Ramadan Day 15 thought for the day from my new book The History of Jihad: The influential Islamic jurist Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who died in 1350 in the Abbasid capital of Damascus, explained the Islamic view of synagogues and churches: Those who are of the opinion that to pray in a church or synagogue is […]

When  they conquered India, Muslims were benevolent and tolerant, right? That’s what Rutgers Newark professor Audrey Truschke would have you believe. Ramadan Day 14 thought for the day from my new book The History of Jihad: “When Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony,” by Aijaz Zaka Syed, Saudi Gazette, August 19, 2017: AT a time […]

Ramadan Day 13 thought for the day from my new book The History of Jihad: Turkish President and would-be caliph Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to turn the Hagia Sophia, now a museum in Istanbul, back into a mosque. But how did the Hagia Sophia become a mosque in the first place? Today is the anniversary […]

The Qur’an and Sunnah sanction slavery, which is why it is so hard to eradicate in North Africa even today. In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, I recount how Captain G. F. Lyon of the British Navy traveled to Tripoli, where in 1819 he witnessed the arrival of a […]

“Tolerant al-Andalus”? Really? The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS contains verses the Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq wrote in 1066 to the Berber king Badis about Granada’s Muslim ruler, who had dared to choose a Jew as his secretary: He has chosen an infidel as his secretary when he could, had he wished, have […]

In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, you will meet a hero of Islamic history, Muhammad Ghori, who in 1191 and 1192 twice defeated a force of Rajputs led by the Hindu commander Prithviraj Chauhan in northern India. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Hasan Nizami noted that a primary objective of […]

My new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS tells the story of the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV, who was alarmed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and concluded, as have so many other Muslim rulers throughout history, that it was because Allah was angry over lax enforcement of the Sharia. So […]

In my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, I recount how in 711, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the governor of Iraq, sent the general Muhammad ibn Qasim into Sindh, modern-day western Pakistan. It was the beginning of the jihad conquest of India. Hajjaj gave his commander ruthlessly precise instructions: My ruling is […]