Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries

by Paul Fregosi and Paul Fergosi

Book Overview

"Jihad," the Muslim holy war against Christians and others, has raged for 1,300 years with bloody conquests in Europe dating from campaigns to convert the infidels in the 7th century to today's random acts of terrorism in the name of Allah. Yet this huge unrecorded "hole" in European history has been censored and stifled by political and literary authorities who have feared reprisals from angry Muslims trying to hide a legacy of brutality vastly more...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573922471
• ISBN13: 9781573922470
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 442 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

One of the most important books in print?

Paul Fergosi has presented an history that clarifies many of the most bitter ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that are destabilizing the world today. His writing style is compellingly readable. Some may be surprized that history can be both informative and satisfying ("entertaining" would be an inappropriate word, though it comes to mind.) This book presents an abridged chronology of world-shaping events and people. There WERE truly heroic and evil individuals behind the works of fiction such as "The Lord of the Rings" that will be recognizable to even the casual reader. The battles of good versus evil, and not-so-good versus evil, and evil versus evil, are often horrific, and are presented as such, with heroism or duplicity or incompetence presented without silly notions of moral equivalence or political correctness. You learn of the events that created the hates between Serbs and Bosnians, Turks and Greeks. I've read many books, ranging from the dry and rather detached to the hysterical, liking Thomas Sowell's "Conquests and Cultures," Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," and the English translations of Bat Ye'or's books on Dhimmi. They won't appeal to the casual reader the way this book will, even if it is just because it contains descriptions of mayhem and a gay revolt. This book should be read because it helps define what the West is contending with today. As Huntington said on page 217, op. cit."The problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it's Islam,..." The people teaching history in high schools and colleges today don't KNOW history, or they choose to ignore it. My children have all had college-level history classes, and even in upper-division courses, were fed non-sense about the "diffusion of Islam" around the world. The latter courses were post-9-11.

Europe's imperial cousin

If you think Christianity has been the biggest bogeyman for millennia then you might want to check out this big book on imperialism of a different name.For 1,300 years Islam has been every bit as ruthless,insatiable for land and loot and ready for war as any force imaginable.This fact has been largely forgotten and mythologized(Orientalized)in the last 100-150 years,and Westerners(intellectuals mainly),uneasy over European-American dominance,have indulged in every guilt-mongering,apologetic, and hairshirt wearing antic imaginable to apologize for our contemporary dominance.The self-bashing of the West may at last be coming to its end precisely because the quaint cultures of old Islam that were so long patronized and cartoonized are suddenly real and spreading again...and they are far from quaint and cute and noble.This book would be best read by those who take a far too myopic,European view of history;people who think that religious intolerance,slavery,warmongering and every evil under the sun are strictly European specialties.

There should be more books like this

This is an excellent book which is long overdue. The author and the publisher deserves much praise for their courage as this book is not only about military history but opens the eyes of the non-Muslim world, especially the West, to what Islam truly is, contrary to what Muslims wish to portray. Most Westerners I know perceive that all religions are the same. In this regard, there are two completely opposite views (although ironically, both reach the same aforesaid conclusion) which are as follows :1) that all religions promote friction, war and hatred; 2) that all religions promote peace and love and abhors violence. With regards to the first view, there are evil men from all faiths, some of whom use religion as a vehicle to drive towards their own goals and for justifying their own wicked deeds. In such cases, religion should not be attributed as the cause, in the same way cars should not be blamed for causing road accidents. In response to the latter view, indeed all major religions do promote love and peace save for one. The Quran says: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."What this book has succeeded in pointing out is that Osama and Ayatollah Khomeini did not come up with the concept of Jihad. The Quran did !!! Jihad is Muhammad's equivalent to Jesus' "Go ye and preach the gospel to the world". The Quran divides the world into the Abode of Peace (the Lands of Islam) and the Abode of War (the Lands of the Infidels) which should be conquered and subjugated by the faithful. The "offer" given to an unbeliever conquered in a Jihad is this: accept Islam or die. For Christians, Jews and other peoples of the Book, there exist a third option; to become a dhimmi, who had very little rights (ie. imagine, he was not even allowed to defend himself if he or his wife was attacked by a Muslim without reason) and was heavily taxed. Convert to Islam and problems solved.Time and again, Muslims and their Western apologists often cite the predicament of the Spanish Jews after the conquest of Granada and how they lived "happily ever after" after migrating to the Ottoman Empire. What they conveniently fail to mention is the fact that the religion in which the great Spanish-Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, was compelled to convert to was Islam and not Christianity; that Sabbetai Zevi (the "Jewish Messiah"), a Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire was forced to accept Islam on the pain of death and commissioned to evangelize the Jews for Islam; that in Morocco prior to the European colonization, the Jews were living under intense oppression; that the descendants of the Sephardim who had migrated to England, Holland, France, Italy and later on America, have achieved far greater wealth and success than those who h

