“This book is indispensable to understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century”: here is a new review of my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which you can order here, that has appeared in the American Thinker today.
“1,400 Years of Jihad and Islamic Terror, Well Told by Robert Spencer,” by John Dale Dunn, American Thinker, January 13, 2019:
Robert Spencer is the man, the best prepared person to write a comprehensive history of the horrors of Islam.
And he has.
Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is an amazing book, extraordinary in its detail and riveting in its narratives and analysis.
…This book is indispensable to understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century and ultimately to formulating strategies to deal with the Islamist threat and defeating radical Islamist terror.
It’s critical to know and understand this for context, yet that’s not being done. It’s certainly not being done by the wimpy Western intellectuals and politicians, intimidated by the well-developed Islamic propaganda machine.
Knowing the enemy is essential to survival and victory. To underestimate a threat and the nature of the enemy is suicide. Spencer has long been the leading historian of the nature of Islamic violence and conquest, and now he’s telling the story of the monstrous movement that is Islam. His grasp of the history of, and the important events and figures within, Islam from the beginnings to the present is unexcelled. In reading this book, it’s obvious he is the go-to guy for scholarship on the theology, or what is more properly the ideology dressed up like theology, of Islam as we can see it.
It’s also important that he be listened to. These days, it is taken for granted, even among many Washington policymakers, that Islam is a fundamentally peaceful religion and that Islamic jihad terrorism is something relatively new, a product of the economic and political ferment of the twentieth century. It’s not true. In The History of Jihad, Spencer proves definitively that Islamic terror is as old as Islam itself, as old as Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” He had been a highwayman and terrorist for years before he founded his religion, dying in 632.
Reading the details of the killings is not only alarming, but exhausting. I learned that some Islamist leaders spent all their time killing and torturing people and taking woman and children as slaves, both sex slaves and house slaves.
I also learned that Islam had a limited economic base – effectively confined to conquest and slavery. Muslims were effectively a criminal enterprise, and anything they acquired of value came from the end of a sword or the threat of death or torture.
The book is a long serial of bloodbaths and terrorist outrages.
I challenge any reader to keep track of the killers and the magnitude of the killing (millions died) in places such as North Africa and the Asian subcontinent, or the number of churches, shrines, temples of the non-believers destroyed and replaced with mosques. Civilizations decimated – it is a disgusting thing, Islam, and to keep track of the appalling conduct requires copious note-taking and remains difficult to grasp. Spencer tells a terrible tale, indeed, yet all Western intellectuals can do is talk about the conduct of the crusaders.
The Spencer book will cure the reader of that silly nonsense. One reads too many stories in the book of Muslim victors doing mass executions of enemies to have any fury left for crusaders. Muslim conquerors were positively steeped in violence and bloodshed – stacking the heads of their enemies high and raping all of their women, executing hundreds of thousands, and far more than can be accurately counted….
Read the rest here.