Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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66 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The truth shall set you free, May 22, 2008
Ali Sina is uniquely qualified to write a book on Mohammad. He is an Iranian ex-Muslim, who grew up in orthodox surroundings, and underwent the same brain washing that every Muslim does. In his youth, he read the Islamic literature extensively and was filled with revulsion at the violence inherent in the Koran, the immorality of the Hadiths and the general venom which these books spew towards non-believers. He apostasized, and left his country for good, settling down in Canada.
Now he runs a website called faithfreedom.org bringing the truth about Islam to the entire world. There is also a testimonies section in his website, where ex-Muslims share their experiences of Islam.
With this book Ali Sina joins the league of Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer in bringing the truth about Islam to a wider audience. Islam has survived on misinformation and repression. Throughout its 14 centuries of violent history, criticising Islam was a risk you could undertake only at the cost of your life. Now internet has enabled us to remain anonymous critcs of this ghastly cult. The veil has been lifted, now its only a matter of time before the cult of lies collapses like a pack of card. This scourge has troubled the world 20 times as long as communism and claimed 50 times as many lives, along with destroying advanced civilizations like Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia, besides wiping out Buddhists from India and killing and subjugating millions of Hindus. Islam's decimation will come not a moment too soon, whenever it comes. And yes, I have a gut feeling that it will be within the next few decades.
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49 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book could save millions of lives, June 19, 2008
I had anxiously awaited this book for some time, being a huge fan of Ali Sina from his website, Faithfreedom.org, as well as from his contributions to Islam-watch.org. His writings are always well-researched, insightful, illuminating, and fascinating. He combines a deep understanding of the human soul and mind with a deep understanding of Islam, the Muslim mind, and the cultural factors involved in the Muslim world. He is never apologetic, and is often accused of being a liar simply for telling the ignorant what they really need to know. This book is quite an ambitious project, but a necessary one, and Ali Sina is the perfect person to undertake it, as he is ever-able to combine his deep-rooted regard for the truth about Islam, which is almost invariably quite ugly, with an unabashed compassion for Muslims, since he believes that we must never sink to their level, but rather, always abide by the Golden Rule, love our neighbors, and hope that one day they will come to understand that what they believe is evil through and through, that Islam is not a religion, but rather a nihilistic Nazi death-cult and a totalitarian, colonialist political movement. I like to agree with him and believe that Muslims are good people, who are victims of inhumane circumstance, and who simply need deprogramming and a solid dose of the truth.
This book should be required reading in schools. Sina goes beyond Robert Spencer's "The Truth About Muhammad," which is also fantastic book and should also be required reading, but Sina seeks to answer the question "so what was wrong with Muhammad?" As it turns out, lots. He takes into account his childhood, which was unstable, and during which he alternately experienced undue adulation and a complete lack of love, resulting in one of the most extreme cases of malignant narcissism the world has ever seen. Combine these experiences with a medieval Bedouin culture which is actually quite similar to Arab culture today, in that it is a "shame" culture, like that of the Nazis and the Shintos, which substitutes honor for morality. It is a culture in which one does not take pride in hard work, one does not admit one's faults, accept blame, or ever, under any circumstancs, acknowledge, let alone confront, societal, familial, and personal problems. The truth, like hard work and empathy, was never highly valued in the Arab world.
It is important to understand Muhammad because 1.2 billion people follow his narcissistic, immoral/amoral example, to this day behaving and thinking in a clannish manner, never even conveiving of the Golden Rule, the ultimate moral compass, the basis of morality. Instead, they are forced to be OCD about the number of times they wipe their butts, bring "religion" into the bedroom, and have every behavior and aspect of life dictated to them, including which foot to put one's weight on while on the toilet, the proper showering procedure, and of course, every aspect of one's sex life. Muhammad was not only OCD. He was also a necrophiliac who reveled in zombifying people, if only by force. Cult leaders do this, and the more difficult the travails of one's "faith," the more inclined they are to believe it. After all, they've put forth too much effort for it to possibly be untrue, right? A million crazy rules serve as a substitute for morality in Islam because Muhammad was a power-hungry opportunist. There is no "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not lie" in Islam. There is halal (permissible) and haram (forbidden). So while the Koran sanctions the rape of one's daughers and sisters (Q 2.071), lying to, stealing from, and killing unbelievers, infidel "sons of apes and pigs," one may never mortage a house, take out student loans, or enjoy a glass of wine. Islam is submission, and Muhammad was a power-hungry psychopath who needed for people to either submit to his will or die. While Muhammad was an unfathomably evil mad man, Sina manages to always portray him as human. To conceive of Muhammad as a monster is not only too easy, but also dangerous, as to do so would be denying that circumstances, people, and culture could create such a person. Sina believes that everyone is born pure and innocent. What one becomes after that is first a matter of chance, and then choice.
