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Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims
This book reveals how, for well over a millennium and across three continents - Asia, Africa, and Europe - non-Muslims who were vanquished by jihad wars became forced tributaries (called dhimmi in Arabic) in lieu of being slain. Under the dhimmi religious caste system, non-Muslims were subjected to legal and financial oppression, as well as social isolation. Extensive primary and secondary source materials, many translated here for the first time into English, are presented, making clear that jihad conquests were brutal, imperialist advances, which spurred waves of Muslims to expropriate a vast expanse of lands and subdue millions of indigenous peoples. Finally, the book examines how jihad war, as a permanent and uniquely Islamic institution, ultimately regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims to this day. Scholars, educators, and interested lay readers will find this collection an invaluable resource.
782 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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October 31, 2025
From early 2006 through the COVID-19 years, I immersed myself in the study of comparative religion. It was during that contemplative phase that I read this book.
Bostom’s *Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims* emerges from that volatile literary and ideological moment when the word “jihad” ceased to be a term of historical curiosity and became a charged political shibboleth. Published in the early twenty-first century, the book positions itself as both a scholarly anthology and a cultural intervention, claiming to recover the “true” meaning of jihad from Islamic sources and history. Yet, under the postmodern lens, its epistemic posture appears less like an act of illumination and more like a performance of power—a text that re-inscribes the binaries it claims to expose.
What it frames as “documentation” becomes, on closer reading, an elaborate staging of the civilizational divide: the West as the archive of rationality, Islam as the site of fanaticism. The book is not merely about history—it is about the production of historical authority itself, about who gets to narrate violence, and whose violence gets sanctified as defense rather than aggression.
Bostom’s work is a monumental compilation, and in that, it initially evokes the authority of the historian. It resembles a textual fortress: pages upon pages of quotations, chronicles, and exegesis, carefully stacked to overwhelm dissent. However, the postmodern critic knows that such excess—this archival glut—is never neutral. Foucault would call it a “disciplinary archive,” where accumulation serves the function of control. The parade of sources—from classical jurists to chroniclers of conquest—is marshalled less for hermeneutic depth than for rhetorical domination.
Each citation, stripped of its original discursive context, becomes an exhibit in a museum of moral decay. This, ironically, is a profoundly modern act: the imposition of linear reason upon an infinitely complex tradition. In this sense, *Legacy of Jihad* enacts the very epistemic violence that Edward Said diagnosed in *Orientalism*. It transforms Islam into an object of perpetual scrutiny, a field of pathology where the Western scholar’s gaze dissects and defines the Other’s soul.
What’s fascinating—and troubling—is how Bostom deploys the language of “legacy.” The term implies inheritance, a chain of transmission that stretches across centuries. But postmodernism teaches us to be wary of such temporal continuities. There is no unbroken “legacy” of jihad any more than there is a pure lineage of Western liberty. Bostom’s temporal flattening—his tendency to read medieval chronicles as evidence of twenty-first-century terrorism—reflects a hermeneutic anachronism masquerading as empirical rigour. History, in his telling, is not a texture of discontinuities but a straight road from the seventh century to the Twin Towers. This linearity is itself an ideological construct, a narrative convenience that serves to stabilize identity: the West as eternally embattled, Islam as eternally bellicose. Here the historian becomes mythmaker. The “legacy” he claims to unveil is one that the postmodern critic recognizes as simulacrum—what Baudrillard would call “the precession of simulacra,” where representation precedes reality.
The post-9/11 context of Bostom’s work cannot be ignored. It is the ghost haunting every page. The text reads like a juridical brief for the moral legitimacy of the War on Terror, couched in the idiom of scholarship. Its form is academic, but its function is polemical. In this way, *Legacy of Jihad* exemplifies what Jean-François Lyotard called the “grand narrative” of modernity—the story that legitimizes power through knowledge. Bostom’s grand narrative is the civilizational struggle: reason versus fanaticism, enlightenment versus medievalism, West versus Islam. Yet, in the postmodern condition, such grand narratives collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
The very structure of Bostom’s argument—his claim to objectivity, his invocation of universal truth—is undermined by the multiplicity of meanings that “jihad” has carried across centuries. The spiritual jihad of self-purification, the socio-political jihad of defense, the metaphorical jihad of struggle against injustice—all are subsumed beneath a single totalizing definition. In reducing semantic plurality to dogmatic singularity, the text performs the very fundamentalism it condemns.
