What do you think?
Rate this book
The Sword of the Prophet: Islam - History, Theology, Impact on the World
We hear it said over and over again: "September 11 changed America forever." Less often do we hear a coherent and informed explanation of what, exactly, changed. What changed, in fact, was that for the first time in American history we have been forced to confront Islamic militancy as it has assaulted the world for almost 14 centuries.In "The Sword of the Prophet," the reader receives the unvarnished truth about the rise of Islam and the patterns set by its founder, Muhammad; the historical meaning of jihad against the (non-Muslim) "infidel" that we see today in the al-Qaeda terror network; the broad sweep of the global military, political, moral, and -- yes -- spiritual struggle that faces us; and what we must do if we wish to survive. Above all, we must avoid the twin perils of complacency and despair, and for that a sober, factual, and contextual presentation like that found in Trifkovic's work is essential. But every American owes it to himself or herself to know the real score of the post-9/11world -- and this slim but invaluable volume is the place to start.
312 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 2002
17 people are currently reading
374 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
January 11, 2015
Dr Trifkovic gives us a comprehensive analysis of Islam. In terms of narrating and critiquing Islam, there isn’t much new material here. However, Trifkovic’s world-class expertise into the Balkans and post-Communist history shed much uncomfortable light in the role the United States has played in funding and supporting the worst of militant Islam around the world.
In terms of analyzing Mohammed, both morally and theologically, Trifkovic relies on the critiques previously given by Belloc, Lewis, and Geisler, along with standard works from The Catholic Encyclopedia. Against those who justify Mohammed’s actions (e.g., raiding caravans, consummating marriage with a 9 year old, seducing his daughter-in-law, etc) by saying that was standard culture for the time, Trifkovic masterfully points out that if that were true, Mohammed would not have invented a subsequent revelation justifying his actions!
Trifkovic then recounts the nightmare of Islam overrunning the Byzantine Empire, Palestine, and India. The slaughter—justified by Sura 9:5—is simply too much for words. According to Will Durant, whom Trifkovic quotes, the Muslim conquest of India was one of the worst catastrophes for all of human civilization. Moving to Europe, even as late as 1922, the Muslim Turks were slaughtering Greek Christians by the hundreds of thousands. (At this point in the narrative Trifkovic recounts how in the Straits of the Bosporus, American and British naval ships, seeing Armenian Christians drowned in the sea, not only refused to help them, but also aided the Turks in the slaughter. Neutrality, you see, must be maintained. This would also be standard Anglo-American policy in dealing with Orthodox Christians for the next 85 years.)
It gets worse, sadly. After WW2 the United States’ actions ranged from arming Turkish militants to invade Christian Cyprus; creating al-Qaeda in Central Asia (Trifkovic masterfully refutes Brzeznski’s claim that the US did this to destabilize the Soviet Union); ignoring the slaughter of half a million Christians in Southeast Asia; arming and transporting thousands of Afghan and Pakistani militants into Bosnia, and a host of other situations. It cannot be seriously maintained that the United States is really against “terror.”
What can be done? The situation is grim. The crisis is not because of the strength of Islam. The crisis is rather a crisis of the heart. Europeans (and to a lesser degree Americans) simply lack the will to resist. They lack the vision of a comprehensive faith. It is not so much that the Elites love Islam, but rather they hate Christians.
Therefore, Europe should return to the ancient faith. They should seek alliances with countries that have such a heritage and have fought the battle against Islam—countries like Russia, Serbia, Greece, and Armenia. The victory will come from the East. And we are actually at a point in history where we can do this. The economic catastrophes have crippled the NWO banking cartels. NATO has officially run out of gas, and people from France to Serbia are seeing it as nothing more than legal terrorism. People are growing disenchanted with the Elite-imposed self-hatred (and no doubt tired of welfare Muslims car-bombing their cities). The next ten years will be grim and a close-call, but now more than ever is the victory within reach.
A FEW WORDS OF CRITICISM
This book could have used an editor. Trifkovic is a world-class mind. This makes the numerous editorial problems even more strange.
In terms of analyzing Mohammed, both morally and theologically, Trifkovic relies on the critiques previously given by Belloc, Lewis, and Geisler, along with standard works from The Catholic Encyclopedia. Against those who justify Mohammed’s actions (e.g., raiding caravans, consummating marriage with a 9 year old, seducing his daughter-in-law, etc) by saying that was standard culture for the time, Trifkovic masterfully points out that if that were true, Mohammed would not have invented a subsequent revelation justifying his actions!
Trifkovic then recounts the nightmare of Islam overrunning the Byzantine Empire, Palestine, and India. The slaughter—justified by Sura 9:5—is simply too much for words. According to Will Durant, whom Trifkovic quotes, the Muslim conquest of India was one of the worst catastrophes for all of human civilization. Moving to Europe, even as late as 1922, the Muslim Turks were slaughtering Greek Christians by the hundreds of thousands. (At this point in the narrative Trifkovic recounts how in the Straits of the Bosporus, American and British naval ships, seeing Armenian Christians drowned in the sea, not only refused to help them, but also aided the Turks in the slaughter. Neutrality, you see, must be maintained. This would also be standard Anglo-American policy in dealing with Orthodox Christians for the next 85 years.)
It gets worse, sadly. After WW2 the United States’ actions ranged from arming Turkish militants to invade Christian Cyprus; creating al-Qaeda in Central Asia (Trifkovic masterfully refutes Brzeznski’s claim that the US did this to destabilize the Soviet Union); ignoring the slaughter of half a million Christians in Southeast Asia; arming and transporting thousands of Afghan and Pakistani militants into Bosnia, and a host of other situations. It cannot be seriously maintained that the United States is really against “terror.”
What can be done? The situation is grim. The crisis is not because of the strength of Islam. The crisis is rather a crisis of the heart. Europeans (and to a lesser degree Americans) simply lack the will to resist. They lack the vision of a comprehensive faith. It is not so much that the Elites love Islam, but rather they hate Christians.
Therefore, Europe should return to the ancient faith. They should seek alliances with countries that have such a heritage and have fought the battle against Islam—countries like Russia, Serbia, Greece, and Armenia. The victory will come from the East. And we are actually at a point in history where we can do this. The economic catastrophes have crippled the NWO banking cartels. NATO has officially run out of gas, and people from France to Serbia are seeing it as nothing more than legal terrorism. People are growing disenchanted with the Elite-imposed self-hatred (and no doubt tired of welfare Muslims car-bombing their cities). The next ten years will be grim and a close-call, but now more than ever is the victory within reach.
A FEW WORDS OF CRITICISM
This book could have used an editor. Trifkovic is a world-class mind. This makes the numerous editorial problems even more strange.
December 31, 2008
I just stumbled upon this book in my bookshelf and just have to write a review.
The book takes the point of view that Islam, as a religion, is inherently violent. Trifkovic spends the entire book quoting passages from the Koran and doing historic analysis on Mohammed's time to prove that the religion was born in blood, and that, in its essence, it contains violence, and, in his point of view, that is why there are Islamic terrorists in such abundance. He also throws in some defense of Christianity with similar historic references to make the "this is different than other major religions" point.
The book is pure hate-mongering. It is pseudo-intellectual hyped up garbage that makes its point by selectively choosing evidence and ignoring a thousand years of tradition to the contrary. It's a modern-day "Elders of Zion," except anti-Muslim instead of anti-Jew.
The only people who could conceivably like this book are those who already have the preconceived notion that Islam == violence.
