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Mohammeds Koran Why Muslims Kill For Islam Peter Mcloughlin PDF Download

The document discusses the book 'Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam' by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson, which argues that Islam is inherently a religion of violence rather than peace. It critiques the portrayal of Islam by politicians and media, asserting that the truth about the religion's violent history has been obscured. The authors aim to present a chronological interpretation of the Koran to clarify their claims about the motivations behind Muslim violence.

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100% found this document useful (1 vote)
100 views79 pages

Mohammeds Koran Why Muslims Kill For Islam Peter Mcloughlin PDF Download

The document discusses the book 'Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam' by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson, which argues that Islam is inherently a religion of violence rather than peace. It critiques the portrayal of Islam by politicians and media, asserting that the truth about the religion's violent history has been obscured. The authors aim to present a chronological interpretation of the Koran to clarify their claims about the motivations behind Muslim violence.

Uploaded by

faxnaboussu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Table of Contents

About the Authors


Preface
Introduction
The Deliberate Deception of the Public
Decoding The Koran
Devout Muslims Kill, Our Leaders Lie
Without Jihad There Would Be No Islam
Journalists: Allies Of The Grand Lie
Hiding The Truth Causes Terrorism
The Crime Of Quoting Winston Churchill
The Grand Lie Is Holocaust Denial
Appeasing Violent Supremacism
Muslim Pride In Their Doctrine Of War
Islam: The Most Totalitarian System
1400 Years Of Jihad Against Non-Muslims
Islam = Islamism = Violent Islamism
“But Not All Muslims Are Violent”
Deception Is Part Of Islamic Morality
Fundamental Importance Of Abrogation
We Kuffar Have Lost Our Minds
Islamʼs Clear Offer: Submit Or Die
Looking Over The Wall Of Fake News
Even Military Analysts Have Been Useless
Islamʼs Relentless Hatred Of Unbelievers
Chronological Koran
Brief Guide to the Text
The Later Koran – Mohammedʼs Success
The Early Koran – Mohammedʼs Failure
Recommended Books
Recommended Books (Date Order)
Appendix 1: Expert Chronologies
Appendix 2: Encrypted Koran Index
Appendix 3: Decrypted Koran Index
Mohammed’s Koran

Why Muslims Kill for Islam

Peter McLoughlin
and
Tommy Robinson
Copyright © 2017 Peter McLoughlin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or


reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission. The Pickthall Koran presented here is in the
public domain, but this presentation remains copyright.

First Edition 2017

cover art courtesy of:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Emirate#/media/File:Fla
http://cliparts.co/clipart/3808677

The black flag is known as the Raya (“the banner of the


eagle”).
The writing on the flag is the Shahada:
“there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Standard
The flag of Saudi Arabia is similar to this, but with a green
background.
Anyone who believes that such flags are fake should read
this http://www.khilafah.com/qaa-islamic-flags-and-
banners/.

Published by Peter McLoughlin


It is not for any prophet to have captives [slaves]
until he hath made slaughter in the land. — Koran 8:67

“Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the


religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war
that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the
war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it.
It is the war of Muslims against infidels”. — Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi, Leader of the Islamic State, Newsweek, May 2015

“Pope says Koran is a book of peace and Islam is a


peaceful religion” — Daily Mail, August 2016

“ISIS jihadis blast Pope Francis and claim their war


is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran” — Daily Express,
August 2016

“Waging jihad – spreading the rule of Allah by the


sword – is an obligation found in the Quran, the word of
our Lord.” — “Why We Hate You”, Dabiq (official
statement of the Islamic State) Issue 15, August 2016

“On the IRA we told the truth, on the Islamic


problem, we lie.” George Walden, UK Government
Minister for Higher Education (1985–1987)
About the Authors
Tommy Robinson has been campaigning against
Islamic extremism since 2004. In 2009 a small protest group
he set up in his home town in England became a national
protest group: the English Defence League. After being
hounded by the State for organizing this protest group,
Tommy Robinson was imprisoned in 2013. In 2015 his
best-selling autobiography Tommy Robinson: Enemy of the
State was published by The Press News Ltd (ISBN
0957096496). Despite the police being given hundreds of
documented death threats made against Tommy Robinson
(and his entire family) police have not even prosecuted a
single individual. Under laws which oblige the British police
to warn potential victims of credible plots to kill them,
police have been compelled to inform Tommy Robinson of
six known plots to kill him. No-one has been prosecuted for
any of these plots. In addition, Muslim terrorist groups such
as Al Shabab have also threatened to kill Mr. Robinson. On
a regular basis the British police continue to hound Mr.
Robinson and even his small children.

Peter McLoughlin is a writer who lives in England.


Brought up in a Communist household, he considered
himself a Leftist Libertarian until mugged by reality in 2009.
Whilst researching evidence that schoolgirls were
systematically entrapped into prostitution by Muslim gangs
in England, McLoughlin uncovered that the State had
known of this grooming phenomenon for decades, but the
agencies and the news media had concealed their
knowledge of the phenomenon. After 20 years of cover-up
the grooming scandal was broken open by The Times in
2011, following two years of protests across England by the
English Defence League. In 2014 McLoughlin published the
first book on the nation-wide cover-up, months before
“Rotherham” became a byword for taxpayer-funded
agencies turning a blind-eye to the rape of schoolgirls on an
industrial scale. In 2016 an updated edition of his book Easy
Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal was
published by New English Review Press (ISBN
1943003068).
Preface
Throughout this text phrases and paragraphs are
emphasised using bold text. None of this emphasis should
be assumed to occur in the original texts from which we
quote. We render these parts of the book in bold text
because this book attempts to undo decades of deception
from politicians, religious clerics and journalists. The use of
bold text is to enable the reader to quickly and easily grasp
the core content of this book, whilst the rest of the text is
there to supplement the core content.
A frequent ruse used to confuse people coming to
terms with the Koran is “what you have heard has been
taken out of context”. To destroy this ruse, this book
contains an entire Koran, with the only significant difference
being that this Koran has been put into the accepted
chronological order (but in reverse, so that the latest – and
most violent – commands spoken by Mohammed are the
first thing the reader sees). As we explain in the
Introduction, it is the normal Koran, the standard Koran
which “takes things out of context”, in that the standard
Koran is in no rational order, thus denying the reader of the
context provided by the chronology of what was said first
and what was said last. Our presentation of the Koran is the
only known attempt to present the Koran in reverse
chronological order. Furthermore it is also the only known
attempt to visually indicate which parts of the Koran are
known to have been cancelled by Mohammedʼs later
commands. Because of these features, our Koran allows the
non-Muslim reader to grasp in minutes what might
otherwise takes months or years of study. The reasons why
Muslims kill for Islam will become readily apparent, and the
reader will easily be able to convince family, friends and
colleagues that these are the reasons. The Introduction
proves that this view of Islam was the standard view among
Western experts for centuries before Muslim terrorists
brought down the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
The reader need no longer be fobbed-off with lies such
as “Islam is a religion of peace”, or “Islam is opposed to all
killing”, or “Muslims only fight in self-defence”. With the
expertise gained from this book, the electorate can start to
demand political change, before it is too late.
We would like to thank the following for their
assistance in providing inter alia advice, reference material,
organisational guidance, proof-reading: Alex Felix, Andrew
Bostom, Brian John Thomas, Gavin Boby, Kay, Paul
Collins, Robert Bor.
Any defects which remain in this work are the
responsibility of the authors. This book was originally
conceived as a print book using traditional academic
practices, however Kindle will not permit such standards as
paragraph indents on both sides. Sadly, this deficiency in
the Kindle format means that extended quotations are only
indented on the left.
Introduction

Following any horrendous terrorist attack by Muslims,


an attack explicitly done in the name of Islam, we are
immediately reassured by politicians, academics and clergy
that Islam is “a religion of peace”. If you are impatient to try
and understand this contradictory situation, a situation in
which most of us have found ourselves on a monthly or
even weekly basis for many years, just read to the end of
this paragraph and then turn to the Koran which follows
the Introduction and you will immediately see why Islam
is the very opposite of a religion of peace. You will see
why Muslims kill, and you will see that those members of
our own society who have a duty to inform us have been
blatantly lying to us about Islam. The lies by those who we
trust have had the populations of democracies confused for
so many years. If you do not believe what you see after just
a few minutes of reading the Koran contained in this book,
then return to our Introduction for further evidence and
explanation. If you are a Muslim, please put this book
down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this
book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of
Islam more thoroughly.

Since the fall of the Twin Towers, a narrative has been


pushed claiming that Islam is a religion of peace. But the
truth is the opposite: Islam is a religion of war. Moreover,
this truth about Islam was known by the educated class for
centuries, right up until the end of the twentieth century. But
just a decade after 9/11, the unimaginable became fact: the
police in Britain would arrest those who dared to quote the
views on Islam of such great historical figures as Winston
Churchill. When the truth about the violence inherent in
Islam is occasionally heard, the Left are to be found
denouncing the speaker as “racist”, “Islamophobic” or “far-
right” - those who tell the truth being demeaned as holding
uninformed and prejudiced views. Such denunciations are
nonsense, as anyone looking at only the core texts of Islam
will see that Islam is a religion of war. When a Muslim
would explicitly articulate the Islam recognized by the
companions of Mohammed, the Islam practised for over a
thousand years, that Muslim would often be marginalized by
our elite as “an Islamist extremist”. This is an example of
another deceit used to confuse the public, to claim that there
is something called “Islamism” which is separate from
Islam, and that there is even a violent version of Islamism.
But there are no shades of gray in Islam. From the image of
Mohammed portrayed by the core texts of Islam, it is clear
that if Mohammed was alive today we would be unable to
distinguish between the founder of Islam and a so-called
ʻviolent Islamistʼ. The truth about Islam is black and white,
and has been known for centuries, as we shall demonstrate.
Whilst your child is being deceived at school, the adult
population in the West is deceived by the lies of politicians
(lies supported by their allies in the media). Meanwhile, in
homes and madrassas, in mosques and Islamic
organisations, Muslims in the West are told the truth about
Islam. One of the first things that Barack Obama did on
becoming President of the United States was to visit the
world’s foremost Islamic university, to tell the world that in
the Middle Ages, when Spain was ruled by Muslim
invaders, it was a place of peace and tolerance.

Obama hit many of the right notes. He


conveyed to his audience that he is familiar
with the vast and glorious history of Islam,
such as the long periods of religious tolerance
in Andalusia, where Muslims, Jews, and
Christians lived together in peace under
Islamic rule.1

The above quotation is taken from an article in the “Religion


and Ethics Newsweekly” of the PBS website (PBS is the
American equivalent of the BBC). The article cites
numerous professors of Islam (some Muslim, some non-
Muslim). If those experts have any criticism of Obama’s
speech, it is that he was not positive enough about the
greatness of Islam. However, this idea that there was peace
and religious tolerance under Islam is a lie. The lie is so
gross that those politicians who put it forward might as
well say that there was peace and tolerance in Nazi
Germany. This lie about Islamic tolerance is easily
exposed based solely on Islamic scholarship from that
period (although in recent years entire books have been
published exposing this lie about the myth of Islamic
tolerance).2 Obamaʼs speech concluded by quoting portions
from the Talmud and the New Testament that promote
peace. The word “peace” appears twenty-eight times in this
speech, yet the verse from the Koran with which Obama
concludes has nothing to do with the promotion of peace.3
Thus, in his key speech purporting that Islam was peaceful
and tolerant the President of the United States (who says he
comes from a long-line of Muslims and that he grew up in
Muslim Indonesia), could not cite a single verse from the
Koran which promotes peace.4 Yet no journalist or
academic thought to point out this discrepancy.
To expose this discrepancy further let us turn to a
famous commentary on the Koran by Imam Qurtubi, a
scholar who lived in this supposedly tolerant Islamized
Spain over 700 years ago. In 2003 British convert to Islam
Aisha Bewley translated the Imamʼs Classical Commentary
of the Holy Qur’an.5 Ms. Bewley is far from being some
ignorant extremist when it comes to Islam, and in the small
print of her translation it says that her husband Sheikh
Bewley was the editor of the commentary. Between them
these two converts to Islam have published dozens of books
on Islam, including such books as Islam: The Empowering
of Women (1999) and Islam: Basic Practices and Beliefs
(2008). We can take it for granted that not only are the
Bewleys considered to be very mainstream and respectable
Muslims but also that they are highly knowledgeable about
Islam. They have even published their own translation of the
Koran.6
Ms. Bewley says that her translation of Qurtubi’s
commentary “is intended to give modern readers access to
the immense learning of Imam al-Qurtubi in such a way that
it will illuminate for them the meaning of Allah’s words in
the Qur’an”.7 Yet this learned, illuminating commentary on
the Koran portrays Islam as anything but tolerant. When it
comes to discussing the key violent sections of the Koran,
this classical commentary makes it clear not only that
“the religion of peace” commands violence, but this
violence is to be used against those who are doing
absolutely nothing to harm Muslims:

permission to fight was revealed about


fighting in general and the instruction is to
fight not only those idolaters who fight the
Muslims but also those who do not fight.
[…] This is the position of the majority of
scholars.8

This Islamic scholar goes on to clarify: Islam demands that


all peaceful non-Muslims are to be killed purely because we
have not submitted to the values of Islam.

