Raphael Israeli reviews Andrew Bostom's superlative Legacy of Jihad in The Jerusalem Post:
In an extensive collection of primary documents and commentary, Andrew Bostom shows that Islamic jihad has always used war to compel the whole world to embrace Islam or live under its yokeThe Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims
Edited by Andrew Bostom
Prometheus
750pp., $28In our moribund world, traumatized by the Islamic holy war (jihad) on the one hand and by political correctness on the other, we find ourselves helpless in the face of worldwide Muslim terror and dumbfounded by the conspiracy of silence and permissiveness that allows abominable acts to unfold, but forbids publicly naming them.
Indeed, instead of calling horrendous acts what they are, more and more voices in the scholarly world, out of ill-advised squeamishness or avoidance, have elected either to ignore the Islamic import of the horrors or to "understand" and thus legitimize them. This is analogous to explaining the Mongol rampages or the Nazi massacres with sympathy for the perpetrators rather than to unequivocally condemn them.
The dhimmi state of mind submits to the aggressor instead of asserting its rights against him. It refrains from publicly teaching the nature and history of jihad, avoids condemning it under any circumstances, skirts any discussion embarrassing to Muslims and hides incriminating facts concerning Muslim conduct.
It is no wonder, therefore, that while numerous Muslim legal treatises and monographs on jihad describe (in native languages) the harsh realities of international relations as conceived in Muslim political theory, in Western languages it is hard to find all-encompassing anthologies on this essential aspect of Islamic law.
This is the unique contribution of Andrew Bostom, a prominent professor of medicine, who has taken a keen interest in the recent outbreaks of Muslim terror. He faced this dearth of sources accessible to the Western intellectual and determined to attack the problem himself. In his search, he unearthed many unpublished sources and segments of published texts that were improperly contextualized from a wide array of readings and translations. He then had original essays translated into English, borrowed translations from Western scholars, excerpted texts from secondary and tertiary sources, and created, for the first time in a Western language, a documentary history of jihad and the fate of non-Muslims under Muslim rule.
Read it all.
Those who choose to ignore or dismiss this book because of some contretemps or other with the author, or compiler (who has his maddening side), should think again.
Why ? Because for all those who read and thoroughly assimilate the contents of this book -- which are the work of, in the 20th century alone, 21 "major contributors" (listed in the back), including such figures as Snouck Hurgronje and K. S. Lal and Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq and Edmond Fagnan and Roger Arnaldez and Clement Huart and W. R. W. Gardner, and Majid Khadduri, and Dimitar Angelov, and Maria-Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru, and Vasiliki Papoulia and Aram Ter-Ghevondian and John Ralph Willis, and whose work, whose scholarship, in some cases unearthed from journals and books unobtainable except in the most remote stacks in the largest libraries, and now collected, translated, and republished for a public comprised of both specialists and the common reader, who will wish to know, who need to know, who find it essential to know, a good deal more about the theory and practice of Islam than they have been getting from the small army of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who have managed to penetrate, to infiltrate, and to seize power, in almost every major (and many minor) academic centers of teaching (but not real "learning") about Islam.
Among the unhappy will not only be the usual suspects at MESA Nostra, but also those who think of themselves, and are widely regarded as (not least by their generous sponsors) as brave battlers against those same apologists, but regard Bostom as one more upstart crow, a "non-specialist," an outsider, someone who didn't write a Ph.D. (for what that is worth, or means) in Islamic studies.
But in the case of discussions of Islam, it is a few outsiders (including such ex-Muslims as the scholar Ibn Warraq and the tireless polemicist Ali Sina) who are running rings around both the obvious apologists and those who, while smiting this or that Muslim terrorist or Muslim-related outrage, still do not get the problem quite right, and offer incomplete analyses of Islam, and of the dangers of a large-scale Muslim presence within the Lands of the Infidels.
There are many who have been received as non-apologist experts on Islam who rely, expressly or by implication, on a view of Islam that none of the contributors to this massive work would agree with. Some of those "experts" have carved out little empires for themselves, with the usual melange of a few Deep-Pocketed Contributors Who Are Profoundly Impressed With the Work You Are Doing, supplemented either by foundation money, or think-tank largesse, or of course -- how could I forget -- the vast sums that some command on the lecture-tour circuit (and if the lecture-tour circuit includes rapt and nubile listeners, possibly to be rendezvoused with later, so much the better).
Now comes Andrew Bostom, infuriatingly correct, and personally often infuriating, with a texte that, if thoroughly read, if thoroughly studied, if thoroughly analyzed,blows up a good deal. And not a few fixed formulas, not a few fixed ideas, not a few careers, as well.
Whatever else Bostom is, he is not in it for empire-building or the money. His career is elsewhere. His contribution to the understanding of Islam, its history and its practice, is, with this book, indispensable. And I would have added "beyond compare" except that in such a case, I would have deprived myself of the chance to -- compare it. And his book does not suffer by comparison. And what's more, he promises more to come.
So, to a great many people, ready and willing to ignore this book, I suggest that they not take the author's phone calls. Don't open his e-mails. But do read his book -- do read Lal, Hurgronje, Fagnan, Huart, e tutti quanti
They aren't sending you emails. They aren't phoning. They are safely dead. But the Islam they described is the Islam that is based on immutable texts. The only thing that has changed, since the days when they wrote, is that Muslim apologists, of the hard variety and of the soft, have seized control of the study of Islam, the scholarly journals, the outlets through which one would once have studied Islam.
Now someone comes along and blows a hole in the whole meretricious edifice constructed over many decades by many Muslim and Arab donors, and by the willing handmaids in, first ARAMCO, and now in MESA Nostra.
What will they do? How can they deny the scholarship compiled here?
They can't. The real apologists can only ignore. The brave quasi-apologists turning on the tap of phrases about "moderate Muslims" and even about a "solution" to something for which the word "solution" has no place, is irrelevant, is meaningless, will probably pretend to welcome the book, give it a tepid endorsement, possibly modify on the surface some of their phrases and attitudes so as to keep their audience and the money rolling in, and even permit themselves the little fiction that what one derives from Bostom's book is "exactly what I have been saying all along." After all, everyone wants to announce that, in saving the West (and, bien sur, hapless Israel) the only one to do it, they chirp or cry in unison, and then open their beaks very wide, is "me, me, me."
Tant pis for them. The jig is not exactly up, but getting close.