The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses

by Robert Spencer

239 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

ROBERT SPENCER is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). Coming in November 2017 is Confessions of an Islamophobe (Bombardier Books).

Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He is a consultant with the Center for Security Policy.

Spencer is a weekly columnist for PJ Media and FrontPage Magazine, and has written many hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism. His articles on Islam and other topics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, Fox News Opinion, National Review, The Hill, the Detroit News, TownHall.com, Real Clear Religion, the Daily Caller, the New Criterion, the Journal of International Security Affairs, the UK’s Guardian, Canada’s National Post, Middle East Quarterly, WorldNet Daily, First Things, Insight in the News, Aleteia, and many other journals. For nearly ten years Spencer wrote the weekly Jihad Watch column at Human Events. He has also served as a contributing writer to the Investigative Project on Terrorism and as an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.

Spencer has appeared on the BBC, ABC News, CNN, FoxNews’s Tucker Carlson Show, the O’Reilly Factor, Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File, the Sean Hannity Show, Geraldo Rivera Reports, the Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, America’s News HQ and many other Fox programs, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, C-Span, CTV News, Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News, France24, Voice of Russia and Croatia National Television (HTV), as well as on numerous radio programs including The Sean Hannity Show, Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor, The Mark Levin Show, The Laura Ingraham Show, The Herman Cain Show, The Joe Piscopo Show, The Howie Carr Show, The Curt Schilling Show, Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, Michael Savage’s Savage Nation, The Alan Colmes Show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, The Neal Boortz Show, The Michael Medved Show, The Michael Reagan Show, The Rusty Humphries Show, The Larry Elder Show, The Peter Boyles Show, Vatican Radio, and many others.

Robert Spencer has been a featured speaker across the country and around the world and authored 17 books. Spencer’s books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Finnish, Korean, Polish and Bahasa Indonesia. His Qur’an commentary at Jihad Watch, Blogging the Qur’an, has been translated into Czech, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Spencer (MA, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth since 1980. His work has aroused the ire of the foes of freedom and their dupes: in October 2011, Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups wrote to Homeland Security Advisor (and current CIA director) John Brennan, demanding that Spencer be removed as a trainer for the FBI and military groups, which he taught about the belief system of Islamic jihadists; Brennan immediately complied as counter-terror training materials were scrubbed of all mention of Islam and jihad. Spencer has been banned by the British government from entering the United Kingdom for pointing out accurately that Islam has doctrines of violence against unbelievers. He has been invited by name to convert to Islam by a senior member of al-Qaeda.

Reviews

[BenAbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about the effects that ideas have on a society. It's true that, as Camus said, we got into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking, yet it cannot be denied that what a man believes in and the ideas that occupy his thoughts, are the most important things about him, since they tell us about that most essential thing: his intentions. And ideas, beliefs, and attitudes, as our author often reminds us, specifically those that are dominant in a society, translate into actions that inevitably shape it and have definite effects that can be both observed and evaluated. In the case of Islam, the observation leads to an inescapable conclusion: Islam is a failure.



The tragedy lies in the fact that Islam promises its adherents success, yet everywhere that Muslims constitute a majority they are surrounded by failure, so much so that the Mediterranean Sea entombs many of those who favored European shores over their own. Though the treatment is not that comprehensive or exhaustive, the book nonetheless covers some of the manifestations of this tragedy, its roots, and the reaction to it, both from those affected as well as the Western world and how it tried to accommodate this contemporary reality of failure with a romanticized picture of Islam.


The author goes through many points that naturally cannot all be done justice in this brief review, yet I shall mention only two below. The first because the author examined it only fleetingly, but which I think deserves a more profound diagnosis ( something I obviously do not claim to do in full below since this is merely a summary) especially considering its impact on contemporary Islamic culture and the Muslim subconscious. The second, the author didn't cover, but is nonetheless Crucial in my opinion.


I/FIRST, on voluntarism:


The definition quoted below is from JAMES V. SCHALL's 'On Islam: A Chronological Record 2002–2018':

“Voluntarism is the philosophical-theological view that no rational order exists in things or in human nature. What is behind all reality is a will that can always be otherwise. It is not bound to any one truth. The opposite of any position can, with equal right, be valid. Evil can be good; good can be evil, if will, divine or human, not reason, is behind each existing thing.”

The Ashʿarite school of theology, which became one of the main theological frameworks of Sunni Islam, had immense influence when it came to the formulation of Islam's conception of the divine, voluntarism, and causality. The Islamic voluntaristic view can be summed up by saying that, when it comes to the divine there is a primacy of will over reason. To put it differently: God is defined primarily by his will. He acts according to his pleasure rather than necessity, and as a result he is not bound by logical consistency nor is he constrained by reason or moral necessity. Therefore, what is "good" is good only because God wills it. so In principle, he can will anything (even what we see as irrational or unjust) and it still would be "good" by definition.

Attached to this is the idea that nothing in creation has real causal power, and that only God causes everything directly at every moment (Allah alone is the sole cause in the created order). What follows from both these points is that there is no rational order besides the pure will of God. Therefore, God's essence in Islam is largely incomprehensible to human intellect and people are called to submit to his revealed will without understanding the underlying reason for his command since there is no inherent rational order behind reality.