Aesthetically, *Legacy of Jihad* reads like a palimpsest of Western anxieties. Beneath the scholarly apparatus, one senses the pulse of fear, the obsession with purity, the desire to locate evil outside the self. In that sense, it participates in a long cultural lineage stretching from medieval polemics to colonial ethnography. The “Muslim Other” here is both enemy and mirror. When Bostom describes the spread of Islam as a “holy war,” he unwittingly echoes the Christian crusading ethos that underwrote Europe’s own imperial violence.
The reader, aware of this irony, feels the postmodern vertigo of mirrored guilt: every accusation boomerangs back toward the accuser. What appears as a historiographical project becomes, in effect, a confessional document of Western neurosis. The attempt to pin aggression onto the Other reveals the insecurity of a civilization haunted by its own history of domination. Derrida might say that the text suffers from “autoimmunity”: in seeking to protect itself from the Other, it destroys its own ethical coherence.
Even stylistically, Bostom’s prose is symptomatic of this tension. It oscillates between the clinical and the moralistic, between the scholar’s detachment and the preacher’s fervour. This tonal instability betrays the text’s deeper identity crisis. It wants to be both archive and accusation, both scientific and redemptive. The result is a hybrid discourse that, to a postmodern reader, feels performative rather than persuasive. The accumulation of data becomes a spectacle of certainty—a way to dazzle rather than to convince. Here the book crosses from historiography into theatre, where knowledge is not a pursuit but a performance of righteousness. In this, it aligns more with the late-capitalist spectacle of fear—news cycles, security narratives, geopolitical branding—than with the quiet labour of historical understanding.
Yet, to dismiss *Legacy of Jihad* entirely would be to miss its cultural significance. It reveals, with almost painful clarity, how knowledge functions under ideological siege. The book becomes an artifact of its time: a textual fossil of the early twenty-first century’s moral panic. In the wake of terror, nations sought not just security but epistemic closure. Bostom’s text offers that closure through the illusion of historical proof. It reassures the reader that chaos has a genealogy, that evil has a lineage, that violence can be contained within a single religious tradition rather than diffused through the human condition. This reassurance, though comforting, is profoundly false. The postmodern critic reads it as a symptom of what Slavoj Žižek might call “fetishistic disavowal”: we know that violence is universal, yet we act as if it belongs only to the Other. The book thus becomes a moral prosthetic, allowing the West to continue its own projects of domination under the guise of defense.
In dissecting Bostom’s project, one must also acknowledge his method of citation. The anthology structure gives the illusion of plural voices, but the editorial framing dictates a single interpretation. Passages from Islamic jurists, poets, and chroniclers are presented without the dialectical counterweights that existed within Islamic intellectual history itself. The vibrant debates of classical Islam—the contestations between Sufis and literalists, philosophers and theologians—are flattened into monotone. The absence of this internal plurality is what renders Bostom’s “legacy” sterile. A living tradition becomes a museum exhibit, frozen and lifeless. The very multiplicity that postmodernism celebrates is here denied. The text’s authority depends on silencing the heteroglossia of Islamic discourse. This is not just selective history; it is epistemic pruning—a curation of voices to fit a predetermined narrative.
It is worth contrasting this approach with the postmodern ethic of fragmentation. Where Bostom seeks coherence, the postmodern historian seeks disruption. Instead of asking what jihad “is,” one might ask how the meaning of jihad has been produced, contested, and transformed across contexts. This shift—from essence to discourse—exposes the rhetorical machinery of texts like *Legacy of Jihad*. The question is not whether jihad has ever been violent (history is littered with violence on all sides), but how “jihad” becomes a signifier of fear in Western consciousness. The answer lies not in scripture but in media, policy, and ideology. In other words, Bostom’s book is less a study of Islam than a mirror reflecting Western discourse about Islam. It tells us what the West fears, not what the Muslim world is.
