The Verdict of History: What Scholars, Critics, and the Evidence Actually Say About Islam and Its Prophet (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798253637401)

The critics have had their say. Now comes the evidence.

The Verdict of History is a forensic dismantling of the four most common accusations levelled against the Prophet Muhammad and the religion of Islam - that he was a paedophile, a warlord, a conqueror who spread his faith by the sword, and the architect of women's oppression. Each charge is heard in full, then answered with the testimony of the last people its critics would expect: non-Muslim historians, Western orientalists, secular scholars, and literary giants who had every reason to condemn and instead found themselves compelled to conclude otherwise.

The witnesses include W. Montgomery Watt, Karen Armstrong, Thomas Carlyle, Mahatma Gandhi, Will Durant, Annie Besant, and Michael H. Hart - the astrophysicist who ranked Muhammad the single most influential human being in history. Their verdicts are not cherry-picked curiosities. They are the mainstream consensus of serious Western scholarship, hiding in plain sight.

This book does not plead. It does not qualify. It presents the historical record - on the Conquest of Mecca, on marriage in the ancient world, on women's rights in seventh-century Arabia, on how Islam actually spread - and lets the evidence speak with the authority it has always possessed and rarely been given the space to exercise.

If you have heard the accusations, this is the answer they were never expecting.