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Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War
Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are often viewed as isolated fanatics outside of the mainstream Muslim population―outlaws not only in the West but also in respectable Muslim nations. This book argues just the that in fact terrorism is the logical outgrowth of an international Islamic political agenda that is endorsed and funded by Islam's major players―Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. Author Moorthy S. Muthuswamy labels these nations the "Axis of Jihad". For decades, he says, they have been devoted to extending their spheres of influence in the name of religion. Utilizing a recent groundbreaking statistical analysis of Islamic doctrines and an analysis based upon the outlook of Muslims, he discusses the possibility that Islam is less a religion and more an ideology of conquest.Muthuswamy urges US policymakers to rethink the War on Terror along the lines of the successfully waged Cold War against communism. The nuclear physicist-author makes the following main the Cold War, this war is more a contest of ideas than armed conflict. Rather than placing the emphasis on military might and costly wars abroad, the West should invest the bulk of its effort in a science-based ideological war, one that is directed at discrediting the simplistic, conquest-oriented theological roots of Islamist indoctrination and jihadist politics.Muthuswamy also emphasizes the importance of a largely non-Muslim India in the War on Terror, in view of its location and size. The India-born author gives a fascinating description of modern Islamic conquest in South Asia. His insights into the Islamist siege and subversion of Indian democracy should be revealing for the citizens of western democracies.The author asserts that the West needs India in dealing with the conundrum that is Pakistan, as they both share language, culture, and more with each other.This fresh perspective on the ongoing threat from Islamist terrorism offers much to ponder about the future course of US foreign policy initiatives.
287 pages, Hardcover
First published March 24, 2009
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January 14, 2017
Bigoted and alarmist. Vast Islamic conspiracy sounds as stupid as vast Jewish conspiracy, but seems to be more okay to claim.
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.
Political Islam has changed much since 2009. However, the basic premise of this book stands strong. Moorthy S. Muthuswamy’s *Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War*, prefaced by Steven Emerson, belongs to that turbulent period when intellectual discourse in the West was haunted by the spectre of ideology — when Islamism, terrorism, and modernity were being reframed through the language of civilisational endurance. Muthuswamy, an engineer by training but a polemicist by temperament, approached the subject with the precision of a scientist and the fervour of a crusader. The result is a curious artifact of its time: part geopolitical analysis, part moral treatise, part survival manual for the Enlightenment.
To revisit it now, in an age where “political Islam” manifests less through organised states and more through decentralised movements and digital networks, is to recognise the book’s prescience and its limitations. Muthuswamy’s argument rests on a stark binary — the free world versus the ideological empire of Islamism — echoing the rhetoric of the Cold War while reimagining its battlefield. For him, jihad is not merely a religious expression but an organised political strategy, one that must be understood, resisted, and ultimately neutralised through intellectual and institutional containment. The metaphor of a “New Cold War” feels deliberate: Islamism, like Soviet communism, is portrayed as an expansionist ideology seeking to replace liberal democracy with theocratic totalitarianism.
But where the analogy succeeds rhetorically, it falters philosophically. The Cold War was a conflict between two modernities — one Marxist, one capitalist — both secular in their metaphysical underpinnings. To recast Islamism within that same dialectic risks misunderstanding its theological core. Muthuswamy tends to reduce faith to ideology and belief to blueprint. Yet, in doing so, he participates in the very modernist tendency he condemns — the need to systematise human experience into political structures. His version of Islam, stripped of transcendence, becomes a political technology — a mechanism of domination rather than a mode of spiritual meaning.
Still, the clarity of his warning is compelling. Written in the shadow of 9/11 and the Iraq War, *Defeating Political Islam* reads as both diagnosis and prophecy. Muthuswamy warns that liberal democracies, committed to pluralism, underestimate ideological absolutism. His analysis of Islamic law, missionary activism, and demographic strategy reflects an almost mathematical mind searching for pattern and causality in what he sees as a long-term civilisational strategy. He argues that political Islam thrives not through violent conquest alone but through the soft mechanisms of culture, education, and politics—a “stealth jihad” that infiltrates institutions under the guise of tolerance. It’s an argument that, while controversial, mirrors the fears of an age when globalisation blurred the boundaries between nation and ideology.