Still, one must admit that the book has academic appeal in certain circles. It satisfies the empiricist’s hunger for citation, the moralist’s hunger for condemnation, and the politician’s hunger for legitimacy. However, to the critical reader, this triangulation of power, morality, and knowledge feels deeply suspect. Michel de Certeau might call it a “scriptural economy,” where texts serve the managerial needs of ideology. The pages of *Legacy of Jihad* become bureaucratic paperwork for empire—a way of administering difference through documentation. In this sense, the book is part of a larger post-9/11 textual apparatus that includes think tank reports, counterterrorism manuals, and cultural propaganda. Each of these, like Bostom’s anthology, transforms fear into fact, anxiety into archive.
At the same time, it is not enough to accuse the book of Orientalism. Postmodern criticism must also interrogate its own complicity. The very act of critiquing Bostom risks reproducing the binary he constructs: enlightened critic versus dogmatic historian. A more nuanced reading would recognize that *Legacy of Jihad* operates within the contradictions of modernity itself.
It is born of genuine historical curiosity, yet warped by the epistemic framework of its age. It seeks truth but finds ideology. Its failure, therefore, is not simply moral but ontological—it reflects the impossibility of writing objective history in a world where language is already politicized. The postmodern condition does not allow innocence in scholarship; every citation carries the residue of power.
The tragic irony is that the book could have been something more. Had Bostom embraced multiplicity—had he allowed jihad to be both struggle and conquest, both spiritual and material—his project might have opened a space for dialogue rather than entrenchment. But the will to clarity triumphs over the will to complexity. In reducing a civilization’s self-understanding to a dossier of atrocities, the book ends up resembling the very religious dogmatism it claims to expose. In this way, *Legacy of Jihad* becomes a cautionary tale for all scholars: that knowledge pursued without reflexivity devolves into propaganda, and that history wielded as a weapon destroys both its object and its wielder.
To read *Legacy of Jihad* today, in a time when global politics has shifted again—when the binaries of East and West are giving way to more hybrid, postnational anxieties—is to see it as a relic of a bygone discourse. The world has moved toward fragmentation, toward the chaos of overlapping crises: digital surveillance, ecological collapse, populism. The old civilizational narratives feel archaic, even quaint. Yet, the book persists, circulating through ideological ecosystems that thrive on nostalgia for certainty. It continues to be cited, not for what it proves, but for what it promises: the comfort of a clear enemy. That, perhaps, is its enduring tragedy and its enduring power.
Ultimately, *Legacy of Jihad* can be read as an unintentional allegory of the West’s own epistemic struggle. Beneath its polemics lies a desperate desire to locate moral coherence in a world unmoored by modernity. The obsession with the “fate of non-Muslims” becomes a proxy for the fate of meaning itself in the postmodern age. Bostom’s fear of jihad mirrors the Western scholar’s fear of interpretive chaos. In that sense, the book becomes self-referential: it is itself a jihad—a struggle against ambiguity, against pluralism, against the terror of not knowing.
And perhaps, in this final paradox, the postmodern critic finds a strange kind of empathy. For all its errors and excesses, *Legacy of Jihad* reveals a universal human impulse: the longing to impose order upon the incomprehensible, to name the dark so that one might not be swallowed by it.
Give it a try, if you choose to.
Bostom’s *Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims* emerges from that volatile literary and ideological moment when the word “jihad” ceased to be a term of historical curiosity and became a charged political shibboleth. Published in the early twenty-first century, the book positions itself as both a scholarly anthology and a cultural intervention, claiming to recover the “true” meaning of jihad from Islamic sources and history. Yet, under the postmodern lens, its epistemic posture appears less like an act of illumination and more like a performance of power—a text that re-inscribes the binaries it claims to expose.
What it frames as “documentation” becomes, on closer reading, an elaborate staging of the civilizational divide: the West as the archive of rationality, Islam as the site of fanaticism. The book is not merely about history—it is about the production of historical authority itself, about who gets to narrate violence, and whose violence gets sanctified as defense rather than aggression.
