Presuming anyone is interested in wading through matoko’s comments this far down the thread…
Robert Spencer’s scholarship cannot reasonably be questioned since a large portion of the seminal texts of Islam, from whatever fiqh, have been put on the internet, often with opposing Arabic text. This is of course useless for a person like myself, but with the titles one may then cross-reference using Amazon.com, where everyone from matoko-like posters afflicted with morbid personality disorders and ordinary naive bourgeois amateurs like myself can, with reasonable confidence, gather the public perspective on the book, apprehend into the historiographical debate, and then proceed to read. It really is not so occult as so many demogogues would have you believe. To become a scholar is one matter, but to become a competent amateur is quite another.
That said, the plain fact of the matter is that scholastic comprehension of Islam is not necessary for an outsider to assess whether Islam, in any of its salient forms, advocates religious war as a duty, or whether it does not. Plainly, it does; the fact, everywhere the case, that every individual Muslim is not presently sharpening a sword or cleaning his AK-47 is neither here nor there, just as a priest rodgering a little boy implies no particular criticism of the Sermon on the Mount. Spencer mostly confines himself to written documents – Quran, hadith, Sunna, Hanbali, Mutazalite, New Testament, Old Testamenet, what have you.
Of course, a tradition like Sufism, to which matoko belongs, he says, is less easily known because of its own mystical traditions – but Sunnite (Orthodox) Islam is not so gnostic, since it is written down.
Honestly, the Islamic holy books are not so long or expensive that most people are incapable of reading them or cannot afford them. The only necessary thing is to come to them in a naive spirit: you do not know what they say until you read them. You do not know where the people are from, what they do, who they are. With that in mind, you simply read. And that is the beginning of scholarship. From my own personal readings, I have found nothing that Spencer’s work contradicts, and nothing in the texts I have and can find online that contradicts Spencer.
Nota bene: matoko’s comment “Islam preserved Aristotle’s treatises through the work of Ibn Rushd [Averroes]” is accurate but misleading. One great gaping hole in Western education is the total ignorance of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, and indeed of the course of Greek history. As the Angel Maroni said to Muhammad, “Read!” Oh wait…
