Two books to read on Islam and terrorism

Over the last twenty some years, a new politically correct, revisionist vision of Islam has asserted itself in the literature on the subject of world religion. This vision asserts a selective, censured history of Islam such as one finds in the now established classics of world religion such as Huston Smith's The World's Religions, or specific treatments such as Abdel Halim Mahmud, The Creed of Islam (1978), Kenneth Cragg's The House of Islam (1988), or Victor Danner's The Islamic Tradition (1988). Typical are the revisionist self-censorship of Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his Ideals and Realities of Islam (1989), The Heart of Islam (2002), and Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization (2003).

In sharp contrast to this is the new species of politically incorrect, wholly uncensored retrieved radicalism of writers such as Serge Trifkovic. I say "retrieved radicalism," because this other, contrasting current of writing about Islam has only recently fallen into eclipse in the West. The traditional Western Christian understanding of Islam has only been retrieved in this new radicalism, although it will surely be called "revisionist" by the now entrenched 'PC' establishment. Hilaire Belloc, for example, wrote a lengthy essay entitled "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed" (1936), which is reprinted in a book co-authored by Gabriel Oussani with articles from the old Catholic Encyclopedia in a volume entitled Moslems: Their Beliefs, Practices, and Politics (2002). Recent writers in this tradition of retrieved radicalism include, e.g., Paul Fregosi (Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuriest, 1998), Dore Gold (Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, 2003), Daniel Pipes (Militant Islam Reaches America, 2003), Robert Spencer (Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics, 2003), Bat Ye'Or, and her books, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (1996), Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2001), and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005), Bernard Lewis and his books, Islam and the West (1993), What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002), and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2004), and Thomas F. Madden's recent historiography of the crusades, "The Real History of the Crusades" (Crisis, 2002), and A Concise History of the Crusades (2005), Paul Marshall (Radical Islam's Rules , 2005), and, most recently, Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam [and the Crusades], 2005).

But far and away the best of these writers, in my humble opinion, is Serge Trifkovic. Trifkovic is a graduate of the University of Sussex, England, received his PhD at the University of Southampton, and pursued postdoctoral research on a State Department grant at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. He began his career as a broadcaster and producer with the BBC World Service in London and with the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. He also covered southeast Europe for U.S. News and World Report and The Washington Times. In addition to several books, he has writen scores of commentaries for the Philadelpha Inquirer, The Times of London, and Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has appeared numerous times on the BBC World Service, CNN Internatinal, MSNBC, and other leading media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic as a commentator on world affairs. He is a regular contributor and, since 1998, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Book No. 1

Trifkovic began to make a name for himself on the subject of Islam by writing "the other side of the story" with his publication of The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World (Regina Orthodox Press, 2002). Those who can't tolerate the political incorrectness of calling sin and evil by their proper names, as long as they are not associated with the Christian West, will be appalled at Trifkovic's accounts of Islamic savagery, both in the founding of Islam, as well as in its contemporary political recensions. But the critique of Islam to be found here -- historical, theological, and political -- is more thorough than any I have encountered. Trifkovic does not endorse war against Islam. The problem of the West, in his view, is not prejudice, but foolishness in the face of violence and barbaric cruelty as manifested in the ongoing slaughter of Sudanese Christians and appalling anti-Semitism of Islamic news media and clerics. The task of the West is to defend itself by restricting immigration and reducing dependence on oil reserves from the Islamic world, and by helping non-Muslims oppressed by Dhimmitude under Islamic law.

Book No. 2

In Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won -- in Spite of Ourselves (2006), Trifkovic develops his comprehensive stretegy for this defense against the Islamist attack on the West. Again, the politically correct crowd will not like what they read, but it was not for nothing that James Burnham wrote a book back in 1985 entitled Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Trifkovic points to an obvious and inescapable conclusion: that a correlation between the presence of a Muslim population in a country and the danger that it will be subjected to a terrorist attack is a demonstrable fact. It should come as no surprise that Muslims, as a group, are least likely to identify with their Western host countries. In Detroit, according to the book, 81 percent of Muslims "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" that Shari'a (Islamic religious law) should be the law of the land. Throughout the Western world, Islamic centers have provided platforms for exhortations to Muslims to support causes and to engage in acts that are morally reprehensible, legally punishable, and harmful to the host country's national security.

I have always concurred with Peter Kreeft's sympathy for Muslim abhorrence at Western moral decadence. America has more guns, more suicides, more abortions, more divorces, more drugs, more pornography, more fatherless children than nearly any country in the world. In this regard, any Christian (Catholic or Protestant) should find himself allied with any Muslim who finds all of this revolting. God's judgment lies heavily upon this. Yet it is quite another impulse to jump out of the frying pan of American decadence into the raging fire of wanton Islamic terrorism. It may be that Islamic terrorism is God's scourge upon a degenerate West that is willing to contenance the slaughter or more innocent human beings every day behind the closed doors of its tidy abortion clinics than were killed by Islamic terrorists on that single day of September 11, 2001. Yet that is no excuse for turning a blind eye to the evil of Islamic terrorism. Study it. See it for what it is. Call it what it is. Condemn it for what it is. Combat it, like abortion (and all the other aforementioned evils in this country), for what it is.