The book takes the point of view that Islam, as a religion, is inherently violent. Trifkovic spends the entire book quoting passages from the Koran and doing historic analysis on Mohammed's time to prove that the religion was born in blood, and that, in its essence, it contains violence, and, in his point of view, that is why there are Islamic terrorists in such abundance. He also throws in some defense of Christianity with similar historic references to make the "this is different than other major religions" point.
The book is pure hate-mongering. It is pseudo-intellectual hyped up garbage that makes its point by selectively choosing evidence and ignoring a thousand years of tradition to the contrary. It's a modern-day "Elders of Zion," except anti-Muslim instead of anti-Jew.
The only people who could conceivably like this book are those who already have the preconceived notion that Islam == violence.
April 8, 2008
Full of information on the radical Islamic threat to the West. I was underlining on many pages of this book. It is a keeper.
July 6, 2025
Reading The Sword of the Prophet: Memory, Militancy, and the Mirror of History
Serge Trifković, 2002 | Read in 2012
I remember the year not just for the end-of-the-world memes or the Delhi gang rape protests, but also for a shift in my reading diet.
I had just finished From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman, and I was itching to understand more—more history, more religion, more of the world’s unfinished arguments. That’s when I stumbled upon The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifković.
At first glance, it was a bold, unflinching book. Subtitled Islam: History, Theology, Impact on the World, it promised to reveal the roots of Islamic militancy through theological and historical scrutiny. I went in with curiosity. I came out… conflicted.
Trifković’s argument is stark. He proposes that the Islamic faith, from its origins in 7th-century Arabia, is inherently political, expansionist, and resistant to reform. This, he claims, explains the persistence of jihadist violence in the modern world. The book traces Islam’s early conquests, its doctrinal foundations, and its socio-political imprint on different civilizations—from the Levant to the Balkans. His central thesis is a warning: understand the historical and theological imperatives behind militant Islam, or pay the price of denial.
And to be fair, there were pages that genuinely jolted me.
The chilling citations from the Hadith, the detailed recounting of forced conversions, the siege of Constantinople, the decline of Eastern Christianity—all strung together to paint a sweeping, if unsettling, portrait. Trifković did not tiptoe. He didn’t soften. He wrote like a man ringing an alarm bell. And in 2012, with Al-Qaeda still looming large and ISIS not far away, the book felt like a dispatch from the front lines of a civilizational crisis.
But even then, somewhere midway through the book, a disquiet began to grow inside me.
Yes, Trifković unpacks history with a scalpel—but at times, he seems to wield it like a machete. His analysis often spills over into polemic. There’s little room in his narrative for dissenting Muslim voices, internal critique, or reformist thinkers. Everything is framed within a binary: Islam versus the West, orthodoxy versus reason, aggression versus innocence. It’s history on a battlefield, with no space for nuance.
I found myself longing for counterpoints—what about Sufism? The Mutazilites? The brilliant pluralism of Andalusia or the deep introspection of Rumi? Why reduce 1.8 billion people to a single doctrinal trajectory?
And yet, Trifković’s warning about ideological complacency also resonated. Especially when he described the West’s intellectual paralysis in naming and confronting radicalism. The chapter on political correctness felt like it could’ve been written today, in a world where Twitter arguments pass for policy debate.
By the time I finished the book, I was rattled, yes. Enlightened in parts. Disillusioned in others.
In hindsight, I think The Sword of the Prophet did something important: it broke the silence. It said the unsayable in a post-9/11 world still finding its vocabulary. But it also stumbled by overstating the thesis and underplaying diversity.
Reading it in 2012, I was angry—angry at violence, at beheadings on the news, at the failure of peaceful answers. The book validated that anger. But with time, I also learned that truth isn’t a sword—it’s a prism. And Trifković, for all his insights, gave us just one angle of a much larger picture.
Would I recommend it today? Yes, with caveats. Read it critically. Pair it with voices like Karen Armstrong, Reza Aslan, or even Edward Said. Debate it. Dissect it. But don’t dismiss it.
Because sometimes, to understand the world’s fault lines, you must first hear the most uncomfortable voices—even if only to learn how to argue better.
Serge Trifković, 2002 | Read in 2012
I remember the year not just for the end-of-the-world memes or the Delhi gang rape protests, but also for a shift in my reading diet.
I had just finished From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman, and I was itching to understand more—more history, more religion, more of the world’s unfinished arguments. That’s when I stumbled upon The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifković.
At first glance, it was a bold, unflinching book. Subtitled Islam: History, Theology, Impact on the World, it promised to reveal the roots of Islamic militancy through theological and historical scrutiny. I went in with curiosity. I came out… conflicted.
Trifković’s argument is stark. He proposes that the Islamic faith, from its origins in 7th-century Arabia, is inherently political, expansionist, and resistant to reform. This, he claims, explains the persistence of jihadist violence in the modern world. The book traces Islam’s early conquests, its doctrinal foundations, and its socio-political imprint on different civilizations—from the Levant to the Balkans. His central thesis is a warning: understand the historical and theological imperatives behind militant Islam, or pay the price of denial.
And to be fair, there were pages that genuinely jolted me.
The chilling citations from the Hadith, the detailed recounting of forced conversions, the siege of Constantinople, the decline of Eastern Christianity—all strung together to paint a sweeping, if unsettling, portrait. Trifković did not tiptoe. He didn’t soften. He wrote like a man ringing an alarm bell. And in 2012, with Al-Qaeda still looming large and ISIS not far away, the book felt like a dispatch from the front lines of a civilizational crisis.
But even then, somewhere midway through the book, a disquiet began to grow inside me.
Yes, Trifković unpacks history with a scalpel—but at times, he seems to wield it like a machete. His analysis often spills over into polemic. There’s little room in his narrative for dissenting Muslim voices, internal critique, or reformist thinkers. Everything is framed within a binary: Islam versus the West, orthodoxy versus reason, aggression versus innocence. It’s history on a battlefield, with no space for nuance.
I found myself longing for counterpoints—what about Sufism? The Mutazilites? The brilliant pluralism of Andalusia or the deep introspection of Rumi? Why reduce 1.8 billion people to a single doctrinal trajectory?
And yet, Trifković’s warning about ideological complacency also resonated. Especially when he described the West’s intellectual paralysis in naming and confronting radicalism. The chapter on political correctness felt like it could’ve been written today, in a world where Twitter arguments pass for policy debate.
By the time I finished the book, I was rattled, yes. Enlightened in parts. Disillusioned in others.
In hindsight, I think The Sword of the Prophet did something important: it broke the silence. It said the unsayable in a post-9/11 world still finding its vocabulary. But it also stumbled by overstating the thesis and underplaying diversity.
Reading it in 2012, I was angry—angry at violence, at beheadings on the news, at the failure of peaceful answers. The book validated that anger. But with time, I also learned that truth isn’t a sword—it’s a prism. And Trifković, for all his insights, gave us just one angle of a much larger picture.
Would I recommend it today? Yes, with caveats. Read it critically. Pair it with voices like Karen Armstrong, Reza Aslan, or even Edward Said. Debate it. Dissect it. But don’t dismiss it.
Because sometimes, to understand the world’s fault lines, you must first hear the most uncomfortable voices—even if only to learn how to argue better.
March 22, 2021
In the West we know far too little about the real history of Islam: its past, present, and plans for the future. Instead we are lectured to by Tony Blair or George Bush about how Islam is a "religion of peace" when it is risible that either of those men know the first thing about the "peace" that Islam purports to provide.
