Steve Gruber is a conservative talk show host with 25 affiliates in Michigan. I am grateful to him for this superb review of my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. This book is the first and only comprehensive narrative history of the entire phenomenon of jihad, from Spain to India and many, many other places — with massive implications for public policy, both foreign and domestic. Order it here now. Demand has been much higher than anticipated and so Amazon has already run out of stock, but they will have more soon, so order now!
“‘The History of Jihad’ an Epic Account the World Needs to Know,” by Steve Gruber, Newsmax, August 15, 2018:
Robert Spencer’s “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS” contains a wealth of information that Americans (and perhaps especially those entrusted with our foreign and domestic policies) do not know, and need to know. At the same time, it is a sweeping historical epic of an astonishingly broad scope, comprehensive and meticulously documented, yet readable and vivid in its retelling of triumph and conquest, defeat and loss, cowardice and collaboration.This book not only makes clear how it came to be that the United States is faced with the internal and external challenge that threaten the world’s lone superpower today, but illustrates the human cost of ideas. “The History of Jihad” demonstrates just how important it is that we approach what has been known as the war on terror not just as a military or national security matter, but as an ideological struggle against an enemy that challenges our most basic premises as a free society and a free people.
What is “The History of Jihad’s” most astonishing lesson is that, for all the confusion and denial surrounding that ideological antagonist today, we face the same ideological adversary that has threatened non-Muslim societies around the world for fourteen centuries. One would think by now, we would know exactly whom and what we are dealing with, and how best to do so. Instead, the willful almost gleeful ignorance is more pervasive than ever, which only shows all the more why Americans today need to read and understand “The History of Jihad.”
It’s all here: the story of how the Arab armies swept out of Arabia in the 630s with amazing force, and how the Islamic jihadis were from the earliest days of the global jihad emboldened by a religious doctrine that created for them a situation in which they could not lose: if they defeated their enemies on their battlefield, they would receive the possessions and the women of the vanquished; and if they were killed, they would be greeted by the fabled virgins of Paradise.
It was as potent an impetus for military conflict as has ever been devised, and it worked magnificently. Spencer uses the words of people who were on the scene as the jihadis advanced to tell the story of how, within 100 years of the traditional date for the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Muslims controlled an empire that stretched from Spain to India. Not only had they conquered, but the straitened conditions they forced upon the conquered peoples would be removed immediately if they simply converted to Islam. This made for the rapid Islamization of the lands they overran. The Roman civilization of North Africa was entirely obliterated; the ancient and proud people of Egypt almost entirely Arabized, and generations of Iranians, an equally proud people, taught to despise and disparage their native pre-Islamic civilization.
“The History of Jihad” contains much more as well. Spencer goes into immense detail about the jihad against India, which was waged for centuries in a manner even more brutal and bloody than it was waged elsewhere. Drawing on the accounts of contemporary court historians, who enthusiastically recorded the brutality of the Muslim rulers in whose courts they resided as if it were a magnificent achievement, Spencer provides an unparalleled tale of oppression and destruction, resulting in the deaths of millions of Hindus and the razing of tens of thousands of Hindu temples. Amid this unremitting story of inhumanity and barbarism, the Hindus only find respite when Muslim rulers, for whatever reason, set aside the restrictions upon them required by Islamic law. Akbar the Great, for example, the Mughal emperor in the latter half of the sixteenth century, grew disenchanted with Islam, and accordingly set Islamic law aside and granted relative freedom to the Hindus; his son and successor Jahangir, on the other hand, a Muslim hardliner, looked upon his father’s magnanimity with contempt, had the scholar who led him away from Islam beheaded, and reinstated many of the oppressive measures upon the Hindus.
The pages of “The History of Jihad” are full of such stories, demonstrating again and again that the ideology of jihad leads human beings to think that when they are brutal and inhumane to other human beings, they are serving the creator of all. This is the harsh lesson put forth by Spencer that all policymakers should heed, and ponder.
mortimer says
I am ready this book now and it is bristling with important information. The most important thing is the way the book ‘BUILDS’ fact upon fact relentlessly driving home the NORMATIVE, CENTRAL POSITION that VIOLENT JIHAD, LYING and DECEPTION have in Islam.
Far from being a ‘religion of peace’, Islam HISTORY reveals Islam as the religion of JIHAD, the most important activity in Islam, even more important than prayer.
The central part of jihad in the life of Mohammed and his community comes clearly through Robert Spencer’s CHRONOLOGICAL account of how the jihadists swept into central France, Poland and China in less than 100 years, plundering and enslaving.
This brutal, greedy, rapacious and enslaving horde conquered much of the ancient world through terror, brutality and theft.
mortimer says
correction : “I am READING this book right now … ”
GET ONE and GIVE ONE to an important influential person.
Tweet about and send info about it your list.
eduardo odraude says
And a key part of what makes the book great is that Spencer quotes the core Islamic sources themselves to show what happened. But he also writes in a graceful, vivid, and dramatic way, and takes the drama and force of the account from the sources themselves. The villain of the story makes it a good story, because the villain is in a way powerful and impressive. Great villains are not infrequently the most interesting part of a story. Islam, unfortunately, is one of the great villains of all time, even if many Muslims have no idea of that and are themselves victims of the aggressive, expansionist, totalitarian cult.
gravenimage says
Newsmax: ‘The History of Jihad’ an Epic Account the World Needs to Know
……………………….
Good stuff from Steve Gruber. Here’s more from him–including on the Muslim Jihad camp in New Mexico:
https://stevegruber.podbean.com/
mortimer says
Steve Gruber’s descriptions of the book and why the book is needed and why it is important are SUPERB English prose and he has ENCAPSULATED PERFECTLY what THE HISTORY OF JIHAD is about and how it is written.
I would send this book review to the MOST skeptical globalist people and I believe they would end up wanting to read HISTORY OF JIHAD by Robert Spencer.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
It’s begun:
“Video: UK Vigilantes Beat Down Would-Be Acid Attacker”
https://www.newswars.com/video-uk-vigilantes-beat-down-would-be-acid-attacker/
Vigilantism happens when police fail to protect the public.
SAE says
Thanks for link Flavius. Not Christian of me but, if they’d have doused the perp’s own acid onto his face and throat, rather than moo juice, THAT threat would’ve been resolved. One down, millions more to go. That is what I consider TRUE progress, unlike liberal BS. ?
gravenimage says
Good to hear the Jihadist was foiled by good people, Flavius.
Michael Copeland says
Robert Spencer’s “The History of Jihad” is a game changer.
The old attitudes will no longer be tenable.
jewdog says
Just finished it. It was concise, comprehensive and clear. The greatest story never told. Now to donate it to the Chabad library and make a pitch for a course on Islam.
gravenimage says
+1
Cicero says
Good review! I have ordered five copies and will give a couple to my local elected council representative as well as the chairperson of an Environment Campaign Group battling the construction of a an Islamic ffree primary school on the prominent site of a former police station in Hackney London UK