Sphere of the unknown

Found this article linked to at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. I think it states its case quite well and passionately. It's by Ibn Warraq, the pseudonymous author of Why I Am Not A Muslim, a critique of Islam which the author was moved to pen in response to the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

Over the weekend, while the whole cartoon thing was going on, I made a half-hearted effort to find some blogs with some dialogue between muslims and non-muslims. I didn't come up with any. The coverage of this whole thing on Irish blogs has been pretty unenlightening (I include myself in this criticism). The amazon.com link here to Warraq's book is interesting for its 232 customer reviews (at the time of posting), some written in the last month as the cartoon kerfuffle heated up in the middle-east . Devout muslims write long criticisms or two-line dismissals of a book they haven't read, while westerners take them to task (many not having read the book either). At least it approaches some form of internet dialogue, something patently absent from our flurry of posts in the Irish blogoparish over the weekend.