Great points.
Couple highlights from Ibn Warraq's Foreword:
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As Bernard Lewis wrote:
…[We] may , indeed , we must study the history of
Atlantic slavery and expose this great shame in the history of the Western world and the Americas north and south , in all its horror. This is a task which falls upon us as Westerners and in which others may and should and do join us.
In contrast , however, even to mention -let alone discuss or explore - the existence of
slavery in non-Western societies is denounced as evidence of
racism and of
imperialistic designs. The same applies to other delicate topics as
polygamy, autocracy, and the like. The range of taboos is very wide. 5
I should like to remind Bernard Lewis, his students and his admirers of his own words,
"There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern Europe relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth about their history , their culture , and their predicament. Today it is those who told the truth, not those who concealed or denied it, who are respected and welcomed in these countries.
"Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly , without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently.
"Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those who do not possess it.
We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments , religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy
rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.
"All this is very dangerous indeed , to ourselves and to others , however we may define otherness- dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future." 6
Finally there are those who tell me that even though Dr Bostom and many others maybe right in exposing history hitherto repressed or simply denied,
this was not the right historical moment to express it, in this hour of a conservative U.S. administration whose members do not hide their Christian allegiances, at this time of a war on terror when we are trying to convince Muslims round the world that we are not at war with them, but those who have a perverted interpretation of the great religion of Islam.
Sir Isaiah Berlin once described
an ideologue as somebody who is prepared to suppress what he suspects to be true. Sir Isaiah then concluded that from that disposition to suppress the truth has flowed much of the evil of this and other centuries. The first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. By suppressing the truth, however honorable the motive , we are only engendering an even greater evil.
We are all beholden to Dr Bostom for helping us to see more clearly, and more honestly past events that have such an important bearing on present travails. In the words of Albert Schweitzer,
"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances." 7
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Read the Foreword in it's entirety here:
http://www.andrewbostom.org/loj//content/view/61/1/
GET THE LEGACY OF JIHAD HERE:
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Jihad-I...ref=pd_sim_b_1