Whereas I had always assumed that Muhammad was simply schizophrenic, what with the bells and whistles, the flashing lights, and then the all-out audio-visual hallucinations, Sina's thesis is that Muhammad actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and agromegaly, which he does quite a good job at proving through historical reconstructions and psychological profiling. A schizophrenic would be unlikely to rise to power in the way that Muhammad did. This explains the visions, the fact that he often believed something had happened when in fact it had not, that he was always paranoid and extremely insecure (although malignant narcissism also explains those), which caused him to forbid anyone from marrying his wives after his death (including his 18-year-old brain-damaged widow Aisha), from ever looking directly at them, or from ever uttering an unkind word about him. We see the ramifications of this today. If someone insults "the leader" (arms straight out, zombie eyes), watch how angry Muslims become. Watch how they treat their women: they force them to wear veils which serve to deprive them of 100% of their diginity, identity, their femininity, and their sexual power; they murder their female relatives for speaking with an umarried male in public, etc., etc. This is partly because his agromegaly caused a greatly increased sex drive combined with impotence which even modern medicine is often unable to overcome. This fact, combined with his loveless upbring and abandonment by his mother, led to an extreme misogyny. Misogyny is obviously nothing more than narcissistic projection, since women are capable of doing everything that men are, plus childbearing, and most importantly here, controlling men with our sexuality. What two attributes do misygynists ascribe to women, Muhammad himself quite explicitly? Stupidity and weakness. Why? Because misogynists, even when they are intelligent enough to understand that they are being controlled, still allow themselves to fall under the spell of female sexuality, thereby making them necessarily weak, stupid, and subconsciously ashamed of that, particularly in a shame culture. So normal, natural sexual desire becomes unnatural, evil hatred. Pretty sick.
The saddest part of the story of Muhammad as it has unfolded throughout history is what it does to families. By declaring that believers must love him more than their own families, generation after generation of Muslims mistreat their children, especially their daughters, who end up raising their own children without love. Children in the Muslim world undergo unspeakable horrors, not the least of which is growing up completely unloved, but also being taught to hate, female genital mutilation, general degradation, being told that they are evil, enduring sanctioned sex abuse at home, in school, and in mosques, sometimes even being turned into suicide bombers before they are old enough to understand what they are doing, and in the case of girls, being pimped away by their family at an always inappropriately young age, usually to someone much older or a cousin, always for money. Muslims have no choice but to learn to hate themselves, women, infidels, and pretty much everyone. The only people whom it is even acceptable to accept are Muslim men, and they are the oppressors, and are often child molesters, wife beaters, polygamists, pedophiles, and rapists, all of which are perfectly permissible in the Muslim world, thanks to the example set by their "prophet." Horrible, loveless childhoods, in addition to polygamy, cause the tragic, dangerous, and volatile cycle of narcissism to repeat itself over and over. Wafa Sultan, the renowned Syrian-American psychologist, once said that nobody could possibly read the Koran, believe a word of it, and maintain any semblance of mental health whatsoever. She is right. For the Koran is Islam, and Islam is Muhammad: malignantly narcissistic, incapable of love, incapable of even a basic understanding of humanity let alone empathy, completely immoral/amoral, regressive even by medieval Bedouin Arab standards, corrupt, intolerant, hateful, oppressive towards women and children, absolutely soulless, evil incarnate, and ultimately wholly political, but never divine. If this book were required reading, who knows how many millions of lives could be saved? Thank you Ali.
Note to the buyer: please buy a NEW copy, if possible. Ali Sina is incredibly giving of his time and energy on Faithfreedom.org, and he does this because he wants to save lives. He finally undertook a project which will pay him. Let him get his due. Thank you. Also, these bad reviews are obviously from people who have not read the book. Ali Sina is frequently subjected to this sort of abuse for telling the truth about an evil cult. He also always manages to rise above it.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic Analysis, June 21, 2008
Prophetic Analysis from staringattheview.blogspot.com
Imagine that three individuals were each commissioned to prepare the psychological profile of a self-appointed religious prophet who founded a tightly-knit community in Arizona in the mid-1800's.