It is an unqualified command to fight


without any precondition of hostilities being
initiated by the unbelievers [...] the reason
for fighting is disbelief because Allah says,
“until there is no more fitna,” meaning
disbelief in this case. So the goal is to abolish
disbelief and that is clear.9

We can forget the lie that Muslims are only acting in


response to aggression. Is it any surprise that the world is
plagued by Islamic terrorism, when these classical scholarly
interpretations of Islam make it clear that the Koran instructs
Muslims to kill unbelievers “without any precondition of
hostilities being initiated by the unbelievers”? In the
aftermath of devout Muslims slaughtering innocent people
in the name of Islam, it is a lie of the greatest magnitude
when leaders in the West describe Islam as “a religion of
peace”. As we will show, for at least 150 years before 9/11,
the educated elite in the West were in no doubt that Islam
was a religion of war.
Following repeated terrorist attacks by Muslims in the
West it is not uncommon for Sheikh Bewley to publish a
statement denouncing the actions of these Muslim
terrorists.10 In these denunciations it would be helpful if
Sheikh Bewley explained why the actions of the Muslim
terrorists are supposedly at odds with the Koranic
commands to kill, commands such as those found in his
wifeʼs translation of the commentary from Qurtubi. Experts
inform us that Qurtubi’s commentary is among the greatest
sources of inspiration for Muslim terrorists.11 Are these
modern, moderate, educated Muslims who translate such
works oblivious to any connection between the texts they
cherish and the violence performed in the name of those
texts?President Obama could praise as “tolerant” the society
which produced a scholar like Qurtubi, yet the liberal
journalists who reported on Obamaʼs speech (and the
academic experts on Islam quoted by these journalists) had
nothing even remotely critical to say about the texts or the
doctrines from that society, doctrines which incite
genocide.12 What is going on?
The explanation is that Islam is completely unlike our
normal expectations of a religion. Contrary to religions like
Buddhism and Christianity, Islam sanctifies violence against
unbelievers: the only reward guaranteed to Muslims is they
will get to spend an eternity in Paradise provided they die
fighting to impose Islam on others. Not only do those who
die during jihad go to Paradise, they have the most honorific
position in Paradise, and have the power to help get
members of their family into Paradise.13 Those Muslims
who do not die in this way face the prospect of an eternity
of torment in Hell. The body of scripture underlying Islam is
very explicit in the violence perpetrated by Mohammed and
his followers. The violence was aimed at conquest and such
violence was committed even when the opponents of Islam
were pluralist and offered no resistance. Islam is
expansionist, instructing its followers to wage jihad on non-
Muslims for all time (as Qurtubi says, the commands to kill
are “general” and “unqualified”). The Islamic State we now
see in Syria and Iraq is a new incarnation of the previous
Islamic State, a state which only ceased to exist in 1924
(after enduring from the twentieth century all the way back
to the seventh-century Arabia). Seeing Islam as a religion is
less accurate than viewing it as an ideology committed to
installing the most totalitarian regime imaginable. Compared
to the centuries-old threat from Islam, the threat from
National Socialism was over in the blink of an eye. Islam
encompasses religion, politics, etiquette, morality, legality
and even the conduct of war. Islam is so all-encompassing
that truth itself is subservient to the total system.14
As the Koran contained in this book makes abundantly
clear, the world-view of Muslims is based on a world that is
divided in two parts: the world of peace (Dar al-Islam)
where Islam reigns, and the world of war (Dar al-Harb), the
lands of the people who have not submitted to rule by Islam.
The process of converting Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam is
called jihad. If we turn to mainstream scholarly works from
the 1980s we see that this is made emphatically clear: the
entry on Jihad in a thirteen volume encyclopaedia about the
Middle Ages says that the world of war “must be brought
under the rule of Islam by ceaseless jihad”.15 It is thus a
holy duty for every Muslim to assist in increasing the area
controlled by Islam, whether by preaching or by violence.
As you will see for yourself in our Koran, the division into
those two oppositions — peace and war, believer and
unbeliever — permeates the book. But you are not to be
allowed to know that these are the fundamental principles of
Islam, you are to be deceived by schools and the media into
believing that Islam is “a religion of peace” and that
throughout history Muslims have been tolerant people.
It is only when the Koran has been arranged
chronologically that the non-Muslim can see that Islam is
constructed to bring the non-Muslim to kneel before
Muslims and Islam. The book you have before you is the
most overt attempt to display the chronological structure
of the Koran and to prove that the Koran commands war
and subjugation instead of peace and tolerance. After so
much deception by the elite, we hope that this book brings
the problem with Islam into clear focus.
The Deliberate Deception of the
Public

“slay the idolaters [kill the non-Muslims]”


Koran 9:5

As soon as you start reading the pages of the Koran in


the way in which devout Muslims know the Koran has been
seen for over a thousand years, it will become immediately
clear to you why Islam is a religion of war. In 1953 here is
what the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the twentieth-centuryʼs
single most authoritative account of Islam in English,16
had to say about jihad:

The spread of Islam by arms is a religious


duty upon Muslims in general [...] Whether
Muhammad himself recognized that his
position implied steady and unprovoked war
against the unbelieving world until it was
subdued to Islam may be in doubt [...] Still
the story of his [Mohammed's] writing to
the powers around him shows that such a
universal position was implicit in his mind,
and it certainly developed immediately after
his death, when the Muslim armies
advanced out of Arabia.17
In the light of this, the most expert view on Islam in the
West, how could any honest leader in a Western democracy
have ever responded to a terrorist attack from devout
Muslims by unequivocally describing Islam as “a religion of
peace”? There are scores of books by academics in the West
which document that Mohammed gave rise to a religion of
war, and we will cite many of them in this Introduction as
proof of this.18 These books have made it clear that, from
the very first claim by Mohammed that he had a revelation,
Islam achieved almost no converts until it embraced
violence. Yet between the scholars who write the books and
the general public (whose votes are supposed to determine
policy in a democracy) there is a wall of politicians, clergy
and journalists who read these precise and informed
academic books but then lie to the public and claim that
“Islam is peace”, “up is down”, as if the scores of books
published in the previous 150 years proving the contrary
had never been written.
After 9/11 it was only those with no role officially
sanctioned by the institutions of the state who would
highlight once again the proof that there was a direct
connection between violence and the doctrines of Islam. A
couple of years after 9/11, in a book about religion and
terrorism, a philosopher attached to no institution wrote:

On almost every page, the Koran instructs


observant Muslims to despise non-believers.
On almost every page, it prepares the
ground for religious conflict. [...] Islam,
more than any other religion human beings
have devised, has all the makings of a
thoroughgoing cult of death.19

Sam Harrisʼ book received glowing reviews from many


members of the educated elite and was praised as a best-
seller. But in the decades following 9/11 this kind of
information never found its way into public debates among
the educated elite, despite Islam affecting the personal
security and the rights to privacy and freedom of speech of
a l l . A wall of deception is maintained by politicians,
clergy, schools and the media who want to maintain The
Grand Lie that “Islam is a religion of peace”. They
ensure that truly informed discussions about Islam are
confined to a small group of intellectuals. Such books as
the one cited above might as well have never been written:
they are like cogs turning inside a large machine, but cogs
which connect to no other part of the machine. More than a
decade later, and despite all the praise heaped upon the Sam
Harris, politicians could still claim that “Islam is a religion of
peace” and there would be no dissent heard by the general
public. There would be no voice heard to contradict The
Grand Lie, there would be no gruelling television interview
where a journalist or some expert would challenge the
politicians’ lies.
I n Mohammed’s Koran we vividly demonstrate the
point made by Sam Harris and show you that, seen in the
context of expert opinion of the previous centuries, his
claim was nothing new. That the essence of Islam is
permanent war with non-Muslims was the standard view
of Islam held by Western scholars before 9/11. The
principle means of demonstrating to you why the world is
plagued by violence from Muslims is by presenting the
Koran in the correct chronological order. When you turn to
the Koran which follows this Introduction, you will see for
yourself that Islam views non-Muslims as the enemy, and
that Islam rules that those believers who do not die in the
fight to subjugate non-Muslims are Muslims whose destiny
is an eternity of torture. If this book fails to show you the
reasons why Muslims are violent towards non-Muslims, then
we do not believe that you will ever understand what is
happening. We do know the image of Islam presented here
flies in the face of years of propaganda fed to people via
television and what passes for education in schools and
universities.
We non-Muslims in the West have been grossly
deceived by the lies and omissions of an elite class.20 As
ordinary members of the public, whether we be atheists or
Christians, conservatives or communists, we should not
need to seek out the Koran and decipher it ourselves, we
should not need to find our way to university libraries to
discover the shelves of books going back centuries which
proved to their readers that Islam was a violent and
expansionist ideology. This is a job which in normal life
our society delegates to an elite class. But instead of
telling us the truth, this elite class have constructed a wall
of lies and misinformation. Whether they did this
deliberately or from fear is irrelevant: the end result is
the same. Devout Muslims are murdering and slaughtering
our countrymen, and all of our lives have been affected in
some way by the actions of these Muslims, yet no leader is
offering us any explanation which makes any sense. From
the Koran we present here, you will see for yourself that
Islam is the absolute opposite of a religion of peace.
We hope that in seeing a Koran where the last
commands to come from the lips of Mohammed are the
first things you read will make clear to you that Islam is a
religion of war, where the true believers are seen as the
soldiers of Allah. It is only when the people of the West
clearly see the nature of Islam that we can proceed to deal
with this threat head on. That is not to say that there is
complete agreement about the entire chronological ordering
of the chapters of the Koran. Nevertheless, the authorities
are agreed on one key fact: the last parts of the Koran which
came from Mohammed, are the chapters commanding war,
and certainly not any chapters extolling restraint.21
Commands from Allah to kill the unbelievers are what
dominate the later part of the Koran, and these commands
cancel out those few earlier commands which might suggest
that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion. It is these
cancelled, earlier commands which our leaders use to
deceive us about the violent history of Islam and the
commands to violence contained in the Koran. One of the
most frequently cited verses used to claim that those
Muslims who use terrorism are not Islamic is a verse
which says “there is no compulsion in religion”. 22 But as
our chronological Koran shows, this is one of the parts of
the Koran which experts say was cancelled by the
commands to kill. Those who cite this verse about
supposed religious tolerance are either lying or they are
ignorant. The book you are reading is peppered with
references to historians and Islamic scholars so that we can
prove the scale of the deceit. Anyone who remains
unconvinced by our presentation should read the works
referenced in the footnotes and reading list.
Decoding The Koran

“Let those fight in the way of Allah [Jihadis] who sell


the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in
the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on
him We shall bestow a vast reward [those who die
imposing Islam get the greatest reward from Allah].”
Koran 4:74

