The moderators at the Middle East Strategy at Harvard blog kindly allowed me to post some comments on Raymond Ibrahim’s article.  Since they have now closed the thread, I’ll finish my thoughts here.  Ibrahim has been arguing that the Qur’an contains very clear doctrines on warfare.  I disagree; this is where the Qur’an is most confusing, which is why later scholars had to come up with the doctrine of abrogation to explain away the contradictions.  Ibrahim retorted by citing verse 9:29, which is traditionally taken to be a justification for fighting Jews and Christians until they submit and pay a tax. I responded to Ibrahim by saying that verse 9:29 does not support his position well since it is notoriously ambiguous.  He shot back that “(t)here is nothing ambiguous about 9:29—at least not to native Arabic speakers.”   For those of you that don’t know Arabic and might be inclined to