It’s recommendation day here in the Book Nook section of Dinocrat. We’ve had an unusually busy day, getting Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad, and Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad. (By the way, on a totally unrelated subject, we are currently enjoying Robert Harris’s historical novel about Cicero and Rome, Imperium.)

We want to comment on the review of The Legacy of Jihad that Lee Harris wrote in Policy Review, and mentioned by Thomas Lifson. Harris writes that Bostom answers the question about the nature of Jihad by using the most respected Islamic sources:

We all know by now that Jihad primarily means holy war against those who are outside the House of Islam — the infidels in the House of War — but there are the naive and those inveiglers who are practicing Taqiyya, so it is good to have the matter settled. (The use of respected sources in order to make the case is also a hallmark of Robert Spencer’s book on Mohammed, say Bostom: “A salient feature of The Truth About Muhammad is its exclusive reliance on pious Muslim sources: the earliest (and most respected) Muslim biographers of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq (died 773), Ibn Sa’d (845), and the great historian al-Tabari (923); the ‘gold-standard’ canonical hadith collections of Bukhari (870), and Muslim (875); and the Koran itself.”)

One of the most salient and interesting of the points Harris makes in his review is that Islam has an excellent strategy for making and holding conquests, by inviting the conquered to join Islam, and, though dhimmitude, providing a means for Christians and Jews in Islamic lands to get along well enough, compared to some conquerors in history:

Thus, it is not at all clear that Islamic Jihad might not work to wear down the weak, the lazy and the weak-minded, and produce an ultimate conversion of Europe or even America to Islam. Islam has a pretty impressive record, after all, of conquering and keeping lands. This scenario might be particularly true in what Harris calls the “Crash of Civilizations,” wherein the West submits ideologically in order to save itself from the brutality it would have to inflict against the fierce warriors or Islam in order to remain secular or Christian. When we read that section of Harris’s review, we couldn’t help being reminded of Lee Harris’s famous piece from four years ago in Policy Review, called “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” It seems perhaps less of a fantasy today, given what we have learned about our enemy and what drives him.

There is perhaps nothing more maddening in modern political life than the absolute failure of those both on the Left and the Right to engage the religious issues, for if we are in a war, it is surely an ideological and religious war, albeit a somewhat peculiar one. The failure to seriously engage the role of religion in Jihad is the greatest political failure in the United States since the Civil War. Since there is almost no one in contemporary political life to consult for greater understanding of these issues, we will turn in conclusion to the great Islamic historian, Ibn Khaldūn, called by Bernard Lewis “the greatest historian of the Arabs and perhaps the greatest historical thinker of the Middle Ages.” Lee Harris writes about Khaldun in his review:

For the Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun, the conquest by the warlike Arabs of more advanced yet weak and decadent empires represented a deep historical pattern. When a civilization becomes too sedentary, too decadent, too forgetful of the struggle for existence that originally put it on top, it becomes ripe for conquest by those who are still warlike and driven by a fanatical sense of mission. Thus, he noted, superior wealth and superior civilization were no guarantee that those who possessed them could hold on to them in the face of small but determined bands of fanatics united by a sense of what he called “group feeling.” In short, for Ibn Khaldun, jihad can be devastatingly effective even when it is waged against a civilization that, in material terms, is far in advance of the jihadists.

Ibn Khaldun died exactly 600 years ago, but he seems to understand the contemporary West much better than is evidenced from the current quality of political discourse. On the battlefield, the West can beat a boxcutter with a gun, but a West that disarms itself in religion, ideology, and faith in itself is no match for those who burn with belief.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.