Few books about religion deserve the attribution "courageous." This book, I ampleased to report, does. It is courageous because it is (as the term originally denoted)
full of heart (coeur) and courageous because it is an act of intellectual honesty
and bravery, an act of faith rather than of faithlessness. It will undoubtedly be
a controversial book because it deals personally and forthrightly with a subject
widely misunderstood by fheists and nontheists of various stripes. That subject is
the Islamic faith.
New religions depend for their sustenance on the energy of converts. Thus
Christianity in the first century of the common era and Islam in the sixth depended
on the enthusiasm of the newly persuaded. Each had its prophet, each its network
of zealous missionary-evangelists and later organization-minded hierarchs and
caliphs to drive and sustain the structures that faith invented. Christianity and