Islamic fatalism is a natural psychological outgrowth of this way of thinking, not to mention that a world where things happen because "God willed them at that very moment" is not conducive to scientific inquiry or prediction based models. (Note that Islamic fatalism also comes in part from a highly deterministic view as laid down in the Quran that is incompatible with free will).

During this last and not too distant episode of war between Iran and Israel/America, something was said during a discussion on an arab news channel that caught my attention, though it was uttered only passingly before they moved to the next topic. An Arab commentator, when asked why the Islamic Republic had not built as many bomb shelters for its people as Israel had for its own (a quick Google search says Israel has nearly 12,000 public bomb shelters, without even counting private built in safe rooms), simply said that it was due to our ( that is 'Arab') culture, which he described as "fatalistic". And it makes perfect sense when one thinks about it. in muslim societies, whenever something bad happens, whether there is an accident, death, or otherwise, words like al-maktub ( “that which is written”) or qada wa qadar ("divine decree and predestination") are immediately thrown around, meaning that God willed things to happen exactly as they did. This fatalistic outlook often seems to obfuscate any sense of personal responsibility or agency. Of course, people will still blame bad driving, negligence, or incompetence, yet there is also this ready made conclusion that what happened was ultimately unavoidable because it had already been decreed. Whether one acted correctly or incorrectly almost becomes secondary, since if God willed the accident to happen then it would have happened regardless.

The same mentality of ‘it is what it is because God inevitably meant it as such' can have broader effects on productivity, initiative, and accountability (Statistics on everything from corruption and quality of life to happiness indexes attest to this). It fosters a passive spirit and a slave-like submission to circumstances (or worse; to despotism) because 'if it's god's will,it's god's will'. since events are often viewed less as the consequence of human action and agency than as manifestations of divine decree.
One can even observe a similar 'obfuscation' in the language surrounding ‘martyrdom’: two Islamist factions fight one another and a third uninvolved party dies, yet the dead man is immediately elevated into a “martyr”. The term almost obscures the reality of the crime itself. By sacralizing the death and therefore imbuing it with eschatological significance the moral weight of what occurred seems to be partially dissolved, or at least shifted into a theological context where the event becomes sanctified (sometimes to the point where it's surreal even) rather than fully confronted in human terms.

Due to the fear that I am blabbering too much, I shall cut to the next point.



II/ SECONDLY, on forms, formalism, and legalism:


Islam has a deeply rooted obsession with forms over the actual essence of things. Take prayer for example. What should be a personal experience with God which is unshackled from dead, hollow and mechanistic repetition of words, is turned into exactly just that: a ceremony with specific instructions, mechanistic movements, and prescribed utterances. (In contrast, Matthew 6:7 KJV states: “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.”)
Even almsgiving follows this tendency. One would think it to be a spontaneous form of generosity yet many are primarily concerned with consulting religious authorities to determine the exact amount that should be paid, since no one wants to give a penny more than is religiously required.

More broadly, Islam often appears to confuse inward belief with outward conformity to forms, rites, ceremonies, and prescribed behavior, even though these are not the same thing. Belief is inward, subjective and spontaneous. Dogma, ritual, and formulaic conformity are fixed, external and far from spontaneous. Yet in Islam the two frequently (and dare I say: exclusively) morph into one another so that conformity to visible forms becomes a measure of religiosity (a Muslim who is religious and believes in God but does not pray is viewed as an insolent hypocrite by the community while an atheist who only prays and fasts because he is expected to is labeled an obedient Muslim... all superficial, nothing but forms, forms everywhere, all the time!)

What this ultimately produces is a deeply superficial religious culture. Religion is supposed to orient man toward a higher world of values so that through the persuite of these values he becomes more virtuous. Instead, Islam often seems to barricade the believer from that world of values by reducing religion to a calculable system of rites, rituals, obligations and prohibitions.

Even morality itself is frequently outsourced to religious authorities. Rather than cultivating an independent individual moral conscience based on (and directed toward) higher principles believers often ask what is permitted, forbidden, recommended, or disliked. The answer, more often than not, ultimately reduces to some variation of “what would Muhammad do?” Morality therefore becomes less about the pursuit of transcendent values and more of an imitation of a fixed model (and a very,very,very outdated model...like 14 centuries out of date, alas, an update is unforeseeable).

In this sense, Islam resembles a secular ideology more than a spiritual religion. In secularism, man becomes the measure of truth. Islam functions similarly, except that the man in question is the almost deified figure of Muhammad. The following is somewhat of an oversimplification, but morality in Islam can often be reduced to two things: precedent and utility. Precedent in the sense of Muhammad’s example, and utility in the sense of what benefits or strengthens the Muslim ummah (the supranational community of believers).



I found this informative. Sometimes it repeated the same criticisms we are all too familiar with by now, but that felt less like a fault of the author than a reflection of the fact that the same symptoms keep reappearing over and over again in the real world. But there were still things of interest here and there. I would recommend it if you haven’t read any of Spencer’s books. It’s as good a start as any, and up to date.



Rating: 4/5.