thus highly credentialed, they teach at prestigious
universities, and their book is aimed at university students.
The concept of abrogation is featured in the very first pages
of this book, which says:
Abrogation... is the process through which
specific revelations are replaced by others.
Abrogation can apply to entire revelations --
for instance, the Qur’an both corrects and
perfects earlier scriptures -- or to particular
sections of one revelation, where one verse or
set of verses replaces another.^299This is not some dreary theological point. Unless one grasps
the concept of abrogation, one cannot understand why the
world has suffered so much slavery, terrorism, and genocide
from Muslims. When one understands the concept of
abrogation, then one also understands why it is that Muslims
and their Quisling allies can make false claims like “there is
no compulsion of religion in Islam”.^300
If we in the West had understood the role of abrogation
in Islam, we would have understood the significance of the
Rushdie Affair of the early 1990s. Devout Muslims all over
the world vowed to kill the author of The Satanic Verses,
bookstores around the world were bombed,^301 people died
in riots,^302 and Muslims made assassination attempts (some
successful) on people involved in the publication of the
book.^303 Why did Muslims all over the world come
together in such a violent way about a novel which most