by Andrew Bostom
My colleagues Phyllis Chesler [1] and Diana West [2] have just written two important, complementary assessments which eviscerate journalist Deborah Scroggins’ recently published, Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui. Chesler and West mince no words in their discussions of Scroggins’ oeuvre, appropriately highlighting the book’s intellectually and morally cretinous argumentation. Ms. Scroggins diatribe cum “analysis” excoriates the intrepid former Dutch Parliamentarian and Muslim freethinker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while providing a Leftist claptrap “blame the West,” sympathetic portrayal of the Sharia-compliant, pious Muslim jihadist, Siddiqui.
As revealed by Chesler and West, Scroggins’ work epitomizes disturbing trends I examine in my forthcoming Sharia Versus Freedom—The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism: Western self-loathing, accompanied by thoroughly uninformed, treacly apologetics on Islam and its quintessential, totalitarian religio-political code, Sharia. For example, Diana West [2] points out how Scroggins chastises Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “simplistic” views on Islam for ignoring two ostensible avatars of “Islamic modernism”—the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto, and Sudanese religious “reformer,” Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. But Scroggins ignorant attack simply confirms the author’s willful blindness and hostility to the mea-culpa based, wrenching reforms of Islam Ayaan and other true modernists from Muslim backgrounds are rightfully insistent upon. Taha was at best a dishonest tinkerer; Bhutto far worse.
Taha’s defining work, “The Second Message of Islam [3]” is readily available in an English translation by his fawning acolyte, and Islamic Sharia-promoting apologist, Abdullah an-Naim. Taha proclaims these bowdlerized pieties (in “The Second Message of Islam [3]”) on Islam’s violent Medinan emergence as a polity:


