The History of Jihad
From Muhammad to ISIS
By Robert Spencer
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. But
in The History of Jihad:
From Muhammad to ISIS, Islamic scholar Robert 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.”
In The History of
Jihad, you’ll learn about:
· The Christian whose personal grudge facilitated
the jihad conquest of Spain;
· The emperor of India who treated his
non-Muslim subjects with tolerance and kindness - because he had grown
disenchanted with Islam;
· The Sultan who commanded the jihad conquest of
Cyprus because he had grown fond of Cypriot wine;
· The Christian leader who was hanged outside
his cathedral for five days as a warning to other Christians not to resist
Islamic rule;
· The Muslim leader who wrote to the Byzantine
Emperor, a Christian, demanding that he "renounce this Jesus and convert
to the great God whom I serve. If not, how will this Jesus be able to save you
from my hands?";
· The caliph who exhorted his governors not to
be lenient on the non-Muslims, saying: "The non-Muslims are nothing but
dirt. Allah has created them to be partisans of Satan";
· How the Muslim Spain that Obama praised became
a center of the Islamic slave trade, where Muslim buyers could purchase
non-Muslim sex-slave girls as young as eleven years old, as well as slave boys
for sex, or slave boys raised to become slave soldiers;
· The Islamic warrior who fought without mercy
against the Hindus in India: "the blood of the infidels flowed so
copiously that the stream was discolored";
· The Islamic caliphate that made it a regular
practice to seize the children of Christian families, convert them to Islam,
and train them as slave soldiers;
· The Muslim reformer who gained a large
following among Muslims by personally stoning an accused adulteress to death;
· The little-known story of how America’s first
war was a jihad;
· The real story of how the Sphinx lost its nose
(no, Napoleon's troops did not shoot it off during target practice);
· The Islamic concept that makes it impossible
for believing Muslims ever to accept a State of Israel in any form;
· How Saudi Arabia revived the concept of jihad
worldwide;
· Why the ISIS movement gained such broad
support from Muslims around the world;
· The domestic and foreign U.S. policies that
are based on ignorance of the history of jihad; and
· The two governments that evidence shows aided
the 9/11 plot.
Spencer briskly traces
the 1,400-year war of Islamic jihadis against the rest of the world, detailing
the jihad against Europe, including the 700-year struggle to conquer
Constantinople; the jihad in Spain, where non-Muslims fought for another 700
years to get the jihadi invaders out of the country; and the jihad against
India, where Muslim warriors and conquerors wrought unparalleled and
unfathomable devastation in the name of their religion.
Told in great part in
the words of contemporary chroniclers themselves, both Muslim and non-Muslim, The
History of Jihad shows that jihad warfare has been a constant of Islam from
its very beginnings, and present-day jihad terrorism proceeds along exactly the
same ideological and theological foundations as did the great Islamic warrior
states and jihad commanders of the past.
The History of Jihad is the first one-volume history of jihad in
the English language, and the first book to tell the whole truth about Islam’s
bloody history in an age when Islamic jihadis are more assertive in Western
countries than they have been for centuries. This book is indispensable to
understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century, and
ultimately to formulating strategies to reform Islam and defeat radical terror.
"In this tour de force, Robert Spencer
narrates the transformation of the concept of jihad, 'exertion in the path of
Allah,' from a rallying cry for the prophet Muhammad's followers into a supreme
religious duty and the primary vehicle for the expansion of Islam throughout
the ages." --Efraim Karsh, author of Islamic Imperialism: A
History
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of
the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and author of sixteen books, including The
New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and
the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