For 1000 years Muslims, like most rational people,


have decided that when faced with contradiction,
instructions which come later should replace instructions
which came earlier. When someone says “stop” and then
subsequently says “go”, rational beings naturally take the
later command as over-riding the earlier command. By
presenting the Koran in reverse chronological order, we can
see that Mohammed’s latest commands to Muslims about
killing would countermand anything else that he said earlier
about peace. Knowing that almost every Koran in existence
has the commands jumbled-up in no particular order,
permits those who would conceal the doctrines and history
of Islamic genocide to make their false claim that Islam is a
religion of peace. We expect that for most people seeing the
Koran in chronological order will be an astonishing
revelation, and the problems we face at the start of the
twenty-first century will suddenly make sense.
From the 1860s onwards scholars of Islam in the West
knew that it was vital that the Koran be understood in
chronological order. One of Britainʼs foremost Islamic
scholars in the twentieth-century was Richard Bell of
Edinburgh University. In the late 1930s Bell produced a
translation of the Koran in chronological order. In 1953
Bellʼs book Introduction to the Quʼran was published, with
a chapter devoted to the discussion of the work of Western
scholars (from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) and the
efforts of these scholars to put the Koran into chronological
order.23 Bellʼs book also has a table at the end of the book,
where the traditional order of the Koran is contrasted with
different translations of the Koran by Western scholars (you
can see a similar table in Appendix 1 of our book). The one
point on which all these scholars of the Koran agreed, is
that it was not any chapter on peace and tolerance that
came from Mohammed at the end of his life, but the huge
Chapter 9 and Chapter 5, which are more concerned with
genocide and apartheid against the Kuffar. ʻKuffarʼ
(unbelief) is the term of hatred that Islam uses to describe
all that is not Islam (this includes all beliefs which are not
Islamic and all those people who are not Muslim – the
term can also appear as ʻKafirʼ). 24 In Islam it is an
offensive term, even more offensive than the word ʻniggerʼ
is in English - ʻKuffarʼ designates a systematic position,
where non-Muslims are sub-human, meaning no true
believer is going to ever be ashamed of their hatred and
hostility towards unbelievers, because such hatred is
sanctioned by the highest authority they know, Allah. 25 Our
politicians and clergy promote Islam which considers us
Kuffar to be sub-human, but they would not promote an
ideology which designated Africans or Muslims as sub-
human. Racists can be shamed out of their racism, Muslims
cannot be shamed out of their kuffarphobia. You will see
from our presentation of the Koran, that the supposed word
of god is pervaded with hatred, hostility and violence
towards the Kuffar.
If you show to Muslims the Koran contained in this
book many of those Muslims may tell you it is not in the
correct order. That is because the Koran they are
accustomed to using is in no sensible order (in effect, it has
been encrypted in a fairly simple manner). If you have ever
tried to read a common Koran you will know that the book
makes almost no sense.26 The Koran printed in that
traditional order makes no sense to you and it may make no
sense to most Muslims (which is one reason why most
Muslims are not directly involved in terrorism, although
they may be involved in jihad indirectly, since the Islamic
concept of “charity” considers funding jihad as an act of
piety).27 It might seem that horrific violence by Muslims has
only occurred in the last few decades. However, the truth is
that across 1400 years, Muslims have been killing non-
Muslims (and Muslims) in the name of Islam. Throughout
history, those who refused to be subjugated by Islam were
killed. Those who tried to leave Islam were killed. As ex-
Muslim Dr. Sookhdeo says, even the killing of non-
conformist Muslims is a form of jihad.28
There are over one hundred places in the Koran where
Hell and Paradise are contrasted. In Islam unbelievers are
going to spend eternity in Hell, where we will have our skin
burned off, only to have our skin grow back and be burned
off again.29 By contrast, obedient Muslims are going to
spend eternity in the Gardens of Paradise, gardens which
have flowing rivers of fresh milk and of wine (yes, wine),
whilst the unbelievers are drinking boiling water in Hell.30
But not all Muslims are assured of going to Paradise: only
those who die fighting to impose the rules of Islam are
guaranteed entry to Paradise: “Allah hath bought from
the believers their lives and their wealth because the
Garden will be theirs: they shall fight in the way of Allah
and shall slay and be slain”.31 Devout Muslims have no
doubt about the opposition Islam creates between believers
and unbelievers, nor any doubt about the eternal horrors of
Islam’s Hell, contrasted with the eternal pleasures of Islam’s
Paradise. Those who find the faith of religious people
puzzling or even ridiculous should try to understand that to
the religious their beliefs are not silly. If some Muslims
really are believers, they really do believe in the eternal
torment of Hell and the eternal pleasure of Paradise. Some
of those believing Muslims may be terrified of war and
violence and death; but if they really do believe that a short
life on earth is to be replaced by an eternity of pleasure or
an eternity drinking boiling water, why should we be
surprised if they kill for Islam, as the Koran commands?
Many of us in the West are even being compelled by law to
respect the religious beliefs of Muslims, beliefs which
declare us to be an enemy, a sub-human enemy who the
Koran says is to be killed if we will not submit to rule by
Muslims. So if we sub-human Kuffar are supposed to
respect an ideology that despises us, why would we not also
respect their Islamic belief that unless they kill for Islam
they risk spending an eternity having their skin burned off?
If we are to respect Islam, then should we not also respect
that they are commanded to kill? Muslims believe that what
Mohammed recited were the eternal words of Allah, which
is why Mohammed was not only known as “the Prophet”
but also known as “the messenger of Allah”. The Islamic
belief is that the commands to kill in the Koran are the word
of god, and to those who follow Islam there is no greater
authority in the world than Allah.
If you read the Koran contained in this book from back
to front, you will be reading the verses Mohammed issued
first. You will also see in our Koran verses where we have
put a line through the text: these are verses which Muslim
authorities recognize as having been “cancelled” by the later
(violent) verses. When reading from the back of our Koran,
you will see that the verses commanding violence do not
start until you are more than half-way through the Koran –
because in the first half of Islam that Mohammed revealed,
Mohammed was not preaching violence. But for the last
half of the Koran recited by Mohammed, the god of Islam
was commanding Muslims to fight the unbelievers (the
Kuffar), to kill those who refuse to abandon their beliefs,
to kill those who refuse to follow the rules of Islam. By
distracting you from the later, violent stage of Mohammed’s
commands and telling you that Islam is “a religion of peace”
your leaders in the West are deceiving you about what the
Koran says and deceiving you about the history of Islam for
over 1000 years.
The chronology of the Koran (and the history of how
Muslims have behaved based on their understanding of this
chronology) is of vital importance to you and your family.
As a famous French philosopher said in 1883:

Those liberals who defend Islam do not


know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of
the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign
of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind
has ever borne […] as soon as Islam had a
mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it
destroyed everything in its path. Religious
terror and hypocrisy were the order of the
day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and
violent when strong.32

Understanding this problem (and being able to convince


those around you of the enormity of the problem) is the
most important challenge facing the world today. We hope
this book is the only tool you need to convince your family
and friends of the threat from Islam.
Devout Muslims Kill, Our Leaders Lie

“whosoever killeth a human being for other than


manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as
if he had killed all mankind […] The only reward of
those who make war upon Allah and His messenger
[Mohammed] and strive after corruption in the land
will be that they will be killed or crucified”
Koran 5:32 - 5:33

It is famously said that a lie could travel half-way


around the world before the truth had even got out of bed.
The momentous horror when Muslims brought down the
World Trade Center, killing 3000 innocent people, was
followed by a lie that rushed around the world: “Islam is a
religion of peace”. This must be the biggest lie in history,
since it turns upside-down the history of the last fourteen-
hundred years, a history which has wrought horrific
violence on the people of Africa, Asia and Europe. The lie
has been used since 9/11 to cover up murder and terror that
is fundamental to Islam. We can put the blame for this lie at
the feet of American President George Bush Jr., who
popularised the lie. After horrific Islamic terrorist murders in
subsequent years, apologists for Islamic violence kept
repeating the lie. As one of the few journalists to break
ranks says: “Never do politicians more loudly proclaim
Islam a ‘religion of peace’ than when bombs are set off in
its name”.33 But any Muslim who has memorised the Koran
knows that what the apologists for Islam keep saying is not
true. Any Muslim who has read the Islamic sayings (which
record how Mohammed lived his life) knows how enormous
is this lie. Any Muslim who has read the most authentic
Muslim biography of Mohammed knows that describing
Islam as “a religion of peace” is not a true account of that
history. Moreover, there is ample evidence that in the
nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, before countries like
Britain or America had any sizable Muslim population, the
truth about Islam was routinely expressed by academics in
the West.34
When one searches a database of twelve million books
published in the last three hundred years (all the content of
these books having been indexed), it transpires that before
9/11 there was only one occurrence of the phrase “Islam is a
religion of peace” in all those twelve million books. The
singular book in which that phrase occurred was a Tom
Clancy novel, that is, “Islam is a religion of peace” was a
phrase spoken by a fictional character. 35 Not one factual,
academic, scholarly book in the hundreds of years covered
by this index had ever referred to Islam as “a religion of
peace”. But ever since September 2001 this fiction has been
used over and over again to deceive the electorate in
Western democracies.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush
issued this statement to the American people, a statement
made with the authority of someone who professes intimate
knowledge of the Koran:

These acts of violence against innocents


violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic
faith. And it’s important for my fellow
Americans to understand that. The English
translation is not as eloquent as the original
Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran,
itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will
be the end of those who do evil. For that they
rejected the signs of Allah and held them up
to ridicule. The face of terror is not the true
faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all
about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t
represent peace. They represent evil and
war.36

