Brad Thor the new Salman Rushdie?

Brad Thor the new Salman Rushdie?
Angry Muslims threaten life of 'The Last Patriot' author

The author of the best-selling new thriller, "The Last Patriot," says his life already has been threatened for contending the Muslim holy book contains errors and is not based on the last revelations of Muhammad.

"I've already had multiple death threats come in, and that's something that we're taking very seriously with the tour coming up," said Brad Thor, whose "Patriot" already has climbed to No. 1 on the Amazon fiction list after its release last week.

Thor says he's adding security precautions as he goes forward with a national book tour.

In the book, which is being called the "Islamic Da Vinci Code," Thor posits that Islamic scholars have engaged in a conspiracy to cover up missing parts of the Quran that allegedly reveal their prophet had a final moderate revelation that abrogates the violent passages of the Quran.

Thor, who has served as a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Analytic Red Cell Program, says his research confirmed that parchments and fragments of parchments of the Quran were uncovered at the Great Mosque in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1974.

"What they found when they started studying them was, uh-oh, there's stuff in here that doesn't look like the Quran today," he explained, "and we've gone around telling everybody that the Quran is perfect and now here are these discrepancies."

More than 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide believe their holy book is the perfect, inviolate word of God – an exact word-for-word, perfect copy of the original book as it exists in Paradise and just as it was transmitted, without a single error, by Allah to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.

But Thor's main character in "Patriot" uncovers aberrations that differ from Islamic dogma, meaning the case could finally be made that the Quran needed to be re-examined in a historical framework.

"He had always believed that the Quran had been written by man, not God," Thor writes about his moderate Muslim protagonist in the opening chapter of his novel. "If such a thing could be proven, Muslims around the world would be able to re-examine their faith with a modern, 21st century perspective, rather than the outdated, unenlightened perspective of seventh-century Arabia."

Thor then spins a tale of murder and intrigue.

"The one thing I've learned from doing my research is Islam has some very dark, very scary skeletons in its closet that it does not want out there, that it absolutely cannot defend," he said.

Friends have warned Thor that his book will be viewed as blasphemous by Muslim fundamentalists.

"You're going to have a fatwah on you" like Salman Rushdie, said CNN's Glenn Beck, a family friend. "This is the kind of stuff that's going to get you killed."

Rushdie has lived under sentence of death since writing his novel, "The Satanic Verses." Muslim clerics condemned the book as blasphemous against Muhammad and the Quran.

But Thor says "Islam is getting a free pass," and he has the right to write anything he wants to write and Muslims have the "right not to read it."

He adds that he's tired of the chattering class in Washington glossing over the violent nature of Islam, sugarcoating it as a "religion of peace" that doesn't need to be reformed.

"I hear all the time about Islam being a religion of peace and I thought, wow, that's weird, there's so much violence in there," he explained in a recent interview with Beck. "And the more I study the Quran, the more I realize that it's unlike the Bible."

Thor notes that since 9/11, more than 11,000 deadly attacks have been committed by Muslims "in the name of Islam."

"We see these horrible things happen in Islam every day," he said, "and we don't even see mainstream Muslims standing up" to protest them.

Next week, the gutsy author even plans to stop for a book-signing appearance at the Borders in Baileys Crossroads, Va., which boasts one of the highest concentrations of Arab and Muslim immigrants in the nation.