Defunct!

Why have many of Jalal Abualrub's articles disappeared?

Starting in September 2005 and up to March 2009 we had this note at the top of the index page listing all our rebuttal articles to Jalal Abualrub's publications.

[Note: All our responses to Jalal Abualrub were/are linked to Abualrub's main website, ____________________. On 13 September 2005, two days after we published our material on Islam and terrorism (see below), responding to his challenge and putting our own challenge before Abualrub, his original site disappeared. Currently, some of his articles listed here are still available at www.islamlife.com.]

This move caused "the disappearance" of quite a few articles Abualrub had written to 'expose the lies of Answering Islam'.

Later on, in November 2008, Abualrub again "reorganized" his website and it is now www.islamlife.com/religion2/ instead of www.islamlife.com, causing even more of his articles to disappear and creating lots of additional dead links in our rebuttals to him.

On 18 March 2009, it was brought to our attention that readers following our links pointing to Abualrub's original website are now served pages that are advertizing perverted sexuality and p()rn0graphy. In order not to provide direct links to such a website, we have now replaced all these links with links to this present page informing readers that the source pages from which we quoted have become defunct.

In those cases where I was able to find that the earlier articles were transferred to his new site, we are linking to the new location, but it is quite interesting to see how many of the arguments that he made against our publications have disappeared for good after we have published our refutations.

Why did Abualrub remove all these rebuttals against "the lies of Answering Islam"? At least two options present themselves:

(a) Abualrub became too proud of himself due to the excellence of his articles resulting in the total destruction of our arguments. Therefore, in order to counteract his own pride and to remain the humble man he wants to be, he removed the strongest ones from his many excellent articles.

(b) After being exposed for his bad arguments because of our rebuttals to his polemics, he was so embarrassed of himself and his arguments, that he wanted to silently let them disappear. Giving up his old domain name, or changing the root directory of his current domain seemed to be an elegant way of disconnecting his articles from our discussion of his arguments, thereby destroying all our crosslinks and source links of quotations from his publications.

The reader who seeks to evaluate the strength or weakness of our respective arguments is can ponder this matter for himself and come to his own conclusions.

Why did I write this page? There are two reasons: First, as the chief editor I always insist that our authors meticulously document every claim. It is our principle at Answering Islam to always document quotations with proper bibliographical references or links to the pages on the world wide web from which they were taken. I am deeply convinced that everything needs to be properly documented and carefully argued. The reader has a right to know, why we have now plenty of "undocumented" quotations in our rebuttals to Jalal Abualrub. They were properly documented at the time of publication, but Abualrub's publications are not dependable and may disappear at any time.

Second, I am annoyed. I am sick of the shiftiness of certain Muslim polemicists – Shabir Ally is another specialist in using this particular methodology (*) – and of having to regularly invest hours and hours for correcting dead links to our debate opponents.

Jochen Katz


Rebuttals to Jalal Abualrub
Answering Islam Home Page