In 2001 there was little reason why the American people


should have known that much about Islam, after all, the first
massive bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993
had failed,37 and two major terrorist attacks against the USA
in 1999 had also failed,38 suggesting that Islam was not
much of a real threat to Americans at home. However,
following the massive escalation in the threat to Americans
on 9/11, it was to be expected that ordinary people would
look to their President (their Commander in Chief) for an
explanation and contextualization of such shocking events.
President Bush was not only claiming expertise on the
contents of the Koran but hammering that point home to
the public by purporting to have read the Koran in
Arabic: there could be no clearer marker of expertise, than
to have peppered his talk with claims about how much more
eloquent was the message of Islam as found in the original
Arabic Koran. This was the start of The Grand Lie.
For over a thousand years before the World Trade
Center was brought down, those in the West who knew
the doctrines or history of Islam knew that Islam was the
opposite of a religion of peace. 39 Yet in 2001 none of the
educated elite spoke up to contradict this monumental lie
from “the leader of the free world”. Here are some
examples from previous centuries, proving how much this
lie went against the known history of Islam. In 1919 the
Foreign Office of the British government issued a handbook
entitled The Rise of Islam and the Caliphate.40 In World War
I, Germany demonstrated their knowledge of Islamic
doctrine by attempting to foment jihad against Britain in
countries with large Muslim populations, even going so far
as inciting Islamic genocide against Christians, and letting
Muslims believe that the Kaiser had converted to Islam.41 In
the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British public
knew that British General Gordon gave his life fighting the
slave-taking jihadi war-mongers of the Sudan.42 Outside the
Palace of Westminster in London, the mother of Parliaments
for so many countries, there is a statue of the twelfth-century
Crusader King Richard the Lionheart, a statue which was
installed there in 1860, memorializing the threat to Europe
from Islam for over a thousand years.43 The US Navy was
created in 1794 with the attempt to stop Muslims from
taking American sailors as slaves, the slavers justifying their
actions by citing Islam’s laws on continuous warfare against
non-Muslims,44 (these slave-raiding parties travelled far
beyond the coast of Africa, as far as London, Ireland and
even Iceland). Nearly a century before the creation of the
US Navy, Englishman Joseph Pitts escaped from a life of
enslavement as a soldier for Islam, and upon returning to
England in 1704 he published the first account of the
pilgrimage to Mecca (he had been able to go to Mecca on
pilgrimage because he had undergone a forced conversion
to Islam).45 Across Europe the humble crescent-shaped
croissant was supposed to remind people on a daily basis of
the unceasing threat from Islam, after the centuries of
military assault on Europe by the Caliphate was stopped in
Vienna in 1683. 46 Cervantes published what is considered
the first novel in literature and the most famous novel in the
Spanish language. The novel contains several chapters on
Christian slaves held by Muslims in Algeria, and this was
written from personal experience, as from 1575 Cervantes
himself was enslaved by Muslims for five years.47 In
Dante’s Divine Comedy from 1320, one of the West’s
greatest works of literature, Mohammed is consigned to
eternal torment in the eighth circle of Hell.48 And of course,
most famously of all, in 1096 the Pope raised the first
Christian jihad against Islam, in response to centuries of
Islamic jihad against Christendom and the persecution of
Christians in their own lands, lands which have mostly
never been reclaimed for Christians since they were
conquered and occupied by the soldiers of Allah. 49 It is thus
demonstrable that for 1000 years the educated elite in the
West have known that Islam was a religion of war, with the
Koran being the fundamental instruction manual. From the
Crusades of the eleventh century to the creation of the US
Navy, and from the poetry of Dante to the humble
croissant, the people of the West were supposed to never
forget that Islam was a predatory religion of war. But
following the attack on 9/11, an attack by the religion of war
in the very heart of the West, the educated elite did not
contradict George Bush and his promotion of The Grand
Lie. None of the educated elite drew attention to a
thousand years of history which proved that the President
of the United States was blatantly lying.
This speech by George Bush at the start of the twenty-
first century will be seen as the crucial point from which the
elite in the West brazenly lied to those who had delegated
authority to this elite. At the very time that the American
public needed to grasp what was the cause of, and the
implications of, this attack (the biggest single assault on the
USA at least since Pearl Harbor), a Republican President
gave the public not the truth, but lies.50 Not surprisingly,
President George Bush cited no chapter and verse from the
Koran to substantiate his claim that “Islam is peace”. The
President did not even tell his audience if what he was
saying was taken from the Koran or taken from some
commentary on the Koran.51 The world’s only superpower,
a country whose entire national defence system failed,
permitting an enemy to slaughter thousands of people in
multiple simultaneous terrorist attacks, was blatantly
deceived by its own Commander in Chief. As is obvious
from the warning signs about Islam listed above, signs
which permeate the culture and institutions of so many
countries in the West, Bushʼs Grand Lie could only work
with the complicity of the elite throughout politics,
journalism, academia and the clergy.
The deception around this pivotal event was not
confined to President Bush. In the aftermath of the
Islamic terrorism of 9/11, the British Prime Minister gave
a speech where he insisted:

Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion,


and the acts of these people are contrary to
the teachings of the Koran.52

Thus, the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of


Great Britain, two highly-educated men, world leaders
who had access to the research and opinions of hundreds
of civil servants and academics, both chose to
emphatically deceive the citizens who delegated authority
to these men. This deception has fatally framed the debate
about Islam ever since.
Without Jihad There Would Be No
Islam

“They [non-Muslims] long that ye should disbelieve


even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level
(with them). So choose not friends from them till they
forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn
back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever
ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from
among them”
Koran 4:89

The people of the Western world have struggled to


disentangle ourselves from this Grand Lie ever since 9/11.
We are living through a time of near universal deceit. It is
said, that in this situation, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act. This book will prove to you that Islam is a
religion of war, and will show you that this doctrine of war
is not only to be found in the texts of Islam but has also
been implemented throughout the history of Islam.
Moreover, you will see evidence that this was known not
just by Muslims but also by scholars in the West. Once you
have seen the truth, you will gape at how the elite have so
consistently deceived the public,53 and at how in just a few
decades our academics and journalists have buried over one
thousand years of knowledge and popular memory: for
example, in the 1970s even the TinTin comics told the story
of the rise of Islam, showing Mohammed leading his
soldiers into battle, his sword aloft. That one image in a
comic book for children represented the essence of Islam
more adequately then most mainstream accounts of Islam
since 9/11.
The Grand Lie has led to many attempts to mislead
the Kuffar about the meaning of the word “jihad”. In a
book about the Koran published in 2007, shortly after the
worst terrorist attack in Britainʼs history, a Professor of
Islamic Studies in Scotland said jihad “denotes an inner
struggle [...] of the individual over his own weaknesses and
sins […] and has nothing to do with war or warring of any
kind”.54 In Britain this absurdly false claim about “inner
struggle” was taken up by Muslims,55 Christian clergy, 56
government departments,57 news media,58 and even
judges.59 Never mind that the view of Western scholars for
over a century before 9/11 had been describing jihad
primarily as warfare, and the Muslim terrorists themselves
were using this meaning of the word “jihad”.60 The lie about
the meaning of jihad became so commonplace that by 2008
even Muslims on trial for a terrorism plot to behead a British
soldier used this ruse of “inner struggle” in their testimony
before the criminal court.61 But consult any dictionary of the
English language before 1990, and if it contains the word
“jihad” at all, the only definition offered is that of “religious
war of Muslims against unbelievers”.62 None of these
standard dictionaries of English have any mention of there
being a primary or even a secondary usage, where jihad
means “inner struggle”. In those core texts of Islam having
chapters devoted to jihad, there is not one entry on the
topic which is to do with inner struggle, as every single
entry is about jihad as violence.63 Yet as the above
examples show, as late as 2014, government departments
and even those testifying before Parliament were claiming
that jihad meant “inner struggle”. The idea that jihad is
“inner struggle” is another form of the lie “Islam is a
religion of peace”. There is so much discussion of jihad
(as warfare) in the core texts of Islam, that the deceivers
tried to frame the mind of anyone who should start to
look at the core texts of Islam. The terrorists were using the
word “jihad” as it had always been used in Islam, and a
fictional secondary meaning was conjured up to deceive the
public in the West. The thirteen volume Dictionary of the
Middle Ages, one of the world’s two greatest reference
works on that historical period, went so far as to say that
“holy war” was so fundamental to Islam that it could even
be considered one of the five “pillars of Islam”.64
You will see from the highlighted verses of our Koran
that this “struggle” or “striving” (a shortening for the
allusive phrase “striving in the cause of Allah”), entails
using any means necessary to enforce Islam on non-
Muslims.65 Here is what one of the mainstream experts on
Islam had to say just a couple of years prior to 2001:

The Arabic word jihad […] means to strive,


to exert oneself, to struggle. […] The origin
of the concept of jihad goes back to the
wars fought by the Prophet Mohammed and
their written reflection in the Koran.66

The destruction of the World Trade Center meant that the


elite needed to sow confusion among the populace, in case
the public started to voice criticism of the Islamization of the
West, a project of the elite which had been under way for
decades.67 As the religion of war showed itself capable of
killing on an industrial scale, right in the heart of the
West, the Quisling elite set about lying for this genocidal
ideology (Quisling is a term from World War II referring
to someone who collaborates with the enemy).68
Variations on the phrase “striving in the path of Allah”
mean promoting and implementing Islam, and when
necessary fighting and losing one’s life for Islam, with the
reward of entering Paradise: “Those who believe, and have
left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives
in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight.
These are they who are triumphant”.69 The word “jihadi”
principally means “one who will kill and die for Islam”, but
since 9/11 this sustained campaign of deception was
maintained: across the West in schools and in the media the
non-Muslim would be told that the idea of jihad as war was
some kind of peculiar misunderstanding by a tiny minority
of Muslims. Meanwhile, in mosques and homes of Muslims
across the West, many Muslims would continue to be told
the doctrinal and historical truth concerning jihad as war.
The deceit of the Kuffar worked and, instead of terrorist
attack after terrorist attack leading to the public demanding
an end to Muslim immigration, the number of Muslim
immigrants increased like never before. Instead of allowing
the public to learn that this modern terrorism from Muslims
was simply a resumption of the murderous violence from
Muslims which extended for over a thousand years after the
death of Mohammed, the elite lied to the masses, ensuring
that by the time the public does come to grasp the truth of
Islam the problem will be almost impossible to solve. It is
thus urgent that the population of Western democracies
should understand that violence is the true essence of
Islam.
More than ten years after 9/11 and on the other side of
the Atlantic, the British were a nation in shock when, out of
the blue, a man was beheaded on a sunny afternoon in
London.70 There had been many other Muslim terrorist plots
in the West in the intervening decade (some of which
succeeded and even more of which were foiled), but there
was something particularly horrendous about this attack: an
off-duty British soldier was murdered and nearly beheaded
in his own country by people born in Britain but who had
converted to Islam.71 The killers chose to stand over the
dead body courting publicity, demanding a passer-by take a
video statement from the killers. The police arrived and kept
their distance, until twenty minutes later when the armed
police arrived. Then, brandishing a gun, the jihadis rushed
at the armed police, presumably hoping to be shot dead by
the police as “martyrs” for Islam. You might think that in
the decade leading up to this, there would have been some
critique of those politicians and journalists who repeated the
lie that Islam was a religion of peace. But incredibly, the
elite just became increasingly confident of their ability to lie
to the public about Islam with no consequences.
A few days after the beheading of this soldier, Nick
Clegg the Deputy Prime Minister made a public statement
about the attack, and in doing so he too deceived the British
public about the nature of Islam, but in a far more brazen
way than even President Bush deceived Americans. This
liberal British politician was no ignoramus: before entering
politics he had been a journalist and was a graduate of three
prestigious universities: Cambridge University, Minnesota
University and the College of Europe.72 His speech was
widely-quoted by the media and was placed on the website
of his political party.
Clegg cited verse 32 chapter 5 [of] the Koran, which
says: “If anyone kills a human being it shall be as though he
killed all mankind whereas if anyone saves a life it shall be
as though he saved the whole of mankind”.73
In espousing The Grand Lie, President Bush was
vague about what part of the Koran he was supposedly
quoting as proof that Islam was a religion of peace. But
when the Deputy Prime Minister of Britain addressed a
public meeting to explain why this beheading of soldier
Lee Rigby was not Islamic, you will note that Clegg
actually cited the chapter and verse of the Koran from
which he was supposedly reciting. 74 What most non-
Muslims would not realise from this speech, is that the
Deputy PM could only “prove” that Islam is opposed to
the taking of human life by omitting the central part of
that very verse, the part of the verse which encourages
Muslims to kill. It was as if this politician stood up and
claimed that one of the ten commandments of Christianity
was “Thou Shalt Murder” instead of “Thou Shalt Not
Murder”. Judaism and Christianity both have
commandments saying that murder is a sin.75 Islam has no
such commandment. On the contrary: Islam explicitly
commands Muslims to kill non-Muslims. So the only way
in which the elite can “prove” Islam is opposed to killing
is by deliberately distorting what the Koran says.
To make it completely clear how brazen was the
deception by the Deputy Prime Minister, here is what the
full verse of Koran 5:32 says.

