I wish I were knowledgeable enough to regularly refute the biases of people like Daniel Pipes. People whose understanding of Islam that I respect find him to be intolerant and often wrong, and that's generally been good enough for me. But I want to share one example that shows why Pipes cannot be trusted.

This spring, the government of Maldives (a small island nation in the Indian Ocean) and the United Nations Development program asked Paul Robinson, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to write a new version of its criminal code. The catch: the code had to be consonant with Shari'a. Robinson set up a special seminar this fall and is having his students do most of the work. When Pipes heard about this (via the detestable Little Green Footballs, no less), he screamed bloody murder:   more »