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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| The Legacy of Jihad |
| 2005-09-09 |
| Review: The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, edited by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, Prometheus, 759 pp. It is only fitting that Andrew G. Bostom's massive collection, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, appears in time for the fourth anniversary September 11, 2001, for no other collection since then has so well explained the theology and philosophy behind those Islamic attacks on America. The leaders of the free world have taken pains since late 2001 to explain that Islam is a religion of peace. But in this far-ranging, 759-page collection of Muslim and non-Muslim eyewitness accounts, scholarly Muslim theological treatises and superb historical surveys, it appears that Islam has actually practiced a grisly jihad campaign against non-Muslims from its earliest days, in the hope of satisfying the Prophet Mohammed's end goal: forcing the âone true faithâ upon the entire world. The somber tone of this monumental work -- graced in its midsection by a chronological summary of the first 500 years of Muslim conquests, including color-coded maps and Islamic art -- is set by the cover, a 19th century-Islamic painting entitled âThe Prophet, Ali and the Companions at the massacre of the prisoners of the Jewish tribe of Beni Kuraizah.â As its name suggests, the art depicts the slaughter of 600 to 900 Jewish men, who were led on Mohammed's orders to the market of Medina, where they were beheaded and their corpses buried in trenches dug for that purpose. Their wives and children were then enslaved. After viewing these accounts, histories and art works, it is hard to continue to believe that radical Islamists are in fact all that radical. Rather, in the most logical way, this collection shows that September 11 was not an aberration, but that Islam at its core seems a faith bent upon the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. Indeed, as many commentators here suggest, when one group of Muslims assumes responsibility for jihad warfare -- the only righteous kind of war, in the Islamic view -- the rest of the umma (Muslim community) is relieved of this fard, or religious duty. Thus, if radical Muslims believe they act on behalf of all Islamdom, Islamic traditions also confirm that they do. Rest at link. |
| Posted by:ed |