For that cause We decreed for the Children of


Israel that whosoever killeth a human being
fo r other than manslaughter or corruption
in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all
mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it
shall be as if he had saved the life of all
mankind.76

If you compare the sentence we quote with what the Deputy


PM claimed he was quoting, you can see that he removed
the section about killing people for “manslaughter or
corruption” (in bold in the quotation above). The section
omitted by the Deputy PM, specifically authorizes killing
(thus completely refuting the idea that the Islam opposes
killing). And if one looks at the following verse (Koran
5:33), it spells out what is meant by “corruption” (the
grounds on which someone may be killed):
The only reward of those who make war
upon Allah and His messenger and strive
after corruption in the land will be that they
will be killed or crucified, or have their hands
and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be
expelled out of the land. Such will be their
degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter
theirs will be an awful doom.77

The “corruption” for which killing is the punishment


authorized in Koran 5:32 is defined in the following verse as
“making war against Allah and Mohammed”, that is,
attempting to implement some political, religious, moral or
legal system other than Islam. Resisting domination by
Islam is thus seen by Muslims as an act of war against Islam
and for this death is sanctioned. So, resisting Islamic
domination (in order to practice your existing religion or
lack of religion) is corruption, for which the penalty is
death. Koran 5:32 is the only part of the Koran which
apologists for Islam ever cite as (supposedly) being some
sort of proof that Islam opposes killing.
If you look out for this verse being ʻquotedʼ by those
defending or promoting Islam, you will find that without
exception they omit the part of the verse which sanctions
killing. Why do this unless they are intentionally trying to
mislead their audience? Whilst frequently accusing critics of
Islam of taking verses out of context, this is instead
precisely what the Quisling elite does, with the pretence that
Koran 5:32 supposedly condemns killing.78 So, in the
simplest possible terms: the only verse of the Koran which
is routinely cited as proof that Islam is “a religion of
peace” is actually a verse which commands the killing of
those who do not submit to Islam! Despite being found
near the beginning of most editions of the Koran,
chronologically this verse is among the very last things
Mohammed ever said. This is another indicator of the need
to put the Koran in chronological order.
Journalists: Allies Of The Grand Lie

“And the first to lead the way, of the Muhajirin


[Immigrants] and the Ansar [Helpers], and those who
followed them in goodness - Allah is well pleased with
them and they are well pleased with Him, and He hath
made ready for them Gardens underneath which rivers
flow [Paradise] , wherein they will abide for ever. That
is the supreme triumph.”
Koran 9:100

What did the two converts to Islam give as their


justification for killing the soldier Lee Rigby? The
justification was that the soldier would have “killed Muslims
in Iraq and in Afghanistan”. 79 A Kuffar soldier who killed
Muslims would undoubtedly fall into the category of those
who waged war against Islam (whether or not the individual
soldier these converts to Islam killed had even been sent
abroad was irrelevant to the killers).80 Reported interviews
with one of the Muslims involved in the beheading of this
British soldier show that the killer’s understanding of Islam
was in accord with the above unedited verses from the
Koran, rather than the Deputy PM’s garbled and deceptive
account of Koran 5:32.81 Not only did Lee Rigbyʼs killers
ask a member of the public to record a video statement for
them, one of these killers had prepared a text which
explained his actions as the obligation on Muslims to
undertake jihad: “To my beloved children, know that to
fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation”. 82 These two
converts to Islam had no racial or national identification
with any supposed “victims” of this randomly chosen
soldier (the killers were neither Iraqis nor Afghans). They
were killing this soldier for ideological reasons, because
they believed that this is what the Koran told them they
must do. As you will see from our chronological Koran,
these Muslims had sound reasons to believe that jihad is an
obligation in Islam. Lee Rigby would have been a
schoolboy when Bush issued The Grand Lie in September
2001, with the schoolboy being told “Islam is a religion of
peace”. Meanwhile his killers would have had it proven to
them by other Muslims that dying for Islam is their only
guaranteed entry to Paradise, and (as believers) the killers
would have taken this to have been a direct recitation of a
command from Allah. Even when the media claimed to
quote “the full text” of the letter one of the killers handed to
a member of the public, the media omitted the long list of
Koran references at the end of the letter, most of which are
commands from the Koran commanding Muslims to kill for
Islam.83
At the meeting where the Deputy PM of Britain
presented his “evidence” that the Koran opposed killing, the
following prominent Muslims were in attendance: Labour
MP Sadiq Khan (who subsequently became the first Muslim
Mayor of London), Conservative peer Lord Tariq Ahmad,
former officer of the British Army Afzal Amin, 84 and
Islamic scholar Sheikh Shams ad-Duha Muhammad of
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Wilson, its professor of moral philosophy, under his pseudonym of
“Christopher North,” attracted many to his class-room for whom his
professed theme would have had no charm. But in the department of
classics, for which all William Nelson’s previous training had been
specially directed, the faculty was imperfectly equipped. Dunbar, a poor
representative of Hellenic scholarship, had then filled the Greek chair for
upwards of a quarter of a century. On the other hand, the professor of
humanity was James Pillans, an elegant scholar, and, in the words of Sir
Alexander Grant, “a born teacher and educator;” though latterly more prone
to dwell on little critical niceties than to give himself up to the drudgery
which was indispensable for the training of his large and often inadequately
prepared class. Among other traits that his old pupils will recall was the
never-failing protest at the opening of a new session, which reminded the
class that he enjoyed the dubious fame of being pilloried by Byron in his
“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” The irate bard, in his indiscriminate
furor, had characterized the professor of humanity as “Paltry Pillans;” and
William Nelson used to quote this incident of his own experience in
justification of the title:—He had an essay to give in on a certain day, and
not having finished it till late on the previous night, instead of walking to
the professor’s remote residence at Inverleith Row, he dropped his
manuscript into the nearest post-box. Next day, when the class assembled,
the first intimation from the professor was, “I will thank Mr. William
Nelson to hand twopence to the janitor for the postage of his essay!”
Notwithstanding some amusing eccentricities, Professor Pillans was held in
great esteem by his old pupil as an apt and painstaking enthusiast in his
profession; and the good feeling was mutual. William Nelson was a
favourite pupil, in whose progress he took a lively interest, and it was in
spite of his most urgent remonstrances that the classic muse was abandoned
at the call of filial duty.
But it was the fortune of William Nelson, in those happy days of student
life, to find himself among a rare band of undergraduates, many of whom
subsequently won a name for themselves in ampler fields. Edward Forbes
was then a zealous volunteer on the staff of the University Maga,
contributing with pen and pencil, in prose and verse, to its columns. He had
a rare power of winning co-operation in whatever he set on foot; and he
gathered around him a band of kindred spirits, who, as sharers in the
exuberant frolic and satire of the Maga, formed themselves at length into
the Magi, or members of the Maga Club. Out of this grew the famous
“Brotherhood of the Friends of Truth,” with its archimagus, its ribbon, and
its mystic motto:-

ΟΙΝΣ ΕΡΩΣ ΜΑΘΗΣΙΣ,

which still survives under its later guise of the Red Lions of the British
Association gatherings. There was a curious admixture of youthful
exuberance and frolic with a lofty earnestness of aim in the Brotherhood.
The search after truth was declared, in its programme, not only to be man’s
noblest occupation, but his duty; and the spirit of the order is thus set forth:
“This brotherhood is a union of the searchers after truth, for the glory of
God, the good of all, and the honour of the order, to the end that mind may
hold its rightful sway in the world.”
Of the youthful band of undergraduates, John Goodsir, Bennett, Blackie,
Lyon Playfair, George Wilson, and Edward Forbes, all ultimately filled
chairs in their own university. Day succeeded to a professorship in St.
Andrews, and Struthers to one in Aberdeen. Henry Goodsir, a youth of high
ability, accompanied Sir John Franklin as naturalist in the ill-fated Arctic
expedition, from which none returned. Dr. Stanger distinguished himself,
with better fortune, in the Niger expedition of 1844; Andrew Ramsay rose
to be chief of the Geological Survey; and other fellow-students and
members of the order have occupied professors’ chairs in Canada and in
India, have represented their university in Parliament, or made their mark in
no less useful ways. Among the latter the name of William Nelson claims
an honourable rank. For the scheme of the brotherhood required each
member “to devote his time and his energies to the department for which he
feels and proves himself best fitted, communicating his knowledge to all, so
that all may benefit thereby, casting away selfishness, and enforcing
precepts of love.” Assuredly when those maxims came to be tested in the
daily business of life, no one gave their spirit of unselfishness more
practical manifestation than the subject of this memoir.
In Professor Pillans’s class he maintained the standing which he had
achieved at the High School. His foremost but unequal rival in the
composition of Latin verse was the late George Paxton Young, the esteemed
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Toronto. It was
while William Nelson was still a student that John Cairns—the friend and
fellow-student both at Edinburgh and Berlin of his younger brother, John
Nelson, and now the venerable Principal and Professor of Systematic
Theology in the Divinity Hall of the United Presbyterian Church—came
fresh from the pastoral hills of Berwickshire to win for himself a
distinguished place among the men of his time.
Amid the stimulus and rivalry of such competitors for fame, the young
student devoted himself with renewed zeal to the classics, with undefined
visions of some honourable professional or academic reward as his life-
prize; and fulfilled the high anticipations of his earlier career. But while
thus steadily pursuing a course which gave abundant promise of triumph,
his father was suddenly prostrated by disease; and William, as the eldest son
of a large family, abandoned all the bright prospects of his university career,
and the dream of professional or academic achievements, to grapple with
the unfamiliar difficulties of a commercial enterprise, till then conducted on
a scale commensurate with the modest aims of an elder generation in the
Old Town of Edinburgh.
The business of Mr. Thomas Nelson was a curious survival of the system
borrowed from the great fairs of the Middle Ages, and grafted on to their
older traffic by the successors of Guttenburg and Fust; of Caxton, Wynkin
de Worde, and Chepman and Miller. Allan Ramsay had followed in their
steps, with his booth at the sign of the Mercury, opposite the head of
Niddry’s Wynd, from whence he transferred it to the Luckenbooths at the
City Cross. It was in just such another luckenbooth at the Bowhead that Mr.
Thomas Nelson originated the business which has since developed into
such great proportions.
William Nelson threw himself at once, with characteristic singleness of
aim, into his new vocation; nor did he ever express regret at his enforced
desertion of scholarship for trade. But few men have carried away from
school or college a keener sense of the attachments of student life. To the
last the plea of an old schoolmate ever presented an irresistible claim which
scarcely any demerit could cancel. The fate of one whose life, by his own
misconduct, had closed in miserable failure is thus charitably noted in one
of his letters: “Poor —— died two days ago of congestion of the lungs; and
it is a wonder that he hung on so long, as he has been in a very dilapidated
condition for years. The last time I saw him, his condition was truly
pitiable. I sent him a fresh bolster and bedding, for the ones he had were
hard and foul. Poor fellow! he did a great deal to hasten the approach of the
last enemy.” His loyalty to early friends was unfailing. He kept a record of
his classmates in the High School, and noted with keenest interest their
success or failure in life. He told with kindly humour of the refusal of a
liberal “tip” offered to a porter at Cairo who had been specially serviceable,
and then claimed fellowship by reminding him of old High School doings.
B—— was the ne’er-do-weel of Mackay’s class, who had thus found his
vocation in the land of the Pharaohs. His sympathy was unbounded in any
honour or good fortune achieved by a schoolmate; and latterly, as he
watched the rapidly diminishing numbers of the old group of school and
college companions, he recorded at the close of each year the minutes of
Death’s roll-call. To one who entered so keenly into academic life, and
whose career was so replete with promise, it was a trying ordeal to abandon
college for the uncongenial drudgery of a trading venture for which such
experiences seemed to promise no helpful training. But in Scotland a
university career is by no means regarded as unsuitable preparation for
trade and commerce; and William Nelson was speedily to show what
success the classical gold medalist of the High School and the best writer of
Latin verse in the College could achieve in business life.
CHAPTER IV.

THE CASTLE HILL.

