Unmasking Juan Cole Was Not Easy

By Khaled Salih

Shedding Light on Academic Disguise and the Sanitisation of islām’s Origins

In the year 632, Islam was confined to Arabic-speaking tribesmen living in Arabia and the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. Most of the population of Syria spoke Greek or Aramaic; most of those in Iraq, Persian or Aramaic; in Egypt they spoke Greek or Coptic; in Iran they spoke Pahlavi; in North Africa they spoke Latin, Greek or Berber. None of them were Muslims. In Egypt and North Africa, lands we now think of as clearly Islamic, there were no Muslims and effectively no Arabic speakers, and the same was true of Iran and Afghanistan. The scale and the speed of the transformation are astonishing; within a century of the Prophet’s death, all these lands, along with Spain, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and southern Pakistan (Sind), were ruled by an Arabic-speaking Muslim elite, and in all of them the local population was beginning to convert to the new religion.

—Hughe Kennedy, 2007

Juan Cole’s Rethinking the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity (2025) arrives dressed in the raiment of methodological virtue. It is a work that bristles with citations, cross-disciplinary gestures, and a professorial air of having finally reconciled islām’s origins with empirical reason. In form it appears the very model of what David Deutsch (2011) calls a good explanation: rich in mechanism, resistant to casual variation, apparently bounded by evidence. Yet under the polish, one encounters a deeper disquiet: the sense that Cole’s explanatory armour conceals, rather than reveals, the heart of the matter. His scholarship, for all its rigour, performs a sleight of hand: by abstracting peace from the very text that institutionalised conflict, he constructs an elegant simulation of moral coherence. It is the achievement of a craftsman who builds a cathedral of glass and then insists that it is marble.

Cole begins from premises that flatter the empiricist conscience. He subordinates later ‘abbasid chronicles to the qur’ān itself, wary of anachronism and polemic. He invokes the carbon-dated ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest and the Safaitic inscriptions as the archaeologist’s rejoinder to speculation (Cole 2025). He proposes what he calls a ‘hermeneutics of trust’: a decision to read islām’s founding text not through suspicion but through sympathy. In principle, none of this is objectionable; scholarship must begin somewhere. But in practice the ‘trust’ functions less as a heuristic than as an ideological sedative. It ensures that the qur’ān will emerge from his examination not as an artefact of its violent century but as the innocent victim of our misunderstandings.

This is the point where method becomes mask. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009) describes the left hemisphere’s appetite for coherence: the tendency to build sealed systems that privilege tidy abstraction over the unruly texture of experience. Cole’s reading of islām is a case study in that pathology. His fascination with the lexical roots ṣ-l-ḥ (reconciliation) and s-l-m (peace) exhibits what McGilchrist calls the “spotlight gaze”: a narrowing of attention that blinds by illumination. By fixing upon these conciliatory words, he amputates the textual body that surrounds them: the verses commanding battle until “religion is allāh’s alone” (Q 9:5; 9:29), the legal architecture of jizyah and jihād, the jurisprudence of abrogation that rendered peace provisional. He isolates the gentle syllables of ṣulḥ as if they were the whole melody, leaving the martial percussion outside the room.

This selective blindness allows Cole to perform what might be called the inversion of whitewashing. Where early muslim historians renamed conquest (fatḥ) as “opening” (infitāḥ), Cole re-enacts the gesture at the level of historiography. The expansion of the first caliphates becomes “peacemaking,” the subjugation of peoples becomes “order,” and the qur’ān’s commands to fight (with the root q-t-l, to kill) are domesticated as metaphor. It is an admirable trick of semantics: rename the sword, and its edge disappears. But the historian’s duty is not to tranquillise language; it is to follow it to the battlefield. The same text that blesses reconciliation also legislates war. To elevate one voice and silence the other is not interpretation: it is surgery.

The moral irony is exquisite. For fourteen centuries, muslim exegetes themselves wrestled with the contradiction between peace and violence. Their solution was brutally honest: they admitted that later, militant revelations abrogated the earlier pacific ones. Cole, in rejecting naskh as a “misreading” (Cole 2025), reverts to a modern piety more fragile than the medieval one. He cannot abide a faith that contradicts itself; hence he builds a new Islam, purified of history and disinfected of conquest. His explanation, in Deutsch’s terms, becomes easy to vary: change the evidence, and the thesis remains untouched. What is presented as historical discovery is in fact moral wish-fulfillment: the rationalist’s longing for a benign revelation.

