Anti-Islamic polemic often rests on secondhand citation of texts authors cannot read.
Evidence
Ibn Warraq spends a good chunk of his first chapter discussing Twenty-Three Years (Bist-o-Seh Sal), a famous book by the prominent Iranian public intellectual Ali Dashti, on the life of Muhammad, noting its radical critique of Islamic doctrine. Yet the basis of his information about Dashti is a secondary source, a book by Daniel Pipes, who himself cannot read the language in which Dashti’s book was written, Persian (or, for that matter, Arabic), on the occasion of the Rushdie affair. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 475
Related
- Islamophobic polemicists work from paid translation rather than primary sources. (similarity 0.89)
- Polemical texts selectively omit events that contradict their argument (similarity 0.82)
- Canonical Islamic texts were cited only to discredit Islam (similarity 0.81)
- Medieval anti-Islamic polemic could work from accurate hadith rather than fabricated detail (similarity 0.81)
- Native informers can undercut their own thesis by citing evidence against it. (similarity 0.81)
- Ibn Warraq’s catalogue of critics contradicts his claim no Muslim challenged doctrine (similarity 0.80)
- A skilled medieval polemicist attacked Islam using only Islamic sources (similarity 0.80)
- Polemicists kept absurd anti-Islam tales because they were proprietary (similarity 0.80)
- Ibn Warraq condemns apostasy in Islam while unable to read its primary sources. (similarity 0.80)
- Insular academic language on Islam enables public charlatans (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval polemicists conflated Qur’an and hadith authorship by Muhammad (similarity 0.79)
- Muslim intellectual critique long predates and exceeds Islamophobic polemic. (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval polemicists used Muslim sources to validate anti-Muslim legends (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-Islamic polemic froze into its framework by the thirteenth century (similarity 0.79)
- Christian polemicists could separate true Qur’anic statements about Christ from false ones (similarity 0.79)