Raymond Ibrahim e-mails in response to Derb:

Whether she acknowledges that Westerners have had negative views of Mohammad prior to the Crusades — with a hefty four pages — in her book is hardly the point. The point is she didn’t acknowledge this fact in her Financial Times article I was writing about on NRO — though she could’ve easily by changing her opening sentence from “Ever since the Crusades people in the west have seen Mohammad as a sinister figure” to “Especially during the Crusades.” Saying “Ever since” is either sloppiness of thought or disingenuous. Writers should be precise in both articles and books, since it is unreasonable to expect the average reader of a newspaper to be thoroughly acquainted with all the writings of any author. As for her argument “that the main point about Christian thoughts on Islam pre-Crusades was dumb ignorance,” Theophanes the chronicler, writing about Islam almost 400 years before the First Crusade was launched, proves otherwise. And even though his thoughts were less than flattering, they at least demonstrate knowledge of the teachings of the Koran not dumb ignorance, which should be reserved for other writings on Islam.