Against the evidence of centuries, Cole proposes that the wars, enslavements, and empires that followed the founder of the religion were all tragic misunderstandings of an originally pacifist scripture. This is the theologian’s dream of innocence reborn as academic hypothesis. It requires the same mental operation that McGilchrist names confabulation: the invention of a plausible story to protect a self-image from dissonance. A millennium of conquest thus becomes a clerical miscommunication, and the qur’ān’s harder edges are filed down to fit a twenty-first-century syllabus on interfaith empathy.

Such intellectual grace has its precedent. Every civilisation invents euphemisms for its violence; Cole’s innovation is to baptise the euphemism in peer review. His islām of peace is a scholarly infitāḥ, an opening through which modern liberal sensibilities may safely admire the founder without confronting the cost of empire. It is also, ironically, a mirror image of the Western guilt it seeks to cure: both imagine that history’s blood can be rinsed away with enough linguistic care. Yet as Raymond Ibrahim (2018) reminds us, the record of jihād is not a parable but a ledger. From the Maghreb to Sindh, the advances by muslims were not a misunderstanding but a successful use of islām a method, as a tool, for conquest, empire building and dominance. The burden of proof lies not with those who remember the armies, but with those who insist they never marched.

Cole’s achievement, then, is not the exposure of truth but the perfection of evasion. He transforms the messy, tragic history of a faith into a frictionless narrative of moral evolution. His qur’ān is not a text situated in conflict but a manifesto of reconciliation that has merely been “misapplied” for fourteen hundred years. This is the scholarly equivalent of claiming that the gulag misapplied Marx or that the Inquisition misread Christ. The defense is as old as ideology itself: blame posterity, sanctify origins, and call the circle virtue.

The larger danger lies not in Cole’s conclusion but in its reception. Our universities, exhausted by moral complexity, welcome his version of islām of perpetual peace as a therapeutic object: a faith without guilt, a history without conquest, a past rendered fit for a UNESCO brochure. It satisfies the left-hemispheric craving for a world without contradiction, where words like peace, justice, and order can be endlessly repeated until they anaesthetize our thoughts. McGilchrist’s warning rings prophetic here: the Emissary, having usurped the Master, believes himself the whole of reason. So too does Cole’s analytic reason, convinced that by rearranging language it has redeemed history.

The irony is final and cruel. In his zeal to rescue islām from the charge of violence, Cole reenacts the very dynamic he claims to oppose: the conquest of reality by abstraction, the substitution of a “self-consistent map” for the blood-stained territory (McGilchrist 2009). His is a peace achieved by erasure, a moral triumph purchased with historical amnesia. To read Rethinking the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity is to witness not the unveiling of truth but the consummation of a disguise: one so sophisticated that it flatters the reader into complicity. The book does not merely defend subject ; it redeems the modern conscience from the inconvenience of knowing too much.

In the end, unmasking Cole is difficult precisely because he never lies outright. He does something more refined: he tells the truth selectively, and then surrounds it with an architecture of benevolent reason. The result is what might be called theology by subtraction. Every verse that disturbs the peace is explained away; every century of conquest is placed in quotation marks. What remains is a system airbrushed into modernity, delivered with the impeccable manners of an academic apology. It is, to borrow from McGilchrist once more, “a world made safe for certainty, but not for truth” (2009).

Cole owes Howard Bloom a good explanation, which must exclude misunderstandings, misapplication and distortion of the core messages that can lead to such an extensive and enduring empire:

Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler tried to take over the world. All of them failed. Yet an illiterate desert prophet and his followers hammered together an empire eleven times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States. The biggest empire in history. How did Muhammad pull it off?

—Howard Bloom, 2016.

References

Bloom, Howard. 2016. The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Cole, Juan. 2025. Rethinking the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Deutsch, David. 2011. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. London: Allen Lane.

Ibrahim, Raymond. 2018. Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West. Boston: Da Capo Press.

McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hughe Kennedy, 2007, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In. Boston, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, page 3.