Bostom’s work is a monumental compilation, and in that, it initially evokes the authority of the historian. It resembles a textual fortress: pages upon pages of quotations, chronicles, and exegesis, carefully stacked to overwhelm dissent. However, the postmodern critic knows that such excess—this archival glut—is never neutral. Foucault would call it a “disciplinary archive,” where accumulation serves the function of control. The parade of sources—from classical jurists to chroniclers of conquest—is marshalled less for hermeneutic depth than for rhetorical domination.
Each citation, stripped of its original discursive context, becomes an exhibit in a museum of moral decay. This, ironically, is a profoundly modern act: the imposition of linear reason upon an infinitely complex tradition. In this sense, *Legacy of Jihad* enacts the very epistemic violence that Edward Said diagnosed in *Orientalism*. It transforms Islam into an object of perpetual scrutiny, a field of pathology where the Western scholar’s gaze dissects and defines the Other’s soul.
What’s fascinating—and troubling—is how Bostom deploys the language of “legacy.” The term implies inheritance, a chain of transmission that stretches across centuries. But postmodernism teaches us to be wary of such temporal continuities. There is no unbroken “legacy” of jihad any more than there is a pure lineage of Western liberty. Bostom’s temporal flattening—his tendency to read medieval chronicles as evidence of twenty-first-century terrorism—reflects a hermeneutic anachronism masquerading as empirical rigour. History, in his telling, is not a texture of discontinuities but a straight road from the seventh century to the Twin Towers. This linearity is itself an ideological construct, a narrative convenience that serves to stabilize identity: the West as eternally embattled, Islam as eternally bellicose. Here the historian becomes mythmaker. The “legacy” he claims to unveil is one that the postmodern critic recognizes as simulacrum—what Baudrillard would call “the precession of simulacra,” where representation precedes reality.
The post-9/11 context of Bostom’s work cannot be ignored. It is the ghost haunting every page. The text reads like a juridical brief for the moral legitimacy of the War on Terror, couched in the idiom of scholarship. Its form is academic, but its function is polemical. In this way, *Legacy of Jihad* exemplifies what Jean-François Lyotard called the “grand narrative” of modernity—the story that legitimizes power through knowledge. Bostom’s grand narrative is the civilizational struggle: reason versus fanaticism, enlightenment versus medievalism, West versus Islam. Yet, in the postmodern condition, such grand narratives collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
The very structure of Bostom’s argument—his claim to objectivity, his invocation of universal truth—is undermined by the multiplicity of meanings that “jihad” has carried across centuries. The spiritual jihad of self-purification, the socio-political jihad of defense, the metaphorical jihad of struggle against injustice—all are subsumed beneath a single totalizing definition. In reducing semantic plurality to dogmatic singularity, the text performs the very fundamentalism it condemns.
Aesthetically, *Legacy of Jihad* reads like a palimpsest of Western anxieties. Beneath the scholarly apparatus, one senses the pulse of fear, the obsession with purity, the desire to locate evil outside the self. In that sense, it participates in a long cultural lineage stretching from medieval polemics to colonial ethnography. The “Muslim Other” here is both enemy and mirror. When Bostom describes the spread of Islam as a “holy war,” he unwittingly echoes the Christian crusading ethos that underwrote Europe’s own imperial violence.
The reader, aware of this irony, feels the postmodern vertigo of mirrored guilt: every accusation boomerangs back toward the accuser. What appears as a historiographical project becomes, in effect, a confessional document of Western neurosis. The attempt to pin aggression onto the Other reveals the insecurity of a civilization haunted by its own history of domination. Derrida might say that the text suffers from “autoimmunity”: in seeking to protect itself from the Other, it destroys its own ethical coherence.