W ITH characteristic energy the young student, now in his nineteenth


year, set himself to grapple with the novel difficulties of the book-
trade. Neither the irksome drudgery nor the uncongenial demands
incident to the business daunted the youthful adventurer, who had so
recently found his highest vocation in the mastery of Latin quantities, and
the triumphs of competitive hexameters after the models of Horace and
Virgil. In the summer of 1880, the present writer spent some weeks with his
old schoolmate at Philiphaugh, in the vale of Yarrow, famous as the scene
of Montrose’s last battle. During an excursion to Berwick, with the special
object of visiting another schoolmate, he pointed out more than one book-
store in the old Border town, familiar to him in association with his first
experiences as a commercial traveller, and humorously described those
early ventures in the disposal of his literary wares. According to Johnson of
Liverpool, his journey extended to that city, and Mr. Johnson gave him his
first large order for books. He had already succeeded in overcoming the
prejudices of the regular trade, and fixed a scale of prices which disarmed
their antagonism.
The books, as already stated, were for the most part reprints from
standard and popular works beyond the range of copyright restrictions.
Their paper-covered boards and imperfect printing were in striking contrast
to the choice typography, paper, and binding, and the tasteful illustrations,
which characterized the works issued by the firm in later days. Yet the germ
even of this was already discernible in the engraved frontispieces and
vignette titles introduced to catch the eye and cater for the popular taste.
So early as 1829, Mr. Thomas Nelson, senior, had aimed at the extension
of his business by engaging a commercial traveller to push the sales of his
publications with the trade. Mr. James Macdonald was first despatched on
this mission; but as Curwen states, in his “History of Booksellers,” owing to
the stigma attached to the unwonted nature of the business, his mission was
a failure. “At Aberdeen the booksellers rose up in arms, and only one had
the courage to give him an order.” To him succeeded, ere long, Mr. James
Peters, a more successful agent, and a faithful attaché of the house through
all its later fortunes till his death. But Curwen says: “It was not until Mr.
William Nelson, the eldest son of the founder, took to the road that the trade
business was really consolidated, not only in Scotland, but also in the chief
towns of the United Kingdom. In fact, it may be said that Mr. William
Nelson was the real builder of the business, working upwards from a
foundation that was certainly narrow and circumscribed. Mr. Thomas
Nelson, the younger brother, soon after this admitted to the firm, undertook
the energetic superintendence of the manufacturing department, and was the
originator of the extensive series of school books.”
William Nelson’s taste in literature was refined, and his reading
extensive. His mind was stored with the fruits of years of liberal study; and
when stimulated by the sight of beautiful scenery, or moved by some
unusual occurrence, he sometimes surprised strangers by his apt and
lengthened quotations from favourite poets. Soon after the removal to the
Castle Hill establishment, Mr. Duncan Keith,—the son of an old friend of
Mr. Nelson, with whom William had spent at Glasgow a brief period of
initiation into the mysteries of trading,—was welcomed as a member of the
West Bow home-circle, and took his place among the busy corps on the
Castle Hill. He was the junior of William Nelson by some years, and thus
writes: “My evenings were chiefly spent in the society of the younger
branches of the family; but I have a distinct remembrance of William
reading aloud from Horace and Virgil in a manner that showed an intimate
acquaintance with the language, and an appreciation of the poetry in the
original. Though a High School dux myself, it was far above me; and, so far
as my later observation goes, above most people.” But it was only amongst
intimate friends that he gave free play to his literary sympathies. Nothing
was more remote from his character than any effort at display; and men of
culture who, in their intercourse with him, had long regarded him only as
the man of business, were sometimes startled by an unexpected betrayal of
his familiarity with classical and general literature, as well as by his sound
judgment on questions of critical discussion.
With a taste thus matured, his feeling for art was refined, and he directed
his efforts, with ingenious skill, to render the works issued from the firm
attractive. Novel methods of illustration were introduced. Wood-cuts were
printed with tinted grounds and relieved lights. Chromo-lithographs vied in
effect with the original water-colour drawings. A late series of reproductions
of Landseer’s pictures, though designed only for a child’s book, constituted
a valuable memorial of the great animal painter. Inventive ingenuity was
directed to the production of fresh novelties in binding and illustration,
many of which were eagerly copied by the trade. William Nelson’s
appreciation of artistic excellence seemed to be innate and instinctive. “A
thing of beauty” was a joy to him wholly apart from his own share in its
production. His admiration for a well-got-up book, or for illustrations of
unusual excellence, found as hearty utterance in reference to the
publications of another firm as of his own; and hence he was always open
to fresh hints, and prepared for improvement on his most successful efforts.
He was, indeed, too easily beguiled by good looks both in books and men.
This characteristic passage occurs in a letter to an old friend: “I had a call
two days ago from a most fair-spoken English clergyman, who wanted help
to build a ragged school in Sheffield. He insisted that you had introduced
him to me, and that I had taken him over the works and given him a book,
which was likely enough; though, as I told him, I had no recollection of it.
He was most plausible, and very good-looking. A good-looking outside
takes my fancy in anything. I always find myself expecting the best of a
good-looking book; and I am apt to believe pleasant things of good-looking
people also. He assured me he was a great friend of yours; and he had such
a friendly look that I gave him what he wanted. Do you know anything of
this Dr. Pike? I have had my suspicions of him that he is a plausible
humbug,”—which, as in many a similar case, proved to be only too well
founded.
A writer in the Scottish Typographical Circular remarks: “Mr. Nelson
was often popping in and out among artists and engravers who did work for
him, giving them new ideas and further suggestions. He did not grudge
trouble or expense if he got things nice and to his mind. He rejoiced in
beautiful typography, and displayed great artistic taste in the wood-cuts and
illustrations.” He was indeed a familiar visitor in the studios of London and
Paris, as well as of Edinburgh; and during his frequent Continental tours
derived intense pleasure from his visits to the galleries both of ancient and
modern art. His eye was quick to discern the merits of a painting, and his
judgment was prompt and decided. He was indeed sensitive to any
manifestation of bad taste; and the unsightly disfigurement of the buildings
or thoroughfares of his native city by placards or signboards, excited his
anger to a degree that sometimes startled the offender. His remonstrance on
such occasions was apt to be expressed with a blunt sincerity that could not
be misunderstood. The same severe standard of taste was applied in his own
business, and made its influence felt in every department of typography,
illustration, and binding.
A memorandum, found among his papers after his death, preserves an
incident in the first stages of the inexperienced but energetic reformer’s
proceedings. His father had acquired a set of stereotype plates of
Drinkwater’s “Siege of Gibraltar,” and had a portrait of its author engraved
for the frontispiece. A reprint of it being in progress, the plate was intrusted
to the engraver for retouching; and he undertook to get the autograph of the
old soldier, to be added as an attractive feature. The new and illustrated
edition was issued accordingly, and found a ready sale. But some years
afterwards a venerable military-looking gentleman waited on Mr. Nelson,
and asked where he had obtained the signature. Colonel Drinkwater, who
was supposed to have been long since dead, was himself the questioner;
and, as William Nelson notes, the signature was subsequently identified as
in the handwriting of the deceased manager of Mr. Lizar’s engraving
establishment. But only in the first stage of transition from student life to
the counting-house and the publisher’s office could such a proceeding have
eluded his vigilance. A copy of the engraving is attached to the
memorandum, and contrasts very markedly with the illustrations of later
years, when William Nelson’s critical taste, conjoined with his experience
in adapting the issues of his publishing-house to popular demand, won for
the productions of the firm a character for great attractiveness in outward
aspect and illustration. At a later date, the “Chronicles of the Schönberg-
Cotta Family” constituted the first of a highly popular series of books by the
same author. The charming authoress who writes under the initials A. L. O.
E., the late Mary Howitt, Mrs. Traill, R. M. Ballantyne, and other writers,
figured on their list of authors. The charming series of “Art Gift Books,”
from the French of M. Jules and Mme. Michelet, and M. Arthur Mangin
—“The Insect,” “The Bird,” “The Mysteries of the Ocean,” and “The
Desert World,” as well as other works of the same class—are illustrated in
the best style of art. But it was as caterers for the people, in an abundant
supply of pure, high-toned popular literature, and not as rivals of the great
publishing houses through which the most eminent writers appeal to select
classes of readers, that the Nelsons achieved their greatest success. In the
tribute paid to the worth of William Nelson by the Rev. Dr. Alison when his
life-work was finished, it is said: “His influence, and that of the firm of
which he was the head, has gone forth healthfully to the ends of the earth.
Religious principle, no less than skill and taste and enterprise, has been in
all their work as publishers of literature. No man can measure the good
which that incessant stream of excellent books issuing from their press has
done for the world. To a large extent they have been for the multitude,
rather than for the learned few.” But this was the summing up of the work
of a lifetime. Much had to be achieved in its progress, step by step, ere such
results could even be aimed at.
Under the energetic management of the young publisher the picturesque
tenement at the head of the West Bow, which had sufficed for his father’s
bookselling operations, soon proved inadequate for the growing business. A
neighbouring “land,”—as an entire pile of building in the Old Town of
Edinburgh is still called,—situated at the head of Blyth’s Close, Castle Hill,
with the palace of Mary of Guise in its rear, was secured; and there the first
steps were taken which ultimately developed into the great establishments
of Hope Park and Parkside. Machinery was brought into use wherever
available; and a well-organized division of labour was introduced, until at
length nearly every process, from the initial type-setting to the final issue of
the bound and illustrated volume, was executed on the premises. The
locality where this new departure was made, preparatory to the great works
at Hope Park, with its hundreds of work-people, and its wholesale branches
at London and New York, is one rich in literary associations. Near by, on
the northern slope of the Castle bank, is the house of Allan Ramsay, poet
and bookseller; Blair’s Close, long noted among the most ancient nooks of
the Castle Hill, was the abode of Alison Cockburn, authoress of “The
Flowers of the Forest,” and of other plaintive as well as humorous Scottish
songs. To St. James’s Court, on the east side, James Boswell brought Dr.
Samuel Johnson, and entertained him in the house where he had succeeded
to the historian David Hume. There was an old-world literary flavour about
the place that gave a certain piquancy to the start of the young adventurer
deserting the classic grove for the prosaic haunts of commerce.
The Rev. Dr. Simpson of Derby, already noted as an old schoolmate and
a life-long friend, refers in one of his letters to the lectures and social
entertainments provided at a later date for the numerous workers in the
Hope Park establishment, in which he was an active labourer. But the
interest taken by William Nelson in his employés was manifested at an
earlier stage. Lectures and social recreations had already been instituted
before the transfer of the works to Hope Park, in some of the earliest of
which the present writer bore a part. But with increasing numbers, and more
ample room, those instructive entertainments were organized on an
extensive scale, and are described in a memorandum of Dr. Simpson, by
whom many of the later lectures were given. His account of them may find
a fit place here, though in some points it anticipates the narrative of later
years. “The deep interest,” he remarks, “which Mr. Nelson felt in his work-
people, and his desire to promote their well-being in every sense,
conspicuously appear in the entertainments which were from time to time
got up for them. At first these were chiefly in the nature of banquets or
suppers, to which all were invited, when they were regaled with the good
things of this life in a judicious but liberal manner. Along with this,
however, he was careful to combine moral and religious instruction, by
securing addresses by one or two clerical friends. By-and-by he provided
for them occasional lectures on subjects of varied interest. For those he got
up, at considerable expense and trouble, a series of illustrations which were
shown on a screen by the oxy-hydrogen light, the lecturer describing each
picture while it was before the eyes of the audience. This was, I believe, the
first introduction of this form of lecture, which has since become so
common. The pictures were reproduced from engravings by the
photographer of the establishment, Mr. Sinclair, and then hand-coloured
with much care and skill by Mr. Ramage, who devoted himself to the art-
work connected with the extensive business of the firm.
“The first of those illustrated lectures was on the transfer of Napoleon’s
remains from St. Helena to Paris. The second was on Garibaldi’s invasion
of Sicily and Italy, ending with his meeting with Victor Immanuel, and
hailing him as king of Italy. Afterwards a new departure was made, and the
lectures were chiefly devoted to the genius and works of celebrated artists;
the illustrations being transcripts of the artists’ principal works. The first
subject of this class was David Scott, R.S.A., in connection with his
illustrations of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner,’ subsequently reproduced by
Messrs. Nelson in a tasteful edition of the poem. The next lecture was
devoted to the works of Landseer; and to this succeeded similar illustrations
of Hogarth, Wilkie, Harvey, Leech, etc. Those lectures were greatly
appreciated; the large hall at Hope Park, in which they were given, being
always crowded to excess by the employés, their wives and families,
supplemented by friends invited by Mr. Nelson, including some who took
an active part in this generous effort for the social elevation of the working-
classes, such as Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Hannah; and their artist friends, Sir
George Harvey, D. O. Hill, James Drummond, and others. For each of those
lectures Mr. Nelson had prepared from twenty to thirty slides, which were
arranged in partitioned cases made for their safe keeping.” But they
perished, along with much more valuable property, in the disastrous fire of
1878.
But only the initial steps towards the full development of the Hope Park
works, with their ingeniously devised machinery and systematic division of
labour, were possible at the Castle Hill establishment. Its accommodation,
though a great step in advance of that at the Bowhead, was inadequate for
such plans, and the numbers employed were correspondingly limited. But
the workmen were carefully selected; and from the first the relations
between them and their employer were characterized by mutual respect and
confidence. They recognized in him one whose interest in their welfare was
generous, and his sympathy that of a friend. But his own attention to
business extended to the minutest details, and anything indicative of mere
eye-service or sloth was intolerable to him. An anecdote highly
characteristic of him is thus narrated on the authority of one who had been
long in his employment:—“Two navvies were engaged one day at Hope
Park turning a crank when Mr. William Nelson was passing. He paused for
a moment and looked at the men, who seemed to go about their work rather
leisurely. He then came forward to them, and asked, in a gruff manner, if
they could not work a little harder and turn the crank quicker. They
answered at once ‘they could not; it was a stiff job, and very fatiguing.’
‘Nonsense,’ he replied; ‘let me try.’ Seizing one of the handles, he did try;
but, after giving the handle two or three turns, desisted, for it made the
perspiration pour from him. Then he remarked, ‘Ay, just go on as you’ve
been doing;’ and, putting his hand into his pocket, added, ‘There’s half-a-
crown between you.’ Many similar anecdotes might be told. He liked smart,
active workmen; but he did not willingly drive or unduly press any one. He
would at once rebuke any of his employés if he considered they deserved it;
but if afterwards he found he had acted hastily or wrongly, he would
apologize, even to the humblest worker, and almost invariably with the
apology there came a gift.”
It is not surprising that the relations between such an employer and his
workmen were something closer than those of the mere hireling. The
workmen who had shared in his first efforts in the Castle Hill establishment
followed him to Hope Park. Some of them, by their fidelity and skill,
contributed to the success of later years; and the veteran survivors of that
original staff were regarded by William Nelson to the last as objects of
exceptional favour.
Among those who thus migrated from the Castle Hill to Hope Park, one
claims special attention as a relic of the original Bowhead establishment.
James Peters has already been named. He was a man of good education,
and, what was rare in his day, had a familiar knowledge of the French
language. He was, moreover, a devout Presbyterian of the early type,
eschewing the Covenanting exclusiveness of his old master, and holding
faithfully to the National Kirk. His familiarity with the Scriptures was so
great that he was accredited with knowing the entire New Testament by
heart, and quoting familiarly from much of the Old Testament. He had been
the trusted clerk, commercial traveller, and man of all work: the entire staff
for a time of the bookselling business under the elder régime; and as the
cautious ventures of its founder gave way to the comprehensive schemes of
a younger generation, he watched their operations with many misgivings.
Old Peters would have furnished a study for Sir Walter Scott fit to have
ranked alongside of his Owen and Caleb Balderstone. He moved in all
things with the regularity of clockwork, and sternly resented in others the
slightest deviation from orderly business procedure or punctuality as to
time. Mr. Duncan Keith sums up his own early recollections of him with the
remark that “even John Munro, the beadle of Mr. Goold the Covenanting
minister’s kirk, stood in awe of him.” One day, contrary to all precedent, he
asked leave to go away a little earlier than the usual closing hour. He
reappeared next morning, and, addressing William, said, “I wish you would
tell your father I got married yesterday.” On inquiry, he stated that he had
just wedded the elderly dame with whom he lodged. “It will be cheaper,” he
said; “and we’ll get on weel enough thegither. We hae been lang used to
each other.” When in early days the plan of book sales was in vogue, he was
intrusted with the carrying out of one of the ventures; but his ideas of
orderly procedure were wholly at variance with the novel experiment. He
abruptly returned home the following day, and would have nothing more to
do with such work. His loyalty to his young masters knew no bounds; but
he could never quite forget that they had been boys when he had the sole
charge of the Bowhead buith, or indeed feel it to be natural to speak of them
otherwise than by their Christian names. Duty clearly required him to
advise and warn them at every new step, so unlike the prudent thrift of early
days. If we could realize all the feelings of a sober old brood-hen when the
ducklings that she has hatched take their first plunge into the mill-pond, and
in spite of her clucking and pother sail off into the expanse of waters
heedless of all remonstrance, we might be better able to sympathize with
the worthy old servitor as his young master launched into ever new and
more ambitious ventures. He survived his active faculties, and was an
object of kindly care and liberality long after he had ceased even to deceive
himself with the fancy that he could be of service in the business.
CHAPTER V.

