"The Muslims I have spoken to have made cogent explanations of jihad theology to me, and luminaries such as Al Azhar's Mahmoud Shaltout seem to have presented plausible treatments and understandings of the matter."
-- from a Jihad Watch reader

One would like set out here those "cogent explanations" by those "Muslims" you "have spoken to," including whatever "luminaries such as Al Azha's Mahmoud Shaltout" offer by way of "plausible" treatments and understandings of the matter.

And then one could compare those "cogent explanations" and "plausible treatments" with what Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Henri Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall, Samuel Zwemer, and other Western scholars, studying and writing during the Golden Age of Western Scholarship on Islam, before the Great Inhibition set in. These scholars of Islam, who devoted their entire lives to the subject, never made the mistake of relying merely on personal interchanges with Muslim interlocutors, for they understood, as all who have had experience in Muslim countries or with Muslims outside those countries comes to understand, Muslim apologists are extraordinarily adept at turning on the charm to Westerners wanting to "find out" all about Islam, and well versed in every kind of taqiyya and tu-quoque, and in presenting demisemihemiquavering fractions of fractions of truths, reflected through prisms that bend or refract crazily (see Snell's Law) the occasional beam of truth, and that in the end leave that Western inquirer quite convinced that he has been wrong, that Muslim apologists have a point, and the Western skeptics and "detractors" are far too severe.

And if those hundreds of Western scholars, writing before the days of Arab money (the same money that supports John Esposito in his fiefdom), writing in the days before everyone was so deeply concerned not to offend, eager to believe such bromides (see George Bush) as "people are the same the whole world over" or "all religions are the same" or "everyone believes the same thing" or (your bromide here), are insufficient to undermine credulity, then perhaps the testimony of the swelling ranks of "defectors" from the Army of Islam, those highly articulate and obviously intelligent people who, having been born into, and grown up within, societies and families suffused with Islam, managed in the West to continue what they might have begun to do even in Muslim societies, that is to compare and contrast and to think clearly, and then, in the freedom of the West, came to openly reject Islam -- such people as Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan -- and are quite capable of setting the naive straight about the full meaning of this Total Belief-System.

And finally, there are even those Muslims so "moderate" and so true in their "moderation" that we may describe them as having rejected altogether large portions of Islam, and who often describe themselves as "cultural Muslims" but in reality, we can call them "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims, and among their ranks is such a person as the Egyptian-born, naturalized citizen of Italy Magdi Allam, who has recently denounced the viciousness coming out of Al Azhar, the very same Al Azhar where, apparently, the poster above discovered "luminaries such as Al Azhar's Mahmoud Shaltout."

I can well imagine what the unfoolable Magdi Allam would have to say about the apparent impressiveness, to the poster above whose travels, and conversations with many "plausible" and "cogent" Muslims, have led him to take a dim view of the predominant view at Jihadwatch, of Al Azhar. For the criticism of Jihadwatch, based on these "plausible" and "cogent" apologists, requires one not only to dismiss Jihad Watch, but also to dismiss those with views identical to those expressed by the principals of Jihad Watch: it means to deny the truth of what Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan and Ibn Warraq and a hundred others have to offer as their own testimony and analysis, the product not of talking to this or that "plausible" Muslim described gushingly as a "luminary" but as the product of living deep inside Muslim societies. And the same criticism of Jihad Watch implies, as well, a criticism of those great Western scholars of Islam -- of Arthur Jeffrey, of Henri Lammens, of Snouck Hurgronje, of Joseph Schacht.

And, of course, it also implies a willingness to ignore the reality we see all about us, by those who take the doctrines inculcated by Islam to heart. In other words, we end up where we began, long ago, with the first paragraph of "Islam For Infidels" and the old joke about the man whose wife discovers him in flagrante delicto and who defends himself indignantly: "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"