced
account and had relied on “a fallacy that
Islam was spread by the sword”. Mr Fregosi
said his aim had been to show that
Muhammad was more of a warrior and more
bloodthirsty than his image.^233As you know from our earlier citation of the most
authoritative Muslim biography of Mohammed, the idea that
Mohammed was a warlord is to be found pervading the
largest part of that very detailed biography. As the past few
decades of terrorist atrocities (and foiled terrorist plots) have
shown, it is risible that Fregosiʼs publisher could
commission this book then back out of publishing it based
on the claim (by a Muslim) that violent jihad was not part of
Islam. The mainstream and scholarly view for centuries was
that Islam was a religion of war.
What could have first prompted the publisher to
encourage Fregosi to write his book on jihad? Most people
no longer even know that in 1993 devout Muslims set off a
massive bomb in the basement of the World Trade Centre,
in an attempt to destroy this symbol of Western success, an
attempt to kill or maim those thousands of workers inside.
Thus a few years before another group of Muslim terrorists
successfully attacked America in September 2001, Muslims