HOPE PARK.

T HE premises on the Castle Hill became ere long too limited for the
rapidly-growing business. William Nelson had been joined in the
enterprise by his younger brother, Thomas; and with their combined
energy many novel features were developed and advances made in fresh
avenues of trade. The publications of the establishment were attracting
attention by their improved typography and tasteful embellishment. Ampler
room and greater subdivision of labour had become indispensable. So,
looking around for some more suitable locality, their attention was directed
to a group of antiquated dwellings at the east end of the Meadows, the
remains of one of the suburban villages swallowed up when Old Edinburgh
burst its mural barriers and extended over the surrounding heights.
In an address given by William Nelson to those in his employment, at
one of his social entertainments, when a building was in progress at Hope
Park which he then assumed was to be the final addition to the works, he
traced the rise of the firm, interspersing the graver narrative with humorous
incidents, and with kindly notices of some whom he referred to as faithful
fellow-workers, from the time when he first gathered them around him in
the new workrooms on the Castle Hill. One of the reminiscences of their
entertainer’s narrative is thus recalled:—When Hope Park grounds were
about to be built upon, Mr. Nelson, being curious to explore the place, made
a visit to what he described as a wilderness of cabbage gardens, with no end
of pig-sties. One grumphy (Anglice, a sow) he noticed in a corner where the
joiner’s workshop afterwards stood, which, as he humorously described it,
“kept its carriage!” The body of a four-wheeled coach, still in good
condition, had been consigned to this novel use. The contrast was striking
when, in later years, the smooth grass lawn, with its tasteful array of shrubs
and flower-plots, filled the area enclosed on three sides by the Hope Park
works.
But the full development of the establishment was the result of years of
patient and steady progress, until it grew to proportions adequate for the
varied departments embraced in the comprehensive scheme, with all its
ingenious improvements in machinery for economizing labour. Its tall
chimney showed from afar the scale on which its operations were carried
on; though at a later date William Nelson realized very strongly the injury
to the amenities of the city, and the obstruction to the magnificent views of
the surrounding landscape, occasioned by such adjuncts to its
manufactories, and laboured by precept and example to get rid of them. In
the later Parkside Works gas-engines are the sole motive power, and their
general introduction was advocated by him as a substitute for the unsightly
chimney with its obscuring volumes of smoke.
With the numerous workmen that were ultimately engaged in all the
varied branches of skilled labour, the Hope Park establishment came to be
recognized as one of the most important centres of economic industry in the
city; and, so far as printing, publishing, and binding are concerned, is
spoken of by Mr. Bremner, in his “Industries of Scotland,” as the most
extensive house in Scotland. The new buildings, when completed, formed a
stately range of offices enclosing three sides of a square, where, under a
well-organized division of labour, with the aid of machinery adapted to its
varied operations, the entire work, from the setting of the types to the issue
of the bound and illustrated volumes, was done on the premises.
Compositors, draughtsmen, photographers, lithographers, steel, copper, and
wood engravers, electrotypers, stereotypers, folders, stitchers, and binders,
plied their industrious skill. The work-men and women employed on the
establishment latterly numbered nearly six hundred; and few centres of
industry have been characterized by more harmonious relations between the
representatives of capital and labour.
The printing of books has constituted an important branch of Scottish
industry from the days of Chepman and Miller, on through Bassendyne,
Hart, and Symson, to our own time. The names of Fowlis, Constable,
Ballantyne, Cadell, Blackwood, Oliver and Boyd, Chambers, Blackie,
Collins, Neill, Black, and Nelson, are all familiarly associated with the
literary history of the century; and, with only three exceptions, they belong
to Edinburgh. It was fitting, indeed, that Edinburgh should take the lead in
developing the typographer’s art, where, in 1507, Walter Chepman set up
the first printing-press in Scotland; and where, in the memorable year when
“the flowers o’ the forest were a’ wede away” on Flodden Hill, he built the
beautiful Chepman Aisle which still adorns the collegiate church of St.
Giles, and endowed there a chaplainry at the altar of St. John the
Evangelist. Edinburgh, in the days of the Scottish Caxton, was even more
noteworthy for its authors than its typographers. Dunbar, Gawain Douglas,
and the makers of that brilliant age, were followed by Montgomery,
Drummond, Allan Ramsay, and Fergusson; and along with this array of
poets, reaching to him whom Burns owned as his master, Hume, Robertson,
Mackenzie, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and Walter Scott, combined to
transform their old romantic town into the Modern Athens of later years.
Their genius was not without its influence on the special aspect of
Edinburgh’s industries, including some of the novel forms of periodical
literature which have so largely contributed to the culture of the masses.
The social entertainments and lectures provided by William Nelson at an
early stage for his employés have already been noticed; but in the spring of
1868 he extended his generous sympathy over an ampler field, and
organized a fête for the whole journeymen printers and stereotypers of
Edinburgh. The invitation met with a cordial response, and the appearance
presented by the assembled guests in the galleries of the Museum of
Science and Art was the theme of admiring comment. They were
summoned to this novel social gathering by one who justly claimed
recognition as an employer “who set a high value upon whatever is
calculated to foster kindly feelings between man and man.” The invitation
said: “For one evening let us lay aside care or irksome duty, and come out
with those we love best, and let us look each other fairly in the face. In the
matter of head we do not much differ; at heart we are agreed. We need to
have the bow unstrung occasionally. Let us do so in company for once, and
see if we can help each other to a happy evening.” The answer to this was
the assembly of upwards of a thousand workmen, with their wives and
sweethearts, in the Industrial Museum, to listen to a lecture by Mr. W. H.
Davenport Adams, on the noble art in the service of which they were
enlisted; and to enjoy the humour and pathos of some of Scotland’s choicest
national songs, including Burns’s proud protest, which could there be
appreciated without any thought of social wrong—“A man’s a man for a’
that!” The Scottish Typographical Circular, in its comments on this unique
gathering, remarked: “Here were a thousand men, nearly all in superfine
black coats and spotless shirt-fronts; a thousand women in tasteful dresses
and bonnets of the latest mode, setting off the comely features of the
printers’ wives, or the fresh, pretty faces of their sweethearts; and in all this
great mass of the ‘lower orders’ not a word out of joint; not a gesture of
impatience; no crowding, jostling, or selfish preferring of one’s own
enjoyment; nothing but courtesy and that perfect good breeding which
prompts men to give their neighbour’s comfort the precedence of their own
convenience.” It was a gathering that Scotland might be proud of, whether
we assign to the host or the guests the chief prominence. The matter of
dress, to which the critic so specially directed attention, was not unworthy
of note as an evidence of provident thrift, and of the self-respect which is
nowhere more fitting than in the skilled artisan.
The spirit manifested in gatherings such as this is the best antidote for
those conflicts between labour and capital which have proved so
detrimental to both. Yet, as will be seen by a letter addressed less than four
years later to his former traveller, Mr. James Campbell, he had evidence that
a perfect solution of this great social problem has yet to be devised. The
letter is dated from Dunkeld, where he had been spending a holiday with his
family. In 1851 he had married Miss Catherine Inglis of Kirkmay, Crail; and
at the date of the letter he was surrounded by a happy family, consisting of
his son Frederick and four daughters, to whom he thus alludes: “The
children have enjoyed their stay immensely, and none more than Master
Fred, who got capital trout-fishing in the Braan, a tributary of the Tay, and
in the Butterstone, a stream about six miles distant.” His greatest happiness
was in his own family circle, and surrounded by the friends whom he
welcomed to his hospitable home. But the cares inseparable from his
extensive commercial transactions could not always be so exorcised; and
now a succession of inclement seasons and bad harvests was clouding the
prospects of all. “We have had,” he writes, “a most miserable time of it for
many months past, as far as weather is concerned. I don’t remember of such
a long continuance of wet weather as there has been this year. It has lasted, I
may almost say, all summer, up to within the last few days; and the result is
that the crops have suffered terribly. As to the potatoes, the disease is
everywhere, and potato starch-mills will have full employment this winter.
It is a time calling for sympathy and forbearance on all hands. But, in
addition, strikes for shorter hours and increase of wages are the order of the
day; and it looks as if the words of the song, ‘Hard times come again no
more,’ were ere long, as a general rule, not to be suitable for this country, as
such times cannot be far distant for both masters and men, if there be not a
cessation soon to this war between capital and labour. Things are all quiet at
present in the trades of printing and bookbinding, but it is rumoured that
heavy demands for both shorter hours and higher wages will be made by the
men next month; and it is known that they have been preparing for a
struggle by subscribing largely to a strike-fund ever since the beginning of
the year, so that there is no doubt coming events are casting their shadows
before.
“Things must be in a strange way in New York just now with operative
printers. We know this from two of our men, who went out there some
months ago in the hope of bettering their condition; but they were glad to
come back to us, and they are both at work again, each at the machine at
which he worked before he left. The history of the experiences of one of the
men was as follows:—He got to New York, but he had no sooner begun to
look out for work than he was set upon by a committee of operative
printers, who were at the time on strike, and he was offered eleven dollars a
week if he would not ask for work. The offer was too good a one for him to
refuse, and he went about for several weeks with his hands in his pockets.
By-and-by he was asked if he would not like to go back to Scotland. He
said he had no objections, and it was arranged that his passage back should
be paid. When the day came for his leaving, some of the New York men
came down to the steamer to see him off, and they gave him five dollars for
pocket-money during the voyage, and a sum of ten dollars to give to his
wife, whom he had left behind in Edinburgh. And so he left the shores of
America. The story of the other man is still more strange. He took work in
an office in which there was a strike; but after being there for a week, he
found his position so uncomfortable from annoyance from the men who had
left, that he went and told his master he would have to leave on account of
this. But what was his surprise when his master told him that he need not
allow this state of matters to continue, as he had just to put a ball through
one of the fellows, and there would be an end of it; and that the utmost that
would be done to him in the way of punishment would be a day or two’s
confinement in the police office or jail. He then handed him a revolver and
said, ‘Take this and make good use of it, and you’ll have a quiet life for the
future.’ This pistol I have now in my possession, and it is worth having as a
curiosity.”
At an earlier date the mischievous effects of a strike extended to the
Hope Park works, ending in the places of some of the strikers being
supplied by other applicants. But the victims learned by experience that
they never appealed in vain to the sympathy of William Nelson, even when
their share in the revolt had been characterized by ingratitude or breach of
faith. It was sufficient that they were impoverished. “Poor fellow!” he
would say, “he brought it on himself; but what of that?” And the liberal aid
was given only too readily; for the plea was discovered to be one to which
he most promptly responded, and was resorted to frequently by impostors
who preyed on his kindly sympathy. What, indeed, the Rev. Dr. Alison
remarked of him after his death, when he said: “He simply could not turn
from distress of any sort without doing something to relieve it,” was no
more than an echo of the sentiment which experience had rendered familiar
to many.
CHAPTER VI.

