After Denise Spellberg, associate professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, assessed the manuscript as “a very ugly, stupid, piece of work” which turned sacred history into soft-core pornography and warned that publication could provoke violence, Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, consulted with security experts and then negotiated an agreement with Jones to terminate their $100,000 two-book contract.
This study dismantles the al-zuṭṭ hadith polemic through close reading, lexicography, and narrative control. By restoring context to yarkabūn, examining transmission variants, and comparing Semitic parallels, it shows how innuendo translation exploits polysemy, suppresses closure, and manufactures scandal without historical warrant within disciplined philology and sober methodological limits alone here
Early Christianity lacked a single, unified theology. This article shows how later “orthodoxy” emerged through historical consolidation rather than original consensus.
The death of Muhammad ﷺ examined through Qur’anic language, hadith context, and history, exposing how poison claims rely on misreading sources.