Even stylistically, Bostom’s prose is symptomatic of this tension. It oscillates between the clinical and the moralistic, between the scholar’s detachment and the preacher’s fervour. This tonal instability betrays the text’s deeper identity crisis. It wants to be both archive and accusation, both scientific and redemptive. The result is a hybrid discourse that, to a postmodern reader, feels performative rather than persuasive. The accumulation of data becomes a spectacle of certainty—a way to dazzle rather than to convince. Here the book crosses from historiography into theatre, where knowledge is not a pursuit but a performance of righteousness. In this, it aligns more with the late-capitalist spectacle of fear—news cycles, security narratives, geopolitical branding—than with the quiet labour of historical understanding.
Yet, to dismiss *Legacy of Jihad* entirely would be to miss its cultural significance. It reveals, with almost painful clarity, how knowledge functions under ideological siege. The book becomes an artifact of its time: a textual fossil of the early twenty-first century’s moral panic. In the wake of terror, nations sought not just security but epistemic closure. Bostom’s text offers that closure through the illusion of historical proof. It reassures the reader that chaos has a genealogy, that evil has a lineage, that violence can be contained within a single religious tradition rather than diffused through the human condition. This reassurance, though comforting, is profoundly false. The postmodern critic reads it as a symptom of what Slavoj Žižek might call “fetishistic disavowal”: we know that violence is universal, yet we act as if it belongs only to the Other. The book thus becomes a moral prosthetic, allowing the West to continue its own projects of domination under the guise of defense.
In dissecting Bostom’s project, one must also acknowledge his method of citation. The anthology structure gives the illusion of plural voices, but the editorial framing dictates a single interpretation. Passages from Islamic jurists, poets, and chroniclers are presented without the dialectical counterweights that existed within Islamic intellectual history itself. The vibrant debates of classical Islam—the contestations between Sufis and literalists, philosophers and theologians—are flattened into monotone. The absence of this internal plurality is what renders Bostom’s “legacy” sterile. A living tradition becomes a museum exhibit, frozen and lifeless. The very multiplicity that postmodernism celebrates is here denied. The text’s authority depends on silencing the heteroglossia of Islamic discourse. This is not just selective history; it is epistemic pruning—a curation of voices to fit a predetermined narrative.
It is worth contrasting this approach with the postmodern ethic of fragmentation. Where Bostom seeks coherence, the postmodern historian seeks disruption. Instead of asking what jihad “is,” one might ask how the meaning of jihad has been produced, contested, and transformed across contexts. This shift—from essence to discourse—exposes the rhetorical machinery of texts like *Legacy of Jihad*. The question is not whether jihad has ever been violent (history is littered with violence on all sides), but how “jihad” becomes a signifier of fear in Western consciousness. The answer lies not in scripture but in media, policy, and ideology. In other words, Bostom’s book is less a study of Islam than a mirror reflecting Western discourse about Islam. It tells us what the West fears, not what the Muslim world is.
Still, one must admit that the book has academic appeal in certain circles. It satisfies the empiricist’s hunger for citation, the moralist’s hunger for condemnation, and the politician’s hunger for legitimacy. However, to the critical reader, this triangulation of power, morality, and knowledge feels deeply suspect. Michel de Certeau might call it a “scriptural economy,” where texts serve the managerial needs of ideology. The pages of *Legacy of Jihad* become bureaucratic paperwork for empire—a way of administering difference through documentation. In this sense, the book is part of a larger post-9/11 textual apparatus that includes think tank reports, counterterrorism manuals, and cultural propaganda. Each of these, like Bostom’s anthology, transforms fear into fact, anxiety into archive.
At the same time, it is not enough to accuse the book of Orientalism. Postmodern criticism must also interrogate its own complicity. The very act of critiquing Bostom risks reproducing the binary he constructs: enlightened critic versus dogmatic historian. A more nuanced reading would recognize that *Legacy of Jihad* operates within the contradictions of modernity itself.
It is born of genuine historical curiosity, yet warped by the epistemic framework of its age. It seeks truth but finds ideology. Its failure, therefore, is not simply moral but ontological—it reflects the impossibility of writing objective history in a world where language is already politicized. The postmodern condition does not allow innocence in scholarship; every citation carries the residue of power.