What makes the book particularly interesting in hindsight is its tone of technocratic rationalism. Muthuswamy writes like an engineer trying to debug civilisation. His prose is analytical, but beneath its equations lies a pulse of existential dread. Every data point feels like a symptom; every statistic, a warning. This style, while clinical, carries a strange poetry — the poetry of a man who believes the world can be saved if only it could be properly understood. In this sense, the book is as much about epistemology as geopolitics: how we know what threatens us, and how we structure that knowledge into action.
Through a postmodern lens, however, Muthuswamy’s project becomes doubly fascinating. His insistence on “defeating” political Islam presumes a stable self—a coherent “West” capable of moral action and intellectual defence.
Yet, as Derrida and Baudrillard remind us, such coherence is always performative. The West, in defining the Other, also defines itself. By positing Islamism as the external enemy, Muthuswamy inadvertently reaffirms the Enlightenment myth of rational supremacy — the belief that secular modernity possesses a universal grammar of truth. The danger, of course, is that this narrative conceals its own metaphysics. It forgets that liberalism, too, is a faith — one that worships reason as devoutly as any believer worships God.
And yet, the book cannot be dismissed as mere ideology. Muthuswamy’s empirical grounding — his extensive references to Quranic injunctions, historical precedents, and modern movements — shows a genuine attempt to engage with the material complexity of Islamic political thought. He identifies strands of reformist Islam, acknowledges internal debates, and distinguishes between the spiritual and the political.
But the gravitational pull of his thesis keeps drawing these distinctions back into a single moral field. In his narrative, Islamism becomes the telos of Islam itself — the inevitable outcome of an unbroken theological logic. Here lies the text’s most problematic yet revealing feature: its inability to imagine discontinuity within Islam.
This flattening of history transforms the book into a kind of civilisational screenplay — one in which modernity’s survival depends on understanding its antagonist. Steven Emerson’s foreword reinforces this frame, invoking the language of defence, vigilance, and intellectual warfare. The text feels less like a dialogue with Islam and more like a briefing document for policymakers and strategists. Yet, ironically, this militarisation of knowledge also turns the scholar into a soldier — the writer into a combatant in the war of ideas. Foucault would call this the “will to ”truth”—the use of knowledge as an instrument of power. In Muthuswamy’s case, that power manifests as the authority to define what is political, what is religious, and what is dangerous.
Re-reading it in 2025, one feels both nostalgia and unease. The “New Cold War” Muthuswamy described has mutated into something less visible, more networked. The binaries of 2009 no longer hold; ideology flows through algorithms now, not borders.
Yet the book’s central insight — that liberal democracies must learn to identify ideological threats that disguise themselves as moral claims — remains relevant. What has changed is the nature of those threats. The political Islam of Muthuswamy’s imagination has been displaced by hybrid movements: digital caliphates, identity-driven populisms, and global disinformation networks that fuse theology with technology. The monsters have gone online.
But perhaps the book’s most enduring value lies not in its prescriptions but in its symbolism. It stands as an emblem of the post-9/11 Western mind — anxious, analytical, seeking redemption through knowledge. In its attempt to map the terrain of belief, it reveals the fragility of secularism itself. The more the West tries to understand political Islam, the more it confronts its own crisis of meaning. What Muthuswamy diagnoses as “religious absolutism” might also be the West’s own longing for certainty—its nostalgia for moral clarity in an age of moral relativity.
There’s an almost tragic beauty in this intellectual struggle. The author’s faith in rationalism is heroic, even moving, but it is also haunted by futility. Every solution he proposes — educational reform, ideological counter-offensives, cultural reassertion — presupposes a unity that no longer exists. The “West” he seeks to defend is itself a collage of contradictions, fracturing under its pluralism. Thus, *Defeating Political Islam* becomes an elegy disguised as a manual: a lament for a civilisation losing its coherence even as it fights to preserve it.
In literary terms, the book belongs to the genre of geopolitical gothic — a world of invisible wars, ideological phantoms, and moral paranoia. The enemy is everywhere, the self is uncertain, and knowledge is both weapon and wound. Reading it evokes the same ambience as John le Carré’s later novels: the slow erosion of certainty, the collapse of faith in grand narratives. Yet Muthuswamy’s tone remains confident, almost defiant. He believes that ideas can still win wars. That belief, though naïve, feels almost sacred now.
In the end, *Defeating Political Islam* is not about Islam at all. It is about civilisation’s recurring dream of purity — the fantasy that truth, once defined, can be defended forever. Muthuswamy’s brilliance and blindness are two sides of that same dream. He reminds us that the battle for the future is always fought in language first — in the words we use to name our fears.
And so, though the geopolitics have changed, the basic premise indeed stands strong — not because Islamism remains unchanged, but because the human need to imagine enemies does. In that sense, Muthuswamy’s “New Cold War” never ended. It merely migrated from borders to minds, from tanks to texts. And perhaps that is where it always belonged.
Most recommended.
Political Islam has changed much since 2009. However, the basic premise of this book stands strong. Moorthy S. Muthuswamy’s *Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War*, prefaced by Steven Emerson, belongs to that turbulent period when intellectual discourse in the West was haunted by the spectre of ideology — when Islamism, terrorism, and modernity were being reframed through the language of civilisational endurance. Muthuswamy, an engineer by training but a polemicist by temperament, approached the subject with the precision of a scientist and the fervour of a crusader. The result is a curious artifact of its time: part geopolitical analysis, part moral treatise, part survival manual for the Enlightenment.
To revisit it now, in an age where “political Islam” manifests less through organised states and more through decentralised movements and digital networks, is to recognise the book’s prescience and its limitations. Muthuswamy’s argument rests on a stark binary — the free world versus the ideological empire of Islamism — echoing the rhetoric of the Cold War while reimagining its battlefield. For him, jihad is not merely a religious expression but an organised political strategy, one that must be understood, resisted, and ultimately neutralised through intellectual and institutional containment. The metaphor of a “New Cold War” feels deliberate: Islamism, like Soviet communism, is portrayed as an expansionist ideology seeking to replace liberal democracy with theocratic totalitarianism.
But where the analogy succeeds rhetorically, it falters philosophically. The Cold War was a conflict between two modernities — one Marxist, one capitalist — both secular in their metaphysical underpinnings. To recast Islamism within that same dialectic risks misunderstanding its theological core. Muthuswamy tends to reduce faith to ideology and belief to blueprint. Yet, in doing so, he participates in the very modernist tendency he condemns — the need to systematise human experience into political structures. His version of Islam, stripped of transcendence, becomes a political technology — a mechanism of domination rather than a mode of spiritual meaning.
Still, the clarity of his warning is compelling. Written in the shadow of 9/11 and the Iraq War, *Defeating Political Islam* reads as both diagnosis and prophecy. Muthuswamy warns that liberal democracies, committed to pluralism, underestimate ideological absolutism. His analysis of Islamic law, missionary activism, and demographic strategy reflects an almost mathematical mind searching for pattern and causality in what he sees as a long-term civilisational strategy. He argues that political Islam thrives not through violent conquest alone but through the soft mechanisms of culture, education, and politics—a “stealth jihad” that infiltrates institutions under the guise of tolerance. It’s an argument that, while controversial, mirrors the fears of an age when globalisation blurred the boundaries between nation and ideology.
What makes the book particularly interesting in hindsight is its tone of technocratic rationalism. Muthuswamy writes like an engineer trying to debug civilisation. His prose is analytical, but beneath its equations lies a pulse of existential dread. Every data point feels like a symptom; every statistic, a warning. This style, while clinical, carries a strange poetry — the poetry of a man who believes the world can be saved if only it could be properly understood. In this sense, the book is as much about epistemology as geopolitics: how we know what threatens us, and how we structure that knowledge into action.
Through a postmodern lens, however, Muthuswamy’s project becomes doubly fascinating. His insistence on “defeating” political Islam presumes a stable self—a coherent “West” capable of moral action and intellectual defence.
Yet, as Derrida and Baudrillard remind us, such coherence is always performative. The West, in defining the Other, also defines itself. By positing Islamism as the external enemy, Muthuswamy inadvertently reaffirms the Enlightenment myth of rational supremacy — the belief that secular modernity possesses a universal grammar of truth. The danger, of course, is that this narrative conceals its own metaphysics. It forgets that liberalism, too, is a faith — one that worships reason as devoutly as any believer worships God.
And yet, the book cannot be dismissed as mere ideology. Muthuswamy’s empirical grounding — his extensive references to Quranic injunctions, historical precedents, and modern movements — shows a genuine attempt to engage with the material complexity of Islamic political thought. He identifies strands of reformist Islam, acknowledges internal debates, and distinguishes between the spiritual and the political.
But the gravitational pull of his thesis keeps drawing these distinctions back into a single moral field. In his narrative, Islamism becomes the telos of Islam itself — the inevitable outcome of an unbroken theological logic. Here lies the text’s most problematic yet revealing feature: its inability to imagine discontinuity within Islam.
This flattening of history transforms the book into a kind of civilisational screenplay — one in which modernity’s survival depends on understanding its antagonist. Steven Emerson’s foreword reinforces this frame, invoking the language of defence, vigilance, and intellectual warfare. The text feels less like a dialogue with Islam and more like a briefing document for policymakers and strategists. Yet, ironically, this militarisation of knowledge also turns the scholar into a soldier — the writer into a combatant in the war of ideas. Foucault would call this the “will to ”truth”—the use of knowledge as an instrument of power. In Muthuswamy’s case, that power manifests as the authority to define what is political, what is religious, and what is dangerous.
Re-reading it in 2025, one feels both nostalgia and unease. The “New Cold War” Muthuswamy described has mutated into something less visible, more networked. The binaries of 2009 no longer hold; ideology flows through algorithms now, not borders.
Yet the book’s central insight — that liberal democracies must learn to identify ideological threats that disguise themselves as moral claims — remains relevant. What has changed is the nature of those threats. The political Islam of Muthuswamy’s imagination has been displaced by hybrid movements: digital caliphates, identity-driven populisms, and global disinformation networks that fuse theology with technology. The monsters have gone online.
But perhaps the book’s most enduring value lies not in its prescriptions but in its symbolism. It stands as an emblem of the post-9/11 Western mind — anxious, analytical, seeking redemption through knowledge. In its attempt to map the terrain of belief, it reveals the fragility of secularism itself. The more the West tries to understand political Islam, the more it confronts its own crisis of meaning. What Muthuswamy diagnoses as “religious absolutism” might also be the West’s own longing for certainty—its nostalgia for moral clarity in an age of moral relativity.
There’s an almost tragic beauty in this intellectual struggle. The author’s faith in rationalism is heroic, even moving, but it is also haunted by futility. Every solution he proposes — educational reform, ideological counter-offensives, cultural reassertion — presupposes a unity that no longer exists. The “West” he seeks to defend is itself a collage of contradictions, fracturing under its pluralism. Thus, *Defeating Political Islam* becomes an elegy disguised as a manual: a lament for a civilisation losing its coherence even as it fights to preserve it.
In literary terms, the book belongs to the genre of geopolitical gothic — a world of invisible wars, ideological phantoms, and moral paranoia. The enemy is everywhere, the self is uncertain, and knowledge is both weapon and wound. Reading it evokes the same ambience as John le Carré’s later novels: the slow erosion of certainty, the collapse of faith in grand narratives. Yet Muthuswamy’s tone remains confident, almost defiant. He believes that ideas can still win wars. That belief, though naïve, feels almost sacred now.
In the end, *Defeating Political Islam* is not about Islam at all. It is about civilisation’s recurring dream of purity — the fantasy that truth, once defined, can be defended forever. Muthuswamy’s brilliance and blindness are two sides of that same dream. He reminds us that the battle for the future is always fought in language first — in the words we use to name our fears.
And so, though the geopolitics have changed, the basic premise indeed stands strong — not because Islamism remains unchanged, but because the human need to imagine enemies does. In that sense, Muthuswamy’s “New Cold War” never ended. It merely migrated from borders to minds, from tanks to texts. And perhaps that is where it always belonged.
Most recommended.
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