Dr. Trifkovic's book was written in the early 2000s, just after the 9/11 attacks, when there was a lot of demand for the "why do they hate us?" book. But while parts of the later part of the book deal with what was "recent history" then, most of the book is timeless, recounting Islam's founding, conquests, and current attitude to the world. It is a religion founded in violence, with Scriptures that reward the attitude of "conversion by the sword," and it is because we in the West are not even slightly acquainted with these realities that we can abide our leaders telling us after each single attack committed by young Muslim men that these attacks have "nothing to do with Islam." As with Bush and Blair, it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone who ever says "this has nothing to do with Islam" knows the first thing about Islam.
If you're up to correcting your own ignorance about this anti-intellectual religion which was, is, and will be a scourge on the human race (particularly to women, who are an afterthought, good for only one thing, as far as Allah is concerned) as long as it exists, take a read.
"The key to understanding is not sympathy and respect for any belief; it is curiosity, intellectual engagement, and a respect for truth." (p. 8)
"Muhammad was born into a society of men ruthlessly active in pursuit of their simple needs, patient of the hardships inherent in their abode, and reconciled to their fate without futile grumbles." (p. 15)
"Muhammad then refrained from cursing the Meccan idols but called them all by the same name, 'Allah,' thus merging 300-odd deities at the Kaaba into one, and calling all of them by the same name. He subsequently abrogated this section of the original Kuran, claiming that this was an interpolation of Satan - hence the 'Satanic verses.'" (p. 31)
"[T]heir readiness to sever the links of birthplace and clan association is a testimony to the prophet's personal charisma and leadership ability." (p. 34)
"That Islam sees the world as an open-ended conflict between the Land of Peace (Dar al-Islam) and the Land of War (Dar al-Harb) is the most important legacy of Muhammad." (p. 51)
"It is the religion's claim that the words and acts of its prophet provide the universally valid standard of morality as such, for all time and all men." (p. 53)
"One consequence of Allah's absolute transcendence and lordship is the impossibility of human free will. Islam not only postulates the absolute predestination of all that we think, say and do, it would regard as heretical any suggestion that man has any choice in the proceedings; all has been divinely preordained and willed by Allah and all is known to him in advance: nothing will ever befall us save what Allah has written for us. This is implacable fatalism: Allah's divine will predetermines whatever has been or shall be in the world, whether good or bad." (p. 62)
"A Muslim prostrates himself before Allah like a slave before his master, who does not know whether he will be apportioned life or death, grace or damnation." (p. 63)
"The 'real' Jesus was a righteous prophet and a good Muslim who paved the way for the final prophet, Muhammed himself." (p. 73)
"The one crucial difference between the Bible as a whole and the Kuran is God's love and His desire to redeem sinners by way of sacrifice. Without sacrifice there is no forgiveness, no atonement and no reconciliation that gives meaning to life and creation." (p. 74)
"If a non-Muslim cannot understand the holy book by divine decree, he can convert to Islam only 'by the mouth,' that is, by force." (p. 82)
"The notion that Islam has a wonderfully clear simplicity compared to the cluttered complexity of Christianity is not new." (p. 85)
(quoting C.S. Lewis) "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about." (p. 85)
"Only after the Islamic Empire had been established the notion of an 'inner' jihad - that of one's personal fight against his ego and sinful desires - also came into being, but it was predicated on the assumption that the external, real jihad was nearing its completion." (p. 89)
(on Muslims during the time of the first four caliphs) "They did not engage in economically productive activity and lived in isolation from the local people, in fortified garrisons spread across North Africa and the Middle East." (p. 89)
"The vanquished were 'culturally disembowled,' condemned to the enforced psychosis of renouncing their old and highly developed identities for a crude and violent desert blueprint that regulated the minutest details of their lives." (p. 90)
"Unleashed as the militant faith of a nomadic war band, Islam turned its boundary with the outside world into a perpetual war zone." (p. 96)
"Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands, the systemic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims." (p. 97)
"The attack began July 14, 1099 - the date destined to live in anti-Christian infamy centuries later - and the next day the Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides and slew its inhabitants, regardless of age or sex." (p. 99)
(from a "peace treaty" with the Christians of Syria) "We shall not build in our cities or in their vicinity any new monasteries, churches, hermitages, or monks' cells. We shall not restore, by night or by day, any of them that have fallen into ruin or which are located in the Muslims' quarters. We shall keep our gates wide open for the passerby and travelers. We shall provide three days' food and lodging to any Muslims who pass our way. We shall not shelter any spy in our churches or in our homes, nor shall we hide him from the Muslims...We shall not hold public religious ceremonies. We shall not seek to proselytize anyone. We shall not prevent any of our kin from embracing Islam if they so desire. We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down...We shall not ride on saddles. We shall not wear swords or bear weapons of any kind, or ever carry them with us. We shall not sell wines. We shall clip the forelocks of our head. We shall not display our crosses or our books anywhere in the Muslims' thoroughfares or in their marketplaces. We shall only beat our clappers in our churches very quietly. We shall not raise our voices when reciting the service in our churches, nor when in the presence of Muslims. Neither shall we raise our voices in our funeral processions. We shall not build our homes higher than theirs...Anyone who violates such terms will be unprotected. And it will be permissible for the Muslims to treat them as rebels or dissenters; namely, it is permissible to kill them." (p. 105)
"Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch." (p. 109)
"Militant Islam sees India as 'unfinished business,' and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam." (p. 113)
(Gladstone on the Turks) "Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view." (p. 123)
"At the destruction of Smyrna there was one feature for which Carthage presents no parallel. There was no fleet of Christian battleships at Carthage looking on at a situation for which their governments were responsible. English, American, Italian, and French ships were indeed anchored in Smyrna's harbor. Ordered to maintain neutrality, they would or could do nothing for the 200,000 desperate Christians on the quay:
The pitiful throng - huddled together, sometimes screaming for help but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope - didn't budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, and there was no way to dispose of the dead. Occasionally, a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and tried to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships, the musicians on board were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The English poured boiling water down on the unfortunates who reached their vessel. The harbor was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to their dinner appointments because bodies would get tangled in the propellers of their launches...A cluster of women's heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbor." (p. 125)
"It is incorrect to say that the Wahhabi movement is to Islam what Puritanism is to Christianity, however. While Puritans could be regarded as Christianity's Islamicists sui generis with their desire to turn Christianity into a scriptural, literalist theocracy that it had never intended to become, Wahhabism is unmistakably 'mainstream' in its demand for the return to the original glory of the early Islamic Ummah. Their iconoclastic zeal notwithstanding, the Wahhabis were no more extreme or violent than the models for Islam in all ages, the Prophet and his companions." (p. 138)
"The difference between Allah and Muhammad becomes blurred once a mortal and sinful man is recognized as the absolute authority on the will of the creator and sustainer of the universe." (p. 146)
"Shari'a is not at all a 'moral law' that guides one's personal map of moral distinctions, but a blend of political theory and penal law, requiring the punishment of violators through the sword of the state." (p. 146)
"The notion that reluctance to embrace Islam is insanity is not new, and corresponds to the Soviet notion of treating political dissidents as psychiatric cases." (p. 149)
"[A] judge in Pakistan sentenced a young woman to death for 'adultery' by stoning. She had been raped by her husband's brother." (p. 154)
"Muhammad has stated that most of those who enter hell are women, not men...because 'they are not thankful to their husbands.'" (p. 155)
"The fire-worshipper, the Jew, and the pig are listed alongside the woman as things that corrupt prayer." (p. 160)
"[S]chizophrenia of the contemporary Muslim society, with signs of modernization in externals, with women doctors and lawyers, and, at the same time, deep-rooted structures that seek to apply Islamic law to civil rights in Muslim countries." (p. 165)
"Sex in Islamic societies has never been about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through domination." (p. 170)
(King Ibn Saud to a British guest) "Verily, the word of God teaches us, and we implicitly believe it, that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for. him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty." (p. 180)
