Part V. Beyond Multicultural Relativism: Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet

By Paul Eidelberg, President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute

Introduction: Having surveyed what well-educated and experienced ex-Muslims say about Islam—Muslim men and women who have lived and suffered under various Islamic regimes—the reader must be all the more dismayed by the university-bred doctrine of multicultural relativism that permeates all levels of education in liberal democratic America and in social democratic Europe.

As indicated at the outset of our survey of Islam, it is this relativism that obscures the horrendous evil—the genocide and politicide—committed in the name of Muhammad and his deity. Relativism has emasculated the West. It corrupts American foreign policy. It prompts the politicians of the secular democratic state, American as well as European, to appease terrorists and tyrannies, especially those that adorn themselves in a ferocious religion. That the civilization inspired by the Prophets of Israel, the dialogues of Plato, the works of Aristotle, the Sermon on the Mount, the tragedies of Shakespeare—a civilization, moreover, that produced scientists like Newton and Einstein, statesmen like Washington and Churchill—that this civilization should genuflect to despots who worship Muhammad and his Jihad-loving deity—what a sacrifice of the intellect; what a betrayal of justice and humanity; a mockery of human greatness!

No doubt the present writer will be accused of “Islamophobia” and paranoia, by academics who dismiss Islamic maledictions such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as mere rhetoric and who therefore purvey the academic doctrine of “conflict resolution,” which is rooted in moral and cultural relativism. The professors of that doctrine are either dull-witted, delusional, or suffer from a pathological denial of evil. According to the Center for the Study of Political Islam, and as reported in FrontPageMagazine, February 21, 2007, Muslims have slaughtered approximately 270 million people since the ascendancy of Muhammad!  Serge Trifkovic takes this data seriously.

In The Sword of the Prophet (2002), Dr. Trifkovic, of Serbian descent, received his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton, UK and pursued postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Unsurprisingly, Trifkovic has been savaged by critics who question his understanding of Islam as well as the reliability of his sources. It’s nothing but “Islamophobia,” a malady they also attribute to American-born scholars like Robert Spencer, author of The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2006). Those critics manifest the title of Allan Bloom’s celebrated book The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Their obscurantism prompted me to preface Dr. Trifkovic with the FrontPageMagazine interview of Abul Kasem, whose portrayal of Islam very much substantiates what Trifkovic says of Islam in The Sword of the Prophet. [i]

Trifkovic portrays Muhammad as a fanatical warlord who used or invented Islamic ideas in the process of conquering Mecca and Medina. Citing the Quran and the Hadiths—Trifkovic exposes Islam’s prophet as cruel, ignorant, and lascivious. Thus, after slaughtering Arab tribesmen and looting their camels, the prophet and his followers kidnapped their women and staged an orgy of rape.  One Hadith explains:

We desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, but at the same time we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing ‘azl [coitus interruptus]. But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah’s Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah’s Messenger … and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born [a view consistent with Islam’s doctrine of predestination (P.E.)].[ii]

To the men of one Jewish tribe, Muhammad offered the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Upon their refusal, up to 900 were decapitated in front of their women and children. “Truly the judgment of Allah was pronounced on high,” was Muhammad’s comment. The women were subsequently raped. Trifkovic comments: “That Muhammad’s actions and words, as immortalized in the Quran and recorded in the Traditions, are frankly shocking by the standards of our time—and punishable by its laws, that range from war crimes and murder to rape and child molestation—almost goes without saying.”[iii]

Trifkovic is aware of the cultural and historical relativism that would prompt Western intellectuals to say, “We must not extend the judgmental yardstick of our own culture to the members of other cultures who have lived in other eras.” He counters this relativism by pointing out that “even in the context of seventh century Arabia, Muhammad had to resort to divine revelations as a means of suppressing the prevalent moral code of his own milieu.”[iv] Muhammad is thus revealed as a deeply flawed man by the standards of his own society, as well as those of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and even by the law of which he claimed to be the divinely appointed medium and custodian. Trifkovic sums up his assessment of Muhammad by quoting the eminent orientalist Sir William Muir (1819-1905): “the sword of Muhammad and the Quran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known.”[v]

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[i] Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet: Islam, History, Theology, Impact on the World.

[ii] Trifkovic, 43.

[iii] Ibid., 44, 50.

[iv] Ibid., 50.  See Ibn Warraq, Why I am Not a Muslim (New York: Prometheus Books 2003), 97, originally published in 1995, who rejects this relativism.

[v] Trifkovic, 132.  Muir’s statement also appears in Ibn Warraq, 88.