American Vision has published a nice excerpt from John Quincy Adams’ “Unsigned essays
dealing with the Russo-Turkish War, and on Greece”, written while Adams was in retirement, before his election to Congress in 1830, originally published in The American Annual Register. He wrote an eloquent description of Christianity, and a biting but equally prescient description of Islam.
In the seventh century of the Christian era a wandering Arab, of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.
Adopting, from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God, he connected indissolubly with it the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle.
Adopting, from the new revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion.
He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion against all the rest of mankind.
The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust; to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature….While the merciless and dissolute are encouraged to furnish motives to human action, there never can be peace on earth and good will toward men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.