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The Myth of Islamic tolerance: how Islamic law treats non-Muslims. Edited by Robert Spencer. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005. 593p ISBN 1-59102-249-5 paper $26.00
Religion, like all things human, exists in a state of constant dialectical struggle. It is at once a mixture, source, and justification of hatred and love, of ignorance and enlightenment, of cruelty and compassion, of progress and reaction. Even the most cursory examination of the history of religions proves this beyond doubt. The study of religion also reveals that categorical judgments that claim that one of these qualities outweighs all the rest are very likely to be wrong, because of the sociological and historical biases of those doing the judging and their frequent failure to acknowledge the fact of the religious dialectic.
In The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, editor Robert Spencer, director of "Jihad Watch," an Internet weblog, has assembled a collection of 58...