VIVIDLY WRITTEN AND WELL SOURCED WORK OF HISTORY

I finished reading Paul Fregosi's book two nights ago and am still thinking about it. This was a memorable and engaging work of history, vividly written. I thought Fregosi's work was well documented and well "sourced" from an historian's and academician's standpoint. I also thought his was an original contribution (and counterbalance) to the existing literature. The early Islamists were the original imperialists. Centuries before Spain began its empire in the New World or the Hapsburg's ruled theirs, the Arabic Empire under the Umayyads and the Abbasids had already subjected (and even forcibly enslaved) entire peoples across North Africa, southern Europe, Italy, Sicily and the Middle East at the point (literally) of the sword. The imperialist facets of early Islam are a fact. When viewed from the perspective of the Islamic conquests of Europe in the 7th-12th centuries, the Christian Crusades are revealed to be what they always were - a counter-jihad or counter-crusade. These were responses to the highly successful Jihad of the Muslims. Pope Urban lifted a page from the Muslim playbook and came up with the Crusade idea. This is detailed in the book with appropriate cites. For all that, I thought Fregosi was fair, dispassionate and hard on both sides of these wars. At not several but MANY points in the book he condemns violence committed by both sides. I think he goes to some pains to indicate he is not anti-Muslim by sticking to the facts and by equally condemning all violence. Smart thing too, since some Muslims can display a tendency to violently react to anyone who criticizes or asks uncomfortably honest questions about their culture, faith, past military history, warrior-mentality, etcetera. Salman Rushdie is just the most famous victim of this reflex to condemn those who write or say things people of the Islamic faith don't like. Taslima Nasrin of Bangledesh is another example of a writer who has felt Islam's wrath. There are others languishing in jails who are less known to us in the West who did not tow the right Islamic line. So, Fregosi displayed some courage to write so eloquently on this type of subject.Fregosi's humanism, compassion, his passionate hope for a better and less violent future come through in his dedication (read it to see what I mean) and his final chapter, among other places. Fregosi can be tart, humorous, yes - a bit sarcastic too, but always, always, there is a caring, deeply morally concerned human being writing the story who mourns the deaths of so many. At some, more subliminal level, there is a deep sadness that permeates this book. Fregosi is by no means a "happy warrior" out to "get Islam." He mourns the torture, death, violence and enslavement of so many. He mourns the human rights abuses and abuse of women by the Arab empire and the Ottoman empire. He mourns the genocide committed by these regimes. I suspect he must have been under some psychological duress when he wrote his book given

A brilliant and dangerous book! Worth every minute!

This book is brilliant and the first one of its kind that I encountered in my reading experience. It is one of those unique books that hold such an antagonistic and seemingly biased tone, and yet this element of extremely strong and vivid personal opinion hardly interferes with this book's facts, credibility, and two-sided analysis. In any case, the subject of Jihad is probably the only subject in history in which an objective argument fails in eliminating persistent biased tones, especially tones of anger and disgust. Why? Because the extremity of historical truth in this matter is self-evident. This book is probably bound, at first,to discourage most objective people with no bias towards Islam, from continuing to read it; it's definitely going to have Imams and sheiks shrieking for blood and to have devout Muslims, fanatics and moderates alike, insulted to a large degree, but a persistent reader who can ignore for a while the apparent hostility in this book, may slowly find out that this work rests its claims on many reliable sources that can be found in a rich bibliography and is an accurate portrayal of long-hidden historical facts that have been shrugged off by many as hogwash or kept in the closet by those too intimidated by the Muslim World in exposing as apparent truths the base and unequaled crimes committed by the Muslim World throughout its long forgotten history.This book even goes so far as to critique Muslim teachings and the prophet's life itself, the very core of Islam, thus crushing the common argument that the Muslim World's actions (or rather today's fundamentalists') were never in concord with its inherent religion or its prophet. From a man who has lived all his life in the Arab world with Muslims, I can tell you that this book mentions and very effectively addresses most of the common Muslim cliches that are used in defense of this religion's barbaric history, most notably that the Crusades began the whole mess between Islam and the West, a totally false and ludicrous claim. Fregosi also focuses on the lives of Muhammad and the caliphs, the period of the Jihad from beginning to its unresolved present, the conditions of the conquered peoples' lives in most regions of the Muslim World, and on many informative primary sources. He also gives his own personal insight on the connection between the terrorists of today and the historical Jihad.I strongly oppose any reviewers who think this book is just another work taken from the batch of rhetorical, uncredible, and evidence-lacking anti-Islamic trash. Yes, I did think so at first, and yes, Paul Fregosi does have a hostile view and expresses that quite strongly, but, he does this as a result of objective analysis where he doesn't fail to make concessions and to criticize (sometimes with the same sarcastic tone) every non-Islamic side for its faults throughout various periods of history. Neither does he cringe at mentioning the few benev