It's always important to take what Orientalists write with a *huge* grain of salt - we have found mistakes countless times in their writings and assumptions. Case in point, the synopsis for the book has a mistake, and the entirety of the book builds on it. You can throw it into ansari.chat to get a good starting point on the fundamental misunderstandings it makes.
> Indeed; one side of my family is Iraqi :)
Yep, I was thinking about it and it very well seems that /g/ is the most widespread pronunciation in the Arab word: Iraq, many parts of West Asia (parts of Syria, parts of Jordan, and parts of Palestine), the Gulf states, Yemen, and many parts of North Africa, even parts of Egypt.
Those who wrote about Tajweed (Quranic Recitation) early on mentioned a lot of those other dialects (including examples of tribes that utter them) which would not be valid to recite the Quran. ك to /sh/ or /ch/ is another one, those also exist today and existed pre-Islam.
The Qira'at include both: different pronunciations of the same word or letter, as well as a curated set of recitations for the same word. This is very well established and evident, so I'm not quite sure where you read there is a debate.
In fact, the same recording I linked to in my previous post has both kinds - Ayah #4 is recited as "Maalik youm id-Din" and "Malik youm id-Din" (long vs short vowel). Maalik means "owner/master of" and Malik means "King". Both were pronounced by Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and recorded and transmitted. The rest of the pronunciations in the recording were dialects (e.g. ص is pronounced 3 different ways: pharyngealized voiceless sibilant, pharyngealized voiced sibilant, and a voiceless sibilant like /s/ in English).
Much of these pronunciations exist to this day too.
Not all dialects were permitted to be recited. For example, the letter ق is never pronounced as /g/ when reciting the Quran, even though that pronunciation existed, and exists today in spoken Arabic.
Regarding Arabic and the Quran, you can read about how the most eloquent Arabs at the time submitted to the language of the Quran - even those who rejected Islam out of pride and arrogance. When it was evident to everyone that the language of the Quran dominated all, it was only natural that it became the standard for the language. Simultaneously, the Quran itself is understood and comprehended through the language spoken at the time, which is why pre-Islamic poetry and prose - among others - are used for things like linguistic exegesis.
That's not entirely accurate. The Quran, to this day, is recited in different "dialects"/recitations (Qira'aat), not just that of Quraish. In fact, Quraish did not use to pronounce the Hamzah (glottal stop) for example, in words such as Mu'min (مؤمن). However, the most popular recitation today (Hafs 'an 'Asim) recites with the glottal stop, as do some others.
Other kinds of pronunciation include the way the Alif Maqsoorah is uttered. For example the name Moses is pronounced Moosa or Moosé (or varying degrees in between) depending on the recitation. These kinds of recitations trace their ways back to how different tribes spoke.
You can hear an example of such recitations for the first Surah of the Quran here[1]
Correlation vs causation (post WWI colonization comes to mind, that continues to this day). Historically, there was a period of time when there were no poor people left to take Zakat, everyone paid their share, and no usurious transactions permitted.
All interest is usury in Islamic Law (and the laws before it such as Christianity and Judaism). There are ways to to put free cash into productive use without exploitation.
The first thing I wrote is that they are two very different things, meaning that no, the same logic cannot be used to justify it. It's quite obvious to say the least.
israel has been documented countless times directly targeting civilians, including reporters, sniping women, children, sexual assault, the list goes on. It's a quick search away to see a very, very long list of war crimes.
Two completely different things. Even the UN acknowledges a people's right to resist occupation. 9/11 was condemned by practically all Islamic Scholars.