A true story by Khalid Durán, “How CAIR Put My Life in Peril”:
On April 4, 2001, a self-described advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. by the name of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), issued a press release1 attacking my forthcoming book, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews.2 CAIR’s attack snowballed into a campaign of personal vilification, which eventuated in a Jordanian political leader calling me an apostate (murtadd).3 Neither CAIR nor Sheikh ‘Abd al-Mun’im Abu Zant of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front had ever read or even seen my book, but the CAIR attack prompted the latter to issue an appeal to Muslims, asking them to unite to kill me. According to most interpretations of the Shari’a (Islamic law), an apostate from Islam must be executed.
At the time, it was not clear whether Abu Zant’s outburst constituted a formal fatwa–a religious edict. But the sheikh was unequivocal in calling for my “blood to be shed.” For its part, CAIR denied that Abu Zant called for my death and claimed that my American publisher concocted the death threat in order to increase sales,4 even though the threat first had been reported in a Jordanian newspaper, Ash-Shahid. Abu Zant lay low for a time, but on July 22, he again called me an apostate, and declared it lawful (halal) to shed my blood. This time Ash-Shahid expressly called his statement a fatwa and bragged about the worldwide media coverage given to Abu Zant and Ash-Shahid.5
The inflammatory language used by Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, to vilify my book, was bound to incite reactions like that of Abu Zant. Put differently, the accusations and the language used by CAIR in its statements, especially those in Arabic, could not but result in calls for violence against me. And so I find myself, the author of a book written to promote a wider understanding of Islam, under a death threat and in need of protection. CAIR has put my life in peril. Its actions are the culmination of a campaign meant to intimidate and silence not only me, but any Muslim in America who would speak out in favor of freedom, tolerance, and dialogue.
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Here is the original Hoppe piece being referenced.