Juan Cole's "Glowing" Book Review

Glowing

University of Michigan comedian Juan Cole runs a blog with the curious title, “Informed Comment“, in which he opines on various topics from a far left point of view. Polymath he may be, but recently, he came out with an opus of a book entitled, “Mohammad: Prophet of Peace amid a a clash of empires”. I haven’t read it, but just the title suggests to me it is trash. One person who has read it and disagrees is  Benjamin Tua, a former State Department official, who wrote a review of Cole’s book. That has led Captain Cole to post something on IC (Informed Comment) describing the review as “glowing”. By the way, this is not the first time Cole has heralded a positive review of his book. Back in June, he was bragging that some guy named David A Johnson, who attends something called the Seattle Atheist Church on Sundays (!) had written a “glowing’ review. That one is even more bizarre than Tua’s.

Here is Cole’s proud posting on Tua’s review.

And here is Mr Tua writing in American Diplomacy.

I don’t know anything about Mr Tua, and he may have been a fine diplomat for all I know. Having worked a lot with the State Department during my own government career, I was not a fan of theirs  but no matter. Again, without having read Cole’s “opus” on Mohammad, I would like to make a few comments about Tua’s review.

First, I bring attention to the parts that Cole himself highlights:

“Tua writes, that it

‘is perfect for the reader who knows little about Mohammad’s life and origins as a member of a tribe that settled feuds in Mecca, about Islam and its pragmatic, peace-oriented tenets, or about the historical and geo-political context of Islam’s emergence.”

‘For a book that, as the author tells the reader, “has been gestating for decades,” it is remarkably short — 208 pages of text. But it includes . . . 61 excerpts from some 28 of the 114 surahs (chapters) of the Qur’an (The Recitation). The excerpts buttress Cole’s argument that the Qur’an and early Islam were strongly imbued with values of compromise and peacemaking.’