EGYPT AND PALESTINE.

T HE excursions of early years, and the longer holiday rambles of student


life, for which the environs of Edinburgh and the neighbouring shores
of Fife afforded so many attractions, were exchanged for a time for the
prosaic rounds of the commercial traveller and book-agent. But this duty
was transferred ere long to trustworthy subordinates; and so soon as
prosperity rewarded the intelligent labours of the young adventurer, the
spirit that prompted earlier excursions revived. This was further stimulated
by that keen desire to see and judge for himself in reference to all matters of
general interest which manifested itself through life. The occurrence of any
unusual event, or the opening up of some new region, was sufficient at any
time to awaken the desire to explore a scene rendered interesting by its
novelty, or by the exceptional circumstances which attracted his notice.
When the first Pacific Railway was completed, he crossed the Atlantic in
company with Mrs. Nelson, travelled to San Francisco, visited the
Yellowstone Region and the Mariposa Valley, and returned through Canada
to renew his intercourse with old friends there. While in the Mariposa
Valley, Mrs. Nelson was presented with one of the giant Sequoia, or
Wellingtonia, which now bears, on a marble tablet attached to it, the name
of “Auld Reekie,” then bestowed on it. At Salt Lake City a Scotsman
addressed Mr. Nelson by name, and begged him to convey his respects to
his old clergyman, the Rev. W. Arnot of Edinburgh; but in mentioning this,
Mr. Nelson dryly added that the Free Churchman of Salt Lake City seemed
to take very kindly to its spiritual wives! He visited Paris in 1851, and
exposed himself to its dangers at the time of the famous coup d’état by
which the Third Napoleon made himself emperor. Twenty years later he
hastened again to the French capital in the perilous outbreak of the
Commune; and when the Christmas season of 1879 was overclouded by the
disastrous fall of the Tay Bridge, immediately on learning of the event he
made his way to Dundee to see for himself the ruins and to investigate the
cause. He succeeded in finding a man who had watched the lights of the
train as it swept on in the profound darkness, and was startled by their being
suddenly extinguished. The bridge had given way; and the train, with all its
passengers, was precipitated into the Tay. In like manner he set out for the
Scilly Islands on the occasion of the wreck of the Schiller; travelled to
Ischia after the occurrence of the earthquake of 1881, in which the town of
Casamicciola was almost totally destroyed; and when, in the following year,
the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act led to a violent popular outbreak
in Connemara, he crossed over to Ireland, that he might visit the disturbed
district and judge for himself of the merits of the conflict.
The amount of preparation for even the longest journey was amazingly
trifling. William Nelson would start almost at a day’s notice for an extended
tour; and this course of procedure, so characteristic of his equanimity,
conjoined with calm, resolute endurance, was curiously exemplified in his
first extended journey. In 1849 he left home with the intention of spending a
six weeks’ holiday in the south of Europe. He was in Leghorn when a letter
reached him which showed that all was going on satisfactorily in the
business. He thereupon decided to make an extended journey to the East.
But his funds were exhausted, and it was before the days of railways or
telegraphs. With a faith in human nature characteristic of him through life,
he stepped into the counting-house of Messrs. Henderson Brothers, the
leading British merchants in Leghorn. He was a total stranger, with no
introduction. He told them his story, and asked them to cash a draft on
Edinburgh for £300. They looked at him, and after a pause told him to draw
the cheque, and gave him the money. The strangers became friends in later
years; and one day, when Mr. Robert Henderson was dining at Salisbury
Green, William Nelson asked him how it was that he and his brother had
ventured to give a stranger so large a sum. “Well,” said Mr. Henderson, “in
plain truth, it was just your Scotch tongue and honest Scotch face, and
nothing else!” The friendship which originated in this novel introduction
lasted with their lives.
There was, in truth, something singularly winning in his open, handsome
countenance; and its influence on strangers was anew illustrated at a later
date, when Mrs. Nelson accompanied him in a tour through the Black
Forest. They were overtaken by a thunderstorm when in Baden-Baden, and
taking refuge in the nearest shop, they found it devoted to articles of virtu.
A woman in charge, who spoke English fluently, received them courteously,
and responded to Mr. Nelson’s inquiries in a way that greatly interested
him. On leaving he expressed his grateful thanks, and said he would have
liked to make some purchases, but unfortunately his remaining funds were
not more than sufficient for his journey home. The reply was: “Take
whatever you please, sir. No one could look in your face and distrust you.”
He did accordingly carry off some choice objects of virtu, always a
temptation to him; the money for which, it is scarcely necessary to add, was
duly remitted on reaching England.
Provided, on such novel security, with funds requisite for a prolonged
tour in the East, he was absent upwards of ten months, and turned the time
to account with characteristic assiduity. The late President of Queen’s
College, Belfast, the Rev. Dr. J. Leslie Porter, who, as a traveller in
Palestine, was familiar with the scenes embraced in Mr. Nelson’s tour, and
repeatedly conversed with him on points of mutual interest, remarks:—“He
did not as a rule enter into detailed descriptions of the localities he had
visited. His chief desire apparently was to elicit from those with whom he
talked the fullest information, as if to add to or correct his own impressions.
One thing particularly struck me: his questions were all pertinent and
exactly to the point. He showed a talent in obtaining exactly the information
he wished such as I have never known equalled, except in the case of one
person. He could glean a wonderful amount of knowledge in a very brief
period. He had himself been a close and accurate observer. He knew exactly
the points which, from want of time or opportunity, he had not been able
perfectly to grasp, and he put his questions in a form that brought out every
particle of information the person he addressed could give.
“Of Damascus Mr. Nelson spoke with great enthusiasm. ‘Yes,’ he said,
‘richness, beauty, and fertility are there. Where,’ he asked, ‘was the scene of
Paul’s conversion? Was it near the east gate, where tradition has located it?’
I pointed out that this could scarcely be, as Paul was on his way from
Jerusalem, and the road from the Holy City approaches Damascus from the
opposite side. He next inquired whether there was still any tradition of
Abraham; and he was very much interested when I told him that a few
miles to the north there is still a shrine, at the foot of the hills, called the
prayer-place of Abraham. ‘Is not that,’ he said, ‘a proof of the tenacity with
which even the oldest traditions cling to the country?’ There was much in
this; and he seemed to feel, as others have felt, that it may be used as an
argument in favour of the truth of the early Christian traditions regarding
the holy places of Jerusalem and other cities in Palestine. He asked much
about the leprosy. ‘Did any tradition of it exist in Damascus?’ I remember
well how deeply he seemed to be impressed when I told him that a short
distance outside the east gate there were the remains of a very ancient
building, called Naaman’s House, and that a portion of it was still used as a
leper hospital. He said to me, ‘I looked for the Straight Street, mentioned in
connection with the conversion of St. Paul, but could see no trace of it.’
Then I told him the results of more recent researches; how they had brought
to light the position and character of that great street which ran through the
city from the east to the west gate, and had on each side a double row of
columns, fragments of which can still be seen in the houses and courts
adjoining.”
But he had a no less keen eye for the modern Damascus, with its motley
population, its narrow streets and thronged bazaars, all full of strange
Eastern life and habits. “The mean, dirty thoroughfares, worse,” as he says,
“than an Old Town Edinburgh close, run between low, shabby-looking
houses; and nothing surprised me more than when I was taken through a
long dark passage, to suddenly find that the shabby street-front concealed a
beautiful court, laid out in garden fashion, with a fine fountain in the centre,
and flower-beds and orange trees, and round this the chambers, brightly
furnished with cushions and matting, etc., all opening on to it, like a scene
from the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” Nevertheless the predominant
thought in his mind was the Damascus of Roman and New Testament times;
the city to which Saul the persecutor was journeying when he was arrested
on the way, and commissioned to go far hence to proclaim the gospel of
glad tidings to the Gentile world.
Having gratified his intelligent curiosity, in seeking to discover the
ancient localities of Damascus associated with Scripture history, he
proceeded by way of Lebanon to Jerusalem. The associations of the city of
Zion, of Nazareth, the Jordan, the Syrian desert, and the Dead Sea, were
replete with interest to a mind trained from earliest childhood in devout
familiarity with every incident of sacred story. The novel scenes of Eastern
life were, moreover, explored with peculiar zest in this his first escape from
the restraints of homely Western civilization into that strange old East
where the customs and ideas of an ancient past still survive. In referring to
this visit to Jerusalem he remarks:—“I was there before any guide-book
was written; and so I had to consult my Bible, and occasionally Josephus,
on a point of history. After these I found Robinson’s ‘Biblical Researches’
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