"But even the stone behind which a Jew hides will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" (p. 181)
(quoting the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1943 and 1944) "(the Germans) know how to get rid of the Jews, and that brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp." & "Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor." (p. 186)
(quoting Al-Akhbar, an Egyptian newspaper, in 2001) "Our thanks go to the late Hitler, who wrought, in advance, the vengeance of the Palestinians upon the most despicable villains on the face of the earth. However, we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient." (p. 188)
"The periods of civilization under Islam, however brief, were predicated on the readiness of the conquerors to borrow from earlier cultures, to compile, translate, learn, and absorb. Islam per se never encouraged science, meaning 'disinterested inquiry,' because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge." (p. 196)
"[I]n 1993...Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, declaring that the world is flat: anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished." (p. 196)
"[D]ecimal positional numbering from India. The decimal numbers were thus transmitted to the West, where they are still mistakenly known as 'Arabic' numbers, honoring not their Hindu inventors but their Muslim transmitters." (p. 198)
(quoting the president of Bosnia) "[T]here can be no peace between Islam and other forms of social and political organization." (p. 198)
"In the name of Allah and Islam, more people were killed in one year of Khomeini than during the preceding quarter-century of the Shah." (p. 206)
"Islam and Communism differ from Nazism only in their inability to create a viable economy." (p. 206)
"Islam is revolutionary in outlook, extremist in behavior, totalitarian in ambition." (p. 207)
"Islam, Communism, and National Socialism have all sought an eschatological shortcut that would enable the initiated to bypass the predicament of a seemingly aimless existence." (p. 207)
(quoting Alexis de Tocqueville) "I studied the Kuran a great deal...I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world, and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself." (p. 208)
"The West cannot wage 'war on terror' while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil, appeasing Islamist aggression around the world, turning a blind eye to the Islamic destruction of peoples who are animists, Hindus, and Christians, and allowing mass immigration of Muslims into its own lands." (p. 260)
(quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia) "In matters political, Islam is a system of despotism at home and aggression abroad...The rights of non-Moslem subjects are of the vaguest and most limited kind, and a religious war is a sacred duty whenever there is a chance of success against the 'Infidel.' Medieval and modern Mohammedan, especially Turkish, persecutions of both Jews and Christians are perhaps the best illustration of this fanatical religious and political spirit." (p. 290)
Dr. Trifkovic's book was written in the early 2000s, just after the 9/11 attacks, when there was a lot of demand for the "why do they hate us?" book. But while parts of the later part of the book deal with what was "recent history" then, most of the book is timeless, recounting Islam's founding, conquests, and current attitude to the world. It is a religion founded in violence, with Scriptures that reward the attitude of "conversion by the sword," and it is because we in the West are not even slightly acquainted with these realities that we can abide our leaders telling us after each single attack committed by young Muslim men that these attacks have "nothing to do with Islam." As with Bush and Blair, it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone who ever says "this has nothing to do with Islam" knows the first thing about Islam.
If you're up to correcting your own ignorance about this anti-intellectual religion which was, is, and will be a scourge on the human race (particularly to women, who are an afterthought, good for only one thing, as far as Allah is concerned) as long as it exists, take a read.
"The key to understanding is not sympathy and respect for any belief; it is curiosity, intellectual engagement, and a respect for truth." (p. 8)
"Muhammad was born into a society of men ruthlessly active in pursuit of their simple needs, patient of the hardships inherent in their abode, and reconciled to their fate without futile grumbles." (p. 15)
"Muhammad then refrained from cursing the Meccan idols but called them all by the same name, 'Allah,' thus merging 300-odd deities at the Kaaba into one, and calling all of them by the same name. He subsequently abrogated this section of the original Kuran, claiming that this was an interpolation of Satan - hence the 'Satanic verses.'" (p. 31)
"[T]heir readiness to sever the links of birthplace and clan association is a testimony to the prophet's personal charisma and leadership ability." (p. 34)
"That Islam sees the world as an open-ended conflict between the Land of Peace (Dar al-Islam) and the Land of War (Dar al-Harb) is the most important legacy of Muhammad." (p. 51)
"It is the religion's claim that the words and acts of its prophet provide the universally valid standard of morality as such, for all time and all men." (p. 53)
"One consequence of Allah's absolute transcendence and lordship is the impossibility of human free will. Islam not only postulates the absolute predestination of all that we think, say and do, it would regard as heretical any suggestion that man has any choice in the proceedings; all has been divinely preordained and willed by Allah and all is known to him in advance: nothing will ever befall us save what Allah has written for us. This is implacable fatalism: Allah's divine will predetermines whatever has been or shall be in the world, whether good or bad." (p. 62)
"A Muslim prostrates himself before Allah like a slave before his master, who does not know whether he will be apportioned life or death, grace or damnation." (p. 63)
"The 'real' Jesus was a righteous prophet and a good Muslim who paved the way for the final prophet, Muhammed himself." (p. 73)
"The one crucial difference between the Bible as a whole and the Kuran is God's love and His desire to redeem sinners by way of sacrifice. Without sacrifice there is no forgiveness, no atonement and no reconciliation that gives meaning to life and creation." (p. 74)
"If a non-Muslim cannot understand the holy book by divine decree, he can convert to Islam only 'by the mouth,' that is, by force." (p. 82)
"The notion that Islam has a wonderfully clear simplicity compared to the cluttered complexity of Christianity is not new." (p. 85)
(quoting C.S. Lewis) "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about." (p. 85)
"Only after the Islamic Empire had been established the notion of an 'inner' jihad - that of one's personal fight against his ego and sinful desires - also came into being, but it was predicated on the assumption that the external, real jihad was nearing its completion." (p. 89)
(on Muslims during the time of the first four caliphs) "They did not engage in economically productive activity and lived in isolation from the local people, in fortified garrisons spread across North Africa and the Middle East." (p. 89)
"The vanquished were 'culturally disembowled,' condemned to the enforced psychosis of renouncing their old and highly developed identities for a crude and violent desert blueprint that regulated the minutest details of their lives." (p. 90)
"Unleashed as the militant faith of a nomadic war band, Islam turned its boundary with the outside world into a perpetual war zone." (p. 96)
"Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands, the systemic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims." (p. 97)
"The attack began July 14, 1099 - the date destined to live in anti-Christian infamy centuries later - and the next day the Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides and slew its inhabitants, regardless of age or sex." (p. 99)
(from a "peace treaty" with the Christians of Syria) "We shall not build in our cities or in their vicinity any new monasteries, churches, hermitages, or monks' cells. We shall not restore, by night or by day, any of them that have fallen into ruin or which are located in the Muslims' quarters. We shall keep our gates wide open for the passerby and travelers. We shall provide three days' food and lodging to any Muslims who pass our way. We shall not shelter any spy in our churches or in our homes, nor shall we hide him from the Muslims...We shall not hold public religious ceremonies. We shall not seek to proselytize anyone. We shall not prevent any of our kin from embracing Islam if they so desire. We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down...We shall not ride on saddles. We shall not wear swords or bear weapons of any kind, or ever carry them with us. We shall not sell wines. We shall clip the forelocks of our head. We shall not display our crosses or our books anywhere in the Muslims' thoroughfares or in their marketplaces. We shall only beat our clappers in our churches very quietly. We shall not raise our voices when reciting the service in our churches, nor when in the presence of Muslims. Neither shall we raise our voices in our funeral processions. We shall not build our homes higher than theirs...Anyone who violates such terms will be unprotected. And it will be permissible for the Muslims to treat them as rebels or dissenters; namely, it is permissible to kill them." (p. 105)
"Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch." (p. 109)
"Militant Islam sees India as 'unfinished business,' and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam." (p. 113)
(Gladstone on the Turks) "Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view." (p. 123)
"At the destruction of Smyrna there was one feature for which Carthage presents no parallel. There was no fleet of Christian battleships at Carthage looking on at a situation for which their governments were responsible. English, American, Italian, and French ships were indeed anchored in Smyrna's harbor. Ordered to maintain neutrality, they would or could do nothing for the 200,000 desperate Christians on the quay:
The pitiful throng - huddled together, sometimes screaming for help but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope - didn't budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, and there was no way to dispose of the dead. Occasionally, a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and tried to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships, the musicians on board were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The English poured boiling water down on the unfortunates who reached their vessel. The harbor was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to their dinner appointments because bodies would get tangled in the propellers of their launches...A cluster of women's heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbor." (p. 125)
"It is incorrect to say that the Wahhabi movement is to Islam what Puritanism is to Christianity, however. While Puritans could be regarded as Christianity's Islamicists sui generis with their desire to turn Christianity into a scriptural, literalist theocracy that it had never intended to become, Wahhabism is unmistakably 'mainstream' in its demand for the return to the original glory of the early Islamic Ummah. Their iconoclastic zeal notwithstanding, the Wahhabis were no more extreme or violent than the models for Islam in all ages, the Prophet and his companions." (p. 138)
"The difference between Allah and Muhammad becomes blurred once a mortal and sinful man is recognized as the absolute authority on the will of the creator and sustainer of the universe." (p. 146)
"Shari'a is not at all a 'moral law' that guides one's personal map of moral distinctions, but a blend of political theory and penal law, requiring the punishment of violators through the sword of the state." (p. 146)
"The notion that reluctance to embrace Islam is insanity is not new, and corresponds to the Soviet notion of treating political dissidents as psychiatric cases." (p. 149)
"[A] judge in Pakistan sentenced a young woman to death for 'adultery' by stoning. She had been raped by her husband's brother." (p. 154)
"Muhammad has stated that most of those who enter hell are women, not men...because 'they are not thankful to their husbands.'" (p. 155)
"The fire-worshipper, the Jew, and the pig are listed alongside the woman as things that corrupt prayer." (p. 160)
"[S]chizophrenia of the contemporary Muslim society, with signs of modernization in externals, with women doctors and lawyers, and, at the same time, deep-rooted structures that seek to apply Islamic law to civil rights in Muslim countries." (p. 165)
"Sex in Islamic societies has never been about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through domination." (p. 170)
(King Ibn Saud to a British guest) "Verily, the word of God teaches us, and we implicitly believe it, that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for. him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty." (p. 180)
"But even the stone behind which a Jew hides will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" (p. 181)
(quoting the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1943 and 1944) "(the Germans) know how to get rid of the Jews, and that brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp." & "Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor." (p. 186)
(quoting Al-Akhbar, an Egyptian newspaper, in 2001) "Our thanks go to the late Hitler, who wrought, in advance, the vengeance of the Palestinians upon the most despicable villains on the face of the earth. However, we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient." (p. 188)
"The periods of civilization under Islam, however brief, were predicated on the readiness of the conquerors to borrow from earlier cultures, to compile, translate, learn, and absorb. Islam per se never encouraged science, meaning 'disinterested inquiry,' because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge." (p. 196)
"[I]n 1993...Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, declaring that the world is flat: anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished." (p. 196)
"[D]ecimal positional numbering from India. The decimal numbers were thus transmitted to the West, where they are still mistakenly known as 'Arabic' numbers, honoring not their Hindu inventors but their Muslim transmitters." (p. 198)
(quoting the president of Bosnia) "[T]here can be no peace between Islam and other forms of social and political organization." (p. 198)
"In the name of Allah and Islam, more people were killed in one year of Khomeini than during the preceding quarter-century of the Shah." (p. 206)
"Islam and Communism differ from Nazism only in their inability to create a viable economy." (p. 206)
"Islam is revolutionary in outlook, extremist in behavior, totalitarian in ambition." (p. 207)
"Islam, Communism, and National Socialism have all sought an eschatological shortcut that would enable the initiated to bypass the predicament of a seemingly aimless existence." (p. 207)
(quoting Alexis de Tocqueville) "I studied the Kuran a great deal...I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world, and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself." (p. 208)
"The West cannot wage 'war on terror' while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil, appeasing Islamist aggression around the world, turning a blind eye to the Islamic destruction of peoples who are animists, Hindus, and Christians, and allowing mass immigration of Muslims into its own lands." (p. 260)
(quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia) "In matters political, Islam is a system of despotism at home and aggression abroad...The rights of non-Moslem subjects are of the vaguest and most limited kind, and a religious war is a sacred duty whenever there is a chance of success against the 'Infidel.' Medieval and modern Mohammedan, especially Turkish, persecutions of both Jews and Christians are perhaps the best illustration of this fanatical religious and political spirit." (p. 290)
December 6, 2018
'The Sword of the Prophet: Islam History, Theology, Impact on the World' (with the cover teaser: "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam") by historian-journalist Serge Trifkovic (assisted by the Canadian diplomat and foreign affairs analyst, James Bissett, who is listed on the inside). Has written what I consider the most valuable, readable and important of books I have seen post-9-11 on the subject of Islam. As a former soldier, intelligence officer and foreign affairs analyst myself, I can tell you after nearly 30 years of my own research on Middle Eastern history and comparative religions that very few books cover this material as well as this book ( I also HIGHLY recommend 'The Arabs' by Anthony Nutting, 'Anatomy of the Qur'an' [Koran] by GJO Moshay, and 'The Lost History of Christianity' by Philip Jenkins for further research). Ignore the one star reviews here written by irate Muslims, soft-headed liberal apologists (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing), the snowflake dupes of political correctness and/or their fellow travelers among the self-hating secular-Western elites. This is a great read. Well-written and researched, Trifkovic not only covers the important history and ideological development of Islam, he also deals with the consistent theme of Islam in all its various manifestations: That the global caliphate and its sharia law is the penultimate goal of Islam and that in the House of "Peace" there is little room for infidels except in their ordained roles as tax-payers, slaves, victims and perpetual scapegoats of an enforced dhimmitude. Trifkovic's narrative covers all of the developments of Islamic terror, emigration and propaganda during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that have led to the current crisis in Europe and North America where Islam is on the brink of overturning constitutional freedoms and western cultural norms under the guise of minority rights and their self-perceived victimhood. He also points out the flaws in secular-humanist philosophical thinking and governmental policy that tries to appease the most radical Islamists in the vain hope that Western secular-hedonistic cultural values will somehow seduce Islam into being good neighbors. Trifkovic's book is an entirely objective, "Just the facts, ma'am," approach to the analysis of a faith that is not really a religion but a system of governance, laws, lifestyle and rituals that cannot help but overwhelm and conquer it's less-disciplined competitors and hosts. He examines the flaws in current Western immigration policy and rightly identifies the only thing that has ever effectively contained Islam: strong force of arms backed up by a strong faith in Christian cultural and religious values... the very thing that liberal secular-humanists and hedonists in the West seek to undermine... to the great joy of this current generation of Islamic-fascist aggressors. This book should be read by all thinking citizens of the US, Canada, Australia and the UK in particular. But alas, it's too politically incorrect for the snowflake crowd of placating weinies that dominate the western news media and academic institutions... sadly. Because the truth does indeed hurt. And truth doesn't change because one believes in unicorns and fairies. I recommend that serious-minded historians, teachers, college student, churchmen, parents, law-enforcement officers, military service-members and government policy-makers read this book. I don't care how "nice" the Muslim family living next door acts. They are members of an ideological system that hates Jews more than the NAZIs did, hates Christianity more than the Roman emperors of the 2nd Century, and which would, if given the chance, eliminate our Western-democratic values faster than the commissars of the twentieth century's communist regimes ever could. Read 'The Sword of the Prophet.' This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
May 21, 2017
This is history writing at its best.The authors do an outstanding job
of telling the true story of Islam from the beginning.There's no sugar-
coating here folks. The telling of the Crusades was on point.The Europeans were fighting a counterattack against the Muslims.
We Americans need to read this book and stop placating to these people.
of telling the true story of Islam from the beginning.There's no sugar-
coating here folks. The telling of the Crusades was on point.The Europeans were fighting a counterattack against the Muslims.
We Americans need to read this book and stop placating to these people.
June 25, 2012
A must have.
May 19, 2024
A CRITIQUE OF ISLAM AND JIHAD FROM A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Srđa [Serge] Trifković is a Serbian-American publicist, politician and historian, who is foreign affairs editor for ‘Chronicles.’ He was formerly director of the Center for International Affairs at the Rockford Institute.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2002 book, “Islam is not only a religious doctrine; it is a self-contained world outlook, and a way of life that claims the primary allegiance of all those calling themselves ‘Muslim’ Islam is also a detailed legal and political set of teachings of beliefs. There is ‘Christianity,’ and there used to be ‘Christendom,’ but in Islam such a distinction is impossible. To whatever political entity a Muslim believer may belong… he is first and foremost the citizen of Islam, and belongs morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and in principle totally, to the world of belief of which Muhammad is the Prophet, and Mecca is the capital…”
“It is necessary to correct [the] trend of public commentary that tends, systematically, not to UNDERSTAND Islam but to construct a propagandistic version of it. That the worst culprits are the titled ‘experts’ in the field is unsurprising. This author is not an Islamicist, but to be a non-specialist is almost a prerequisite for setting out an account of Islam that is free from wriggling apologetics, self-censoring fears, and self-denigrating deference to the ‘Other.’ He regards Islam with a mixture of feelings, but conceives his a priori admiration to be no greater obstacle to understanding Islam and expounding its meaning than it would be to discussing … New England Puritanism. The key to understanding is not sympathy and respect for any belief, it is curiosity, intellectual engagement, and a respect for truth.”
In the first chapter, he explains, “the claim of contemporary Muslim scholars, that the surviving early literature accurately conveys the story of Muhammad’s life, has been accepted by many of their Western colleagues, more or less at face value, lest the believers’ susceptibilities be disturbed… Without passing judgment on … to what extent the Tradition is telling the truth, we shall limit our account of Muhammad’s works and the tenets of his faith to what most Muslims through thirteen centuries have regarded… as factually accurate and dogmatically correct sources: the Koran, the Traditions, and the Consensus.” (Pg. 12)
He states, “there was no such thing as an ‘Arab nation’ before Muhammad, either in the sense of a centralized political structure or of the shared ideals, collective memories, and cultural traits. Only after the rise of Islam, and the emergency of the Arabian Muslims as the founders of a mighty empire, the name ‘Arab’ came to be used by those Muslims themselves, and by the nations encountering them, to describe all people of Arab origin. ‘Arabia’ itself … also did not come to denote the entire Arabian Peninsula until much later. There was no ‘nation,’ but a complex mosaic of warring or cooperating tribes, of shifting allegiances and broken coalitions.” (Pg. 15)
He observes, “The widespread belief in the non-Muslim world that Islam accords respect to the Old Testament and the Gospels as steps in progression to Muhammed’s revelation is mistaken. Modern Muslim commentators try to stress the supposed underlying similarities and compatibility of the three faiths, but this is not the view of ‘true’ (i.e., orthodox) Islam. Muhammad’s insistence that there is a heavenly proto-Scripture and that previous ‘books’ are merely distorted and tainted copies sent to previous nations or communities---Jews of Christians---meant that their scriptures were… opposed to the true, Arabic one. The Tradition also regards the non-canonical Gospel of Barnabas, and not the New Testament, as the one that Jesus taught.” (Pg. 69)
He asserts, “In the subsequent history of Islam, the victims of massacres by Muslim rulers have frequently been Muslims, including members of their own families of families claiming descent from Muhammad himself. Nevertheless, most Muslims look upon the early period of the four caliphs as the ideal model of umma that has never been attained in subsequent centuries, but should be striven to.” (Pg. 93-94)
He argues, “Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands., the systematic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims. The postmodern myth, promoted by Islamic propagandists and supported by some self-hating Westerners---notably in the academy---claims that the peaceful Muslims, native to the Holy Land, were forced to take up arms in defense European-Christian aggression. This myth… ignores the preceding centuries, starting with the early caliphs, when Muslim armies swept through the Byzantine Empire, conquering about two-thirds of the Christian world of that time.” (Pg. 97)
He notes, “an Islamic state is by its very nature bound to distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims… Accordingly, non-Muslims cannot vote or be elected, and no Muslim can be sentenced to die for murdering a non-Muslim… a non-Muslim’s testimony is not acceptable or even allowed in court against Muslims or even against other non-Muslims… Discrimination was universal, not only legal. Non-Muslims could not be employed in the upper echelons of the civil service and in educating or in any way exercising authority over Muslims… The position of Christians, preferable to that of the Jews in Muhammad’s lifetime, eventually became more difficult than that of the Jews.” (Pg. 106-107)
He asserts, “It is remarkable that … the persecution of Christians by Muslims had become a taboo subject in the Western academy… Thirteen centuries of religious discrimination, causing discrimination suffering and death of countless millions, have been covered by the myth of Islamic ‘tolerance’ … We are, nevertheless, often told ty contemporary apologists for Islam that the usual modus operandi of the early Muslims---attacking other people’s lands pillaging, raping, robbing, and extorting---should be judged in its ‘context,’ that this was normal behavior at the time. The same understanding, however, is not extended towards those Europeans … that joined the Crusades… We don’t hear about them because the upholders of the myth of Islamic tolerance are secular Western freethinkers who hate persecution and discrimination… with one exception: when Christians are the victims.” (Pg. 128)
He summarizes, “Islam, a religion born of the desert, has created jihad and remains defined by jihad, its most important concept for the rest of the world. Through jihad, Islam has emerged as a quasi-religious ideology of cultural and political imperialism that knows no natural limits to itself…. jihad is inherently religious as well as political: Islamic normative thinking does not separate the two. It has emerged from the desert, and it perpetually creates new mental, psychic, spiritual, and literal deserts of whatever it touches.” (Pg. 141)
He explains, “The slave trade inside the Islamic empire and along its edges was vast. It began to flourish at the time of the Muslim expansion into Africa, in the middle of the seventh century, and it still survives today in Mauritania and Sudan. The Spanish and Portuguese originally purchased black African slaves for their American colonies from Arab dealers… Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes... Most slaves imported into the Americas were males, while in the Muslim world they were predominantly female.” (Pg. 172-173)
He contends, “The unpleasant truth is that mosques throughout America and around the Western world are being used to teach hate. In the firsts instance, they promote the most outwardly visible form of Islamic piety, the one that focuses on Islamic ritual and practice in the immigrants’ daily lives… For younger members of the second or third generation of Muslim immigrants to the West, Islamic appearance and lifestyle provides the much-needed means of enhancing group identity, loyalty, and self-respect. The next step is to use the pool of outwardly pious to recruit the soldiers of radical Islam… They join the considerable ranks of the former Middle Eastern secularists who have been disappointed both in the Marxist failed God and the futile dead-end of Third World nationalism… They see political parties as mere ‘traps for hunting votes, which ensure the wielding of power for a few people’s benefit---in other words, democracy is really a form of dictatorship.” (Pg. 269-270)
He suggests, “Appeasing the Islamic militants living in America is only making it harder for more tolerant Muslims to emerge, the people who have absorbed enough of American values and way of life to realize that the only way they can be accepted in the long run is to give up the psychotic desire to turn everyone and everything into a mirror-image of themselves…. The old liberal antipathy to Christianity has converged with the new PC movement and the therapeutic society to produce a climate wherein it is easy for the Muslims to lie about the true nature of Islam and get away with it. Defense against such lies is difficult, when it is deemed ‘insensitive’ to respond with facts and in plain language.” (Pg. 275)
He points out, “the Muslim population of the world has been exploding, not only in Asia and Africa but also in Europe and the United States… most Muslim countries regard demography as a political weapon. They will gladly export their surplus population to Europe and America, aware that the bigger the diaspora, the greater the political influence it will exert, and the more concessions the Islamic world will be able to extort from the West. Maintaining the loyalty of the dispersed Muslim diaspora has been a top priority…” (Pg. 283)
He concludes, “Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not hate it, nor ban it. We should, however, blame ourselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts… We have every right to protect our ideas and way of life by openly proclaiming the superiority of our principles. Our second task after defending ourselves is to help our fellow humans trapped in Islam to become free… The passport of anyone preaching jihad should be revoked… Secularists and believers of all other faiths must act together before it is too late.” (Pg. 298-301)
This book will appeal to those seeking ‘political’ critiques of Islam from a conservative Western perspective.
