Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

by Raymond Ibrahim

A number of writers and analysts, myself included,4 have sought to answer this question by showing that Islamic scriptures and their mainstream exegeses often do indeed support the Islamic State’s and other jihadi organizations’ actions. What few have done, however, is answer this question from a macro-historical perspective—that is, not by citing what most in the West instinctively dismiss as “abstract,” “theoretical,” and thus “open-to-interpretation” words of old scriptures, but by documenting what Muslims have actually done to and in the West for centuries. This is an admittedly more complex task that requires a familiarity with and distillation of a number of arcane texts written over the span of a millennium and in a variety of languages—not just key verses in the Koran and hadith. Yet within the context of its stated purview, this book does just that: it records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons.