“This book is indispensable to understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century”: here is a new review of my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which you can order here, that has appeared in the American Thinker today.
“1,400 Years of Jihad and Islamic Terror, Well Told by Robert Spencer,” by John Dale Dunn, American Thinker, January 13, 2019:
Robert Spencer is the man, the best prepared person to write a comprehensive history of the horrors of Islam.
And he has.
Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is an amazing book, extraordinary in its detail and riveting in its narratives and analysis.
…This book is indispensable to understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century and ultimately to formulating strategies to deal with the Islamist threat and defeating radical Islamist terror.
It’s critical to know and understand this for context, yet that’s not being done. It’s certainly not being done by the wimpy Western intellectuals and politicians, intimidated by the well-developed Islamic propaganda machine.
Knowing the enemy is essential to survival and victory. To underestimate a threat and the nature of the enemy is suicide. Spencer has long been the leading historian of the nature of Islamic violence and conquest, and now he’s telling the story of the monstrous movement that is Islam. His grasp of the history of, and the important events and figures within, Islam from the beginnings to the present is unexcelled. In reading this book, it’s obvious he is the go-to guy for scholarship on the theology, or what is more properly the ideology dressed up like theology, of Islam as we can see it.
It’s also important that he be listened to. These days, 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. It’s not true. In The History of Jihad, 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.” He had been a highwayman and terrorist for years before he founded his religion, dying in 632.
Reading the details of the killings is not only alarming, but exhausting. I learned that some Islamist leaders spent all their time killing and torturing people and taking woman and children as slaves, both sex slaves and house slaves.
I also learned that Islam had a limited economic base – effectively confined to conquest and slavery. Muslims were effectively a criminal enterprise, and anything they acquired of value came from the end of a sword or the threat of death or torture.
The book is a long serial of bloodbaths and terrorist outrages.
I challenge any reader to keep track of the killers and the magnitude of the killing (millions died) in places such as North Africa and the Asian subcontinent, or the number of churches, shrines, temples of the non-believers destroyed and replaced with mosques. Civilizations decimated – it is a disgusting thing, Islam, and to keep track of the appalling conduct requires copious note-taking and remains difficult to grasp. Spencer tells a terrible tale, indeed, yet all Western intellectuals can do is talk about the conduct of the crusaders.
The Spencer book will cure the reader of that silly nonsense. One reads too many stories in the book of Muslim victors doing mass executions of enemies to have any fury left for crusaders. Muslim conquerors were positively steeped in violence and bloodshed – stacking the heads of their enemies high and raping all of their women, executing hundreds of thousands, and far more than can be accurately counted….
Read the rest here.

gravenimage says
“1,400 Years of Jihad and Islamic Terror, Well Told by Robert Spencer”
………………………….
Fine review by John Dale Dunn at the American Thinker.
I just finished this book a few days ago–harrowing, but required reading for everyone concerned about Islam.
william carr says
Mohammad and his followers operated a protection racket from the very beginning, surrender or die and those who surrendered lived in submission to Islam
eduardo odraude says
It is an excellent book, and documented from the Islamic sources themselves.
gravenimage says
True, Eduardo–important point. Many of the citations come from Islamic sources.
Mohammed’s pink swastika says
Hey man. Is there a name for what the Muslim conquers do when placing a mosque on a church. Or like what they did at ground zero?
gravenimage says
They *tried* to put a mega-Mosque at Ground Zero–Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller stopped it.
As for what this is called, I’m not sure beyond “Islamic supremacism”.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“Orban: Islam and Open Borders Will Divide EU into ‘Two Civilisations’”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/01/12/orban-open-borders-divide-eu-islamic-christian-west-christian-east/
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“EU Army ‘Already Taking Shape’ Brags German Defence Minister”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/01/12/eu-army-already-taking-shape-brags-german-defence-minister/
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“Arab Nations Inch Toward Rehabilitating Syria’s Assad”
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2019/01/13/arab-nations-inch-toward-rehabilitating-syrias-assad/
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“Egypt university expels female student for hugging male friend”
https://www.france24.com/en/20190113-egypt-university-expels-female-student-hugging-male-friend
Walter Sieruk says
In the book written by the scholar and expert on subjects of Islam and Islamic terrorism , Robert Spencer, which has the title of THE HISTORY OF JIHAD FROM MUHAMMAD TO ISIS on pages 367, 368 it’s revealed that “The early twenty –first century saw a sharp rise in jihad massacres perpetrated all over the West by individuals or small groups of Muslims : in London ,Manchester , Paris, Toulouse, nice, Amsterdam , Madrid, Brussels, Munich, Copenhagen Malmo, Stockholm, Turku [in Finland] ,Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Beslan ,among other places.”
Likewise,the jihadist or jihadists attacks in Western nations be the Muslim terrorists in the city of ,Strasbourg, Stockholm, London, Manchester ,Brussels , Paris, Nice, Berlin ,Madrid. Those jihad-minded Muslim terrorists who engage in those vicious Islamic terror attacks cannot be and will not be reasoned with. They will not respond to either logic or reason. They aren’t interested, at all, in reason or logic. So they have to be dealt with by a strong force of might; either by the police or the use of force by the military. For to even try to reason with a jihad-minded Muslim terrorist is just as much an act of futility as trying to teach algebra to a rabbit.
Elizabeth Baklaich says
Bought the book, finished it in record time then loaned it to a friend then bought it again on audible, (btw great choice 🙂 in narrator) to drill down all the information. This book is a must have for anyone educating themselves on the current threat, 1400 Years of Jihad proves the threat.
Thank you Mr. Spencer for all your work!!! Thank you for sticking your neck out everyday when so many hide, also thank you for being such a wonderful resource.
God bless you and keep you safe.
Mick says
If I had the money, I’d buy hundreds of this book and mail them to every politician I could.