The History of Jihad By Robert Spencer

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.