Srđa [Serge] Trifković is a Serbian-American publicist, politician and historian, who is foreign affairs editor for ‘Chronicles.’ He was formerly director of the Center for International Affairs at the Rockford Institute.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2002 book, “Islam is not only a religious doctrine; it is a self-contained world outlook, and a way of life that claims the primary allegiance of all those calling themselves ‘Muslim’ Islam is also a detailed legal and political set of teachings of beliefs. There is ‘Christianity,’ and there used to be ‘Christendom,’ but in Islam such a distinction is impossible. To whatever political entity a Muslim believer may belong… he is first and foremost the citizen of Islam, and belongs morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and in principle totally, to the world of belief of which Muhammad is the Prophet, and Mecca is the capital…”
“It is necessary to correct [the] trend of public commentary that tends, systematically, not to UNDERSTAND Islam but to construct a propagandistic version of it. That the worst culprits are the titled ‘experts’ in the field is unsurprising. This author is not an Islamicist, but to be a non-specialist is almost a prerequisite for setting out an account of Islam that is free from wriggling apologetics, self-censoring fears, and self-denigrating deference to the ‘Other.’ He regards Islam with a mixture of feelings, but conceives his a priori admiration to be no greater obstacle to understanding Islam and expounding its meaning than it would be to discussing … New England Puritanism. The key to understanding is not sympathy and respect for any belief, it is curiosity, intellectual engagement, and a respect for truth.”
In the first chapter, he explains, “the claim of contemporary Muslim scholars, that the surviving early literature accurately conveys the story of Muhammad’s life, has been accepted by many of their Western colleagues, more or less at face value, lest the believers’ susceptibilities be disturbed… Without passing judgment on … to what extent the Tradition is telling the truth, we shall limit our account of Muhammad’s works and the tenets of his faith to what most Muslims through thirteen centuries have regarded… as factually accurate and dogmatically correct sources: the Koran, the Traditions, and the Consensus.” (Pg. 12)
He states, “there was no such thing as an ‘Arab nation’ before Muhammad, either in the sense of a centralized political structure or of the shared ideals, collective memories, and cultural traits. Only after the rise of Islam, and the emergency of the Arabian Muslims as the founders of a mighty empire, the name ‘Arab’ came to be used by those Muslims themselves, and by the nations encountering them, to describe all people of Arab origin. ‘Arabia’ itself … also did not come to denote the entire Arabian Peninsula until much later. There was no ‘nation,’ but a complex mosaic of warring or cooperating tribes, of shifting allegiances and broken coalitions.” (Pg. 15)
He observes, “The widespread belief in the non-Muslim world that Islam accords respect to the Old Testament and the Gospels as steps in progression to Muhammed’s revelation is mistaken. Modern Muslim commentators try to stress the supposed underlying similarities and compatibility of the three faiths, but this is not the view of ‘true’ (i.e., orthodox) Islam. Muhammad’s insistence that there is a heavenly proto-Scripture and that previous ‘books’ are merely distorted and tainted copies sent to previous nations or communities---Jews of Christians---meant that their scriptures were… opposed to the true, Arabic one. The Tradition also regards the non-canonical Gospel of Barnabas, and not the New Testament, as the one that Jesus taught.” (Pg. 69)
He asserts, “In the subsequent history of Islam, the victims of massacres by Muslim rulers have frequently been Muslims, including members of their own families of families claiming descent from Muhammad himself. Nevertheless, most Muslims look upon the early period of the four caliphs as the ideal model of umma that has never been attained in subsequent centuries, but should be striven to.” (Pg. 93-94)
He argues, “Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands., the systematic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims. The postmodern myth, promoted by Islamic propagandists and supported by some self-hating Westerners---notably in the academy---claims that the peaceful Muslims, native to the Holy Land, were forced to take up arms in defense European-Christian aggression. This myth… ignores the preceding centuries, starting with the early caliphs, when Muslim armies swept through the Byzantine Empire, conquering about two-thirds of the Christian world of that time.” (Pg. 97)
He notes, “an Islamic state is by its very nature bound to distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims… Accordingly, non-Muslims cannot vote or be elected, and no Muslim can be sentenced to die for murdering a non-Muslim… a non-Muslim’s testimony is not acceptable or even allowed in court against Muslims or even against other non-Muslims… Discrimination was universal, not only legal. Non-Muslims could not be employed in the upper echelons of the civil service and in educating or in any way exercising authority over Muslims… The position of Christians, preferable to that of the Jews in Muhammad’s lifetime, eventually became more difficult than that of the Jews.” (Pg. 106-107)
He asserts, “It is remarkable that … the persecution of Christians by Muslims had become a taboo subject in the Western academy… Thirteen centuries of religious discrimination, causing discrimination suffering and death of countless millions, have been covered by the myth of Islamic ‘tolerance’ … We are, nevertheless, often told ty contemporary apologists for Islam that the usual modus operandi of the early Muslims---attacking other people’s lands pillaging, raping, robbing, and extorting---should be judged in its ‘context,’ that this was normal behavior at the time. The same understanding, however, is not extended towards those Europeans … that joined the Crusades… We don’t hear about them because the upholders of the myth of Islamic tolerance are secular Western freethinkers who hate persecution and discrimination… with one exception: when Christians are the victims.” (Pg. 128)
He summarizes, “Islam, a religion born of the desert, has created jihad and remains defined by jihad, its most important concept for the rest of the world. Through jihad, Islam has emerged as a quasi-religious ideology of cultural and political imperialism that knows no natural limits to itself…. jihad is inherently religious as well as political: Islamic normative thinking does not separate the two. It has emerged from the desert, and it perpetually creates new mental, psychic, spiritual, and literal deserts of whatever it touches.” (Pg. 141)
He explains, “The slave trade inside the Islamic empire and along its edges was vast. It began to flourish at the time of the Muslim expansion into Africa, in the middle of the seventh century, and it still survives today in Mauritania and Sudan. The Spanish and Portuguese originally purchased black African slaves for their American colonies from Arab dealers… Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes... Most slaves imported into the Americas were males, while in the Muslim world they were predominantly female.” (Pg. 172-173)
He contends, “The unpleasant truth is that mosques throughout America and around the Western world are being used to teach hate. In the firsts instance, they promote the most outwardly visible form of Islamic piety, the one that focuses on Islamic ritual and practice in the immigrants’ daily lives… For younger members of the second or third generation of Muslim immigrants to the West, Islamic appearance and lifestyle provides the much-needed means of enhancing group identity, loyalty, and self-respect. The next step is to use the pool of outwardly pious to recruit the soldiers of radical Islam… They join the considerable ranks of the former Middle Eastern secularists who have been disappointed both in the Marxist failed God and the futile dead-end of Third World nationalism… They see political parties as mere ‘traps for hunting votes, which ensure the wielding of power for a few people’s benefit---in other words, democracy is really a form of dictatorship.” (Pg. 269-270)
