In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS I recount America’s first war against Islamic jihadists: its conflict in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries against the Barbary pirates. Few historians have recognized this as a jihad, but that is what it was: in June 1796, Pasha Hamouda, the bey of Tunis, offered to conclude a peace treaty with the United States, and stipulated that the Americans had six months to consider the offer, during which Tunisian pirates would not attack American ships. If they rejected the offer, the raids would resume, leaving the Americans no room to maneuver.
Hamouda signed his treaty officer as “commander…of the frontier post of the Holy War,” suggesting at once that the piracy was in service of a larger goal— jihad, conquest, and Islamization of the non-Muslim world—and that if the Americans rejected the offer, they would face war not just with Tunis but with the entire global forces of jihad. As we do today.
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