The government of Pakistan has banned my book The Truth About Muhammad,
confiscating all copies and translations. Why? Because it contains
"objectionable material" about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Said Shahid
Ahmed, counselor of community affairs at the Pakistani Embassy in
Washington: "The book is very, very damaging - let me tell you."

Objectionable material? Damaging? I confess it: they're right. There is
plenty of objectionable material in this book. Here's a small sampling:

1. The Truth About Muhammad details the triple choice that Muhammad directed
his followers to offer to non-Muslims: conversion to Islam, subjugation
without equality of rights with Muslims under the rule of Islamic law, or
war. Did I fabricate this? No, it can be found in, among many other places,
Sahih Muslim, a collection of hadith - traditions of Muhammad and the early
Muslims - that Muslims generally consider reliable. In it, Muhammad says:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who
disbelieve in Allah..When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite
them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you
also accept it and withold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to
(accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from
fighting against them..If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the
Jizya [a special tax levied on non-Muslims]. If they agree to pay, accept it
from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah
's help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

Is Sahih Muslim banned in Pakistan? Of course not.

2. In the book, I discuss how Muhammad's earlier biographer, Ibn Ishaq,
explains the contexts of various verses of the Qur'an by saying that
Muhammad received revelations about warfare in three stages: first,
tolerance; then, defensive warfare; and finally, offensive warfare in order
to convert the unbelievers to Islam or make them pay the jizya (see Qur'an
9:29). Qur'anic commentaries (tafasir) by Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti
and others also emphasize that the ninth chapter of the Qur'an, in which
this call to offensive warfare appears, abrogates every peace treaty in the
Qur'an.

I didn't just dig into old books to find this. In the modern age, this idea
of stages of development in the Qur'an's teaching on jihad, culminating in
offensive warfare to establish the hegemony of Islamic law, has been
affirmed by the jihadist theorists Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abul Ala Maududi, as
well as the Pakistani Brigadier S. K. Malik (author of The Qur'anic Concept
of War), Saudi Chief Justice Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid (in his
"Jihad in the Qur'an and Sunnah"), and others. It is, of course, an
assertion of no little concern to non-Muslims, since it encapsulates a
doctrine of warfare against non-Muslims and their ultimate subjugation under
Sharia rules, with all that implies, and is being used by jihadists today in
the Islamic world to justify their actions and make new recruits.

Are the works of Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti, Qutb, Maududi, Malik or
Humaid banned in Pakistan? Of course not.

3. Also in The Truth About Muhammad I discuss Muhammad's marriage to little
Aisha, which is specifically addressed in the hadith collection Sahih
Bukhari (generally considered by Muslims to be the most reliable such
collection). According to several traditions recorded by Bukhari, "the
Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years
old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and
she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)" (Bukhari
7.62.88; see also 7.62.65; 7.62.64; 5.58.236; 5.58.234).

It is quite obvious that many Muslims take very seriously and act upon the
material on which I depended to write the book. Imitating the Prophet of
Islam, many Muslims even in modern times have taken child brides. In some
places this even has the blessing of the law: article 1041 of the Civil Code
of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the
age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar
years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty
with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of
the ward are duly observed."[i]

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was
twenty-eight.[ii] Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine
blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your
daughters do not see their first blood in your house."[iii]

Time magazine reported in 2001:

In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys. The
law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young
girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian
Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this
year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed
the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum age
of fifteen for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced
anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a
marriage to be consummated.)[iv]

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that over half of the
girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of
eighteen.[v] In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and
Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen. In an Afghan refugee
camp, more than two out of three second-grade girls were either married or
engaged, and virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were
already married. One ten-year-old was engaged to a man of sixty.[vi]

This is the price that women have paid throughout Islamic history, and
continue to pay, for Muhammad's status as "an excellent example of conduct"
(Qur'an 33:21).

Of course, in this as with the other instances I have adduced, other Islamic
authorities differ. Some claim that in repeating the traditions from
Bukhari, I am perpetuating misunderstandings - despite the manifest fact
that these "misunderstandings" are quite widespread in the Islamic world. If
they are indeed misunderstandings, the problem lies with Sahih Bukhari,
which is very ancient and essentially canonical, not with my book, which has
been available for less than three months and will be forgotten before too
long.

But is Sahih Bukhari banned in Pakistan? Of course not.

4. Finally, in my book I explain why it is today virtually impossible to
prove rape in lands that follow the dictates of the Sharia. False adultery
accusations against Aisha led ultimately to the requirement that four male
Muslim witnesses must be produced in order to establish a crime of adultery
or related indiscretions. In cases of sexual misbehavior, four male
witnesses are required to establish the deed - in accord with a revelation
that came to Muhammad to exonerate his youthful wife (Qur'an 24:13).[vii]
This requirement allows unscrupulous men to commit rape with impunity: as
long as they deny the charge and there are no witnesses, they get off
scot-free, because the victim's account is inadmissible. Even worse, if a
woman accuses a man of rape, she may end up incriminating herself. If the
required male witnesses can't be found, the victim's charge of rape becomes
an admission of adultery.

That accounts for the grim fact that as many as seventy-five percent of the
women in prison in Pakistan are, in fact, behind bars for the crime of being
a victim of rape.[viii] Several high-profile cases in Nigeria in recent
years have also revolved around rape accusations being turned around by
Islamic authorities into charges of fornication, resulting in death
sentences that were only modified after international pressure.[ix]

Because they're rooted in Qur'anic dictates, such abuses are extraordinarily
resistant to criticism and reform. Witness the recent situation in Pakistan,
the same country where my book has just been banned. The new Women's
Protection Act has reclassified the crime of rape so that it can be
prosecuted according to modern standards of evidence and testimony, without
relying on the four male witnesses required by the Qur'an. But Muslim
hardliners have staged protests against the new law, calling it "un-Islamic,
immoral and unconstitutional." And they have a case, based on Qur'an 24:13
and the story of Aisha's exoneration.

This is just one indication that what I wrote in The Truth About Muhammad
about Muhammad is generally what Muslims believe about Muhammad - even in
Pakistan. Since I based the book entirely on Islamic sources, the objection
that Pakistani authorities have to it cannot reasonably be based on what I
report about Muhammad, but only on the fact that I hold him to a moral
standard different from the one he delineated for himself, and do not
consider him to be an "excellent example of conduct." But in a society that
is not pathologically insecure, this ought to be not an occasion for banning
and confiscation, but for free and open debate. After all, the reform of
Islam that is so needed today - in order to mitigate the elements of it that
are giving rise to violence and extremism -- cannot possibly begin without
acknowledgment of the fact that there are aspects of Islam that need reform.
But the banning of The Truth About Muhammad in Pakistan is yet another
indication that such reform, despite the immense hopes placed upon it by so
many in the West, is not on the horizon.

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