The prophet, soon after the death of his wife of 25 years, began having dreams about the six-year-old daughter of his best friend and persuaded the friend that God had told him to marry her. He later used the same God-told-me-so line to convince his adopted son to divorce his attractive wife so he could marry her as well. The community was polygamous, but the prophet was the only man who could have as many women as he wanted.
The community had few financial resources, so the prophet developed the idea of robbing stagecoaches and trains that passed through the area. Slavery was legal within the community, and the people who were not killed on these raids were used and sold as slaves. Male members of the community had full sexual access to the female slaves.
The prophet's ambitions were much larger than the few hundred converts he garnered his first few years. He fully expected all the people of the area to accept his prophethood and join the community. When some refused, he turned viciously against them. Eight hundred men were killed in one day, and the rest were driven to outlying regions. When he realized that his people did not have the agricultural and industrial resources to provide for the needs of the community, he came up with a new strategy. He again attacked the people he had recently driven away, this time allowing them to live in exchange for giving him fifty percent of their produce. Shortly before his death, he stated a new ruling that they were to be driven completely from Arizona and never allowed to return.
As often happens with religious and political leaders who see themselves as chosen vessels, the prophet became more intolerant to criticism as he grew older and more powerful. Stories of the murder and assassination of his critics became increasingly common. One of his disciples bragged that he had come across a one-eyed sheep rancher who said he would never join the prophet's group. The disciple waited until the rancher fell asleep, and then thrust a sharpened stick into the rancher's good eye so hard it came out the back of his neck. The disciple next captured an associate of the rancher, tied his thumbs together, and led him to the prophet. The prophet laughed so hard at the sight, according to the disciple, that, "You could see his back teeth". The prophet blessed the disciple when he heard how he had killed the one-eyed rancher.
About the same time a 100-year old poet wrote lines critical of the prophet and his followers. In reference to the many regulations the prophet had established for the community, the poet noted, "You follow someone who divides everything into `This is allowed' and `That is forbidden'." As soon as the prophet heard this, he sent someone to assassinate the old poet.
A second poet, the mother of five children, was courageous enough to criticize the murder of the old man. She wrote, "I despise you people....you who obey a stranger and expect good things from him after he killed all your leaders." The prophet, realizing he was the "stranger" she was writing about, sent one of his followers to kill her. She was murdered in her bed that night with her nursing child lying by her side. Her murderer, perhaps touched with remorse by the heinousness of his crime, asked the prophet if anything bad would happen to him. The prophet replied that her death was of no more significance than two goats butting their heads together in the back yard.
Some time after the prophet's death, it was discovered that the Arizona desert underneath his followers' feet contained the world's largest diamond resources. Community members became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and began to use their new-found riches to extend the prophet's vision that the entire world come under the influence of his teachings and principles.
Now back to the first sentence, where "three individuals" are each commissioned to write a profile of the prophet. The first is a university professor who is an expert in the teachings of the prophet even though he has not joined the prophet's community. He was recently given 25 million dollars by that community to establish a university department where the teachings of the prophet are examined. He is careful to only teach a version of community history appoved by his sponsors. His students rarely learn incidents such as the deaths of the poets and the role of the community in the slave trade as noted above. They know nothing about the world-wide political aspirations of the group.
The second individual is a fully-committed member of the community. She has been taught since her birth that the life of the prophet is the perfect model for all humankind to follow. She doesn't even know many of the details of that life, such as his treatment of the exiles who did not accept his message. She only knows what she was taught, one side of the story, and is not interested in learning more.
The third person is an ex-member of the community. He was born and raised within it, similar to individual number two, but at a certain stage began to question the things he had always been ordered to simply believe. His questioning led to doubt, and the doubt resulted in his leaving the community. He now sees himself as free, but his former associates, including individual number two above, view him as a traitor. Even the university professor, individual number one, despises him because he is not sufficiently "academically trained", according to the professor, to critically examine the community of which he was once a part.
Which of these three individuals might give the most objective profile of the prophet's life? If your answer is individual number three, I recommend this book by Ali Sina.
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