The tragic irony is that the book could have been something more. Had Bostom embraced multiplicity—had he allowed jihad to be both struggle and conquest, both spiritual and material—his project might have opened a space for dialogue rather than entrenchment. But the will to clarity triumphs over the will to complexity. In reducing a civilization’s self-understanding to a dossier of atrocities, the book ends up resembling the very religious dogmatism it claims to expose. In this way, *Legacy of Jihad* becomes a cautionary tale for all scholars: that knowledge pursued without reflexivity devolves into propaganda, and that history wielded as a weapon destroys both its object and its wielder.
To read *Legacy of Jihad* today, in a time when global politics has shifted again—when the binaries of East and West are giving way to more hybrid, postnational anxieties—is to see it as a relic of a bygone discourse. The world has moved toward fragmentation, toward the chaos of overlapping crises: digital surveillance, ecological collapse, populism. The old civilizational narratives feel archaic, even quaint. Yet, the book persists, circulating through ideological ecosystems that thrive on nostalgia for certainty. It continues to be cited, not for what it proves, but for what it promises: the comfort of a clear enemy. That, perhaps, is its enduring tragedy and its enduring power.
Ultimately, *Legacy of Jihad* can be read as an unintentional allegory of the West’s own epistemic struggle. Beneath its polemics lies a desperate desire to locate moral coherence in a world unmoored by modernity. The obsession with the “fate of non-Muslims” becomes a proxy for the fate of meaning itself in the postmodern age. Bostom’s fear of jihad mirrors the Western scholar’s fear of interpretive chaos. In that sense, the book becomes self-referential: it is itself a jihad—a struggle against ambiguity, against pluralism, against the terror of not knowing.
And perhaps, in this final paradox, the postmodern critic finds a strange kind of empathy. For all its errors and excesses, *Legacy of Jihad* reveals a universal human impulse: the longing to impose order upon the incomprehensible, to name the dark so that one might not be swallowed by it.
Give it a try, if you choose to.
August 3, 2007
Despite its cumbersome and intimidating format, this book is indispensable to anyone who cares to know the truth about the wicked doctrine of Jihad, and all its attendant institutions. Dr. Bostom, an accomplished medical scholar and teacher, basically lets the theorists of Jihad, dating back to the very infancy of Islam, speak for themselves, reprinting in English translation a mass of documentary evidence. He also lets the victims of this most terrible of all imperial instruments speak for themselves.
January 31, 2009
Like Bat Ye'or's books, this one covers similar topics with a similar approach - it shows how Muslims have treated non-Muslims throughout the history of Islam, demonstrating with brutal clarity that Islam is most definitely NOT a religion of peace and tolerance. Not an easy read, but worth it.
August 25, 2014
informative and reads fast but is way way biased in my personal opinion,
it almost sounds as propaganda from the american point of view
it almost sounds as propaganda from the american point of view
April 23, 2011
The xenophobes in our country claim that Islam is a purely evil and violent religion, while the more reasonable say that terrorism is merely an extreme minority that can be found in every religion. The Legacy of Jihad is a lengthy and monotonous collection of writings about Islamic jihad authored by a wide variety of experts. The collection has pieces from thousands of years ago and many are directly from the Koran. I learned that violent Islamic jihad is more a part of mainstream Islam than I previously thought. The prophet clearly taught that jihad was a religious obligation for every Muslim, however, a certain amount of interpretation has been employed by different Imams and other religious leaders. This book was great in terms of history. It was, on the other hand, somewhat repetitive and slow moving. Good book to read if you want to know more about the role of jihad in Islam and the rest of the world.
Read
August 7, 2011Excellent reference. Defintely not light reading.
December 5, 2017
Ever dreamt of becoming a historian? A historian say, of Jihad? Then this is the book to read.
It offers source material for the historian of the Jihad, slightly pre-sorted. Some comments already added.
How about the choice of materials for study? Not the typical orientologists' angle of view. It also offers views of the victims of the Jihad, which is untypical.
It offers source material for the historian of the Jihad, slightly pre-sorted. Some comments already added.
How about the choice of materials for study? Not the typical orientologists' angle of view. It also offers views of the victims of the Jihad, which is untypical.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews