By Peter Burrows 1/5/16 elburropete@gmail.com  blog - www.silvercityburro.com 

Phobia (1). A persistent, abnormal or illogical fear of a specific thing or situation.

GǣIslamaphobeGǥ is not an apt word. GǣPhobiaGǥ implies something illogical, but there is nothing illogical in seeing Islam as a threat to everything humanity has so painfully, and incompletely, gained in the last few centuries: representative government, freedom of speech, economic prosperity, equality for women, the abolition of slavery, freedom of religion, and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, phobia connotes fear, and while people who know Islam have every right to fear it, their primary emotion is apt to be one of revulsion.

Those who defend Islam usually know nothing about the Koran or the importance of the life of Muhammad to devout Muslims. This lack of knowledge doesn't prevent them from confidently calling Islamic terrorists GǣradicalGǥ Muslims, something that must amuse the Allah fearing, Muhammad imitating bastards as they behead, crucify, rape, murder, enslave and plunder.

The problem with Islam, in a nutshell, is that its scriptural foundation, the Koran, is worshiped as the infallible, timeless and unchangeable word of God. This belief does not seem to have diminished over the centuries, in spite of what a skeptical non-Muslim would see as evidence that the hopelessly out of date Koran is the work of a man, Muhammad, and is NOT the work of an infallible God.

Nonetheless, the important thing is to try to understand the Koran as devout Muslims do, not as you or I do, or how the ignorant, politically correct people who dominate Western leadership and media think Muslims do. To that end, I recommend you get a copy of GǣTowards Understanding The Koran,Gǥ an English translation of the Koran from Urdu, the language of Pakistan, which was in turn translated from Arabic by the highly respected Pakistani Islamic scholar Sayyid Mawdudi (1903-1979). (1) This translation-of-a-translation suffers from no difference in meaning that I can detect when compared with the straightforward English translation by Yusuf Ali. (2)

The reason I recommend the Mawdudi Koran is that it is an abridged version of a decades long project that Mawdidi undertook to not only translate the Koran, but to footnote it with very helpful explanations of the context and meanings of many of the verses. My abridged version was published in 2011, and has a forward by Pakistani Islamic economist and scholar, Khurshid Ahmad, who gives us an insight into how todayG