He suggests, “Appeasing the Islamic militants living in America is only making it harder for more tolerant Muslims to emerge, the people who have absorbed enough of American values and way of life to realize that the only way they can be accepted in the long run is to give up the psychotic desire to turn everyone and everything into a mirror-image of themselves…. The old liberal antipathy to Christianity has converged with the new PC movement and the therapeutic society to produce a climate wherein it is easy for the Muslims to lie about the true nature of Islam and get away with it. Defense against such lies is difficult, when it is deemed ‘insensitive’ to respond with facts and in plain language.” (Pg. 275)
He points out, “the Muslim population of the world has been exploding, not only in Asia and Africa but also in Europe and the United States… most Muslim countries regard demography as a political weapon. They will gladly export their surplus population to Europe and America, aware that the bigger the diaspora, the greater the political influence it will exert, and the more concessions the Islamic world will be able to extort from the West. Maintaining the loyalty of the dispersed Muslim diaspora has been a top priority…” (Pg. 283)
He concludes, “Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not hate it, nor ban it. We should, however, blame ourselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts… We have every right to protect our ideas and way of life by openly proclaiming the superiority of our principles. Our second task after defending ourselves is to help our fellow humans trapped in Islam to become free… The passport of anyone preaching jihad should be revoked… Secularists and believers of all other faiths must act together before it is too late.” (Pg. 298-301)
This book will appeal to those seeking ‘political’ critiques of Islam from a conservative Western perspective.
December 6, 2018
I can't recommend this book enough. I've traveled to the Middle East (Including both Israel and the Palestinian Authority), spent time among Muslims as an ally and friend, researched Islamic history extensively and written my own books on the subject of the War on Terror. Thus I can tell you: This book is true. I am appalled by liberal apologists for Islam that attack books like this (hence the teaser, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam") that expose the truth behind an intolerant, civilization-destroying ideology that enslaves women and minorities, kills its own in order to advance its agenda, murders homosexuals and Jews systematically and which leaves its people materially and spiritually impoverished. If you love Muslims as I do, you will do everything in your power to convince them there is a better way to live than under the boot-print of Islamic extremism and sharia law. Think: If Christianity, Democracy and Western values are so bad, why do Muslims emigrate to the West? And if it's to escape the oppressiveness of their Muslim "paradise" societies back home, why do they try to force their host nations to become "more Muslim" as soon as they arrive here? The answer is obvious to people who think... and Mr. Trifkovic has simply written the obvious. Read this book!
January 26, 2013
This is a tough one. On the one hand I was moved by the passion of the author. He has clearly been through tough times and is writing to inform and warn people. I would like to know this man, to sit and listen to him explain what he wrote.
But I struggled in reading the book. It was just too hard to separate fact from opinion. I do want to understand the History of Islam. But I need to find a more objective writer, or if that is not possible, read from the alternative perspective and try to compare the too.
But I struggled in reading the book. It was just too hard to separate fact from opinion. I do want to understand the History of Islam. But I need to find a more objective writer, or if that is not possible, read from the alternative perspective and try to compare the too.
October 4, 2013
Another eye opener on the violent history of Islam. It was very upsetting to read how the U.S govt has been appeasing and even supporting oppressive muslim regimes..
December 14, 2015
Extremly subjectively based.
July 23, 2022
A must for today's world.
June 20, 2019
Absolutely a must read for anyone interested in preserving Western Civilization. PC types will be seriously offended, but who cares. Read it anyhow.
May 8, 2025
I did not like it at all.
A book full of prejudice and biased opinions.
A book full of prejudice and biased opinions.
February 28, 2017
Another book every American should read.
April 15, 2011
Serge Trifkovic speaks truth to power, with footnotes.
This book is comprehensive and hard-hitting without being excessively polemical. I was particularly impressed by Trifkovic's survey of Islam's impact on, and undeniable contributions to, world hotspots, as well as the way he disabused the estimable Peter Kreeft of the idea that there can be such a thing as an "ecumenical jihad." Kreeft is seldom wrong, but in this case, I agree with Trifkovic. His hard look at American foreign policy vis-a-vis Muslim countries also makes for tough but informative reading. In Trifkovic's words, "Decades of covert and overt support for 'moderate' Islamic movements, countries, and regimes, whenever they were deemed useful to Western foreign policy objectives-- and especially if they have lots of oil, or prove willing to make peace with Israel, or both -- have been an unmitigated moral and political disaster." In the last chapter, he proposes some ways to fix that.
There are very few things on the negative side of the ledger for this book, but one stylistic choice that grated on me was Trifkovic's habit of usually referring to Catholicism (in the few instances where it comes up) as the "Church of Rome." That usage might be a holdover from Trifkovic's professional roots in England, or from his ancestral roots among Russian Orthodox Christians. Whatever its cause, the label is inaccurate.
Trifkovic is also uncharacteristically ambiguous in describing how the Taliban got started (author Eric Blehm is much clearer). To his credit, however, Trifkovic does point out that the CIA and the U.S. State Department have a shared history of short-sighted thinking.
Given the subject matter, this is a hard book to like. But it's well done, courageous, capped with a home-run conclusion, and probably even more necessary for the people who won't read it than for the people who will.
This book is comprehensive and hard-hitting without being excessively polemical. I was particularly impressed by Trifkovic's survey of Islam's impact on, and undeniable contributions to, world hotspots, as well as the way he disabused the estimable Peter Kreeft of the idea that there can be such a thing as an "ecumenical jihad." Kreeft is seldom wrong, but in this case, I agree with Trifkovic. His hard look at American foreign policy vis-a-vis Muslim countries also makes for tough but informative reading. In Trifkovic's words, "Decades of covert and overt support for 'moderate' Islamic movements, countries, and regimes, whenever they were deemed useful to Western foreign policy objectives-- and especially if they have lots of oil, or prove willing to make peace with Israel, or both -- have been an unmitigated moral and political disaster." In the last chapter, he proposes some ways to fix that.
There are very few things on the negative side of the ledger for this book, but one stylistic choice that grated on me was Trifkovic's habit of usually referring to Catholicism (in the few instances where it comes up) as the "Church of Rome." That usage might be a holdover from Trifkovic's professional roots in England, or from his ancestral roots among Russian Orthodox Christians. Whatever its cause, the label is inaccurate.
Trifkovic is also uncharacteristically ambiguous in describing how the Taliban got started (author Eric Blehm is much clearer). To his credit, however, Trifkovic does point out that the CIA and the U.S. State Department have a shared history of short-sighted thinking.
Given the subject matter, this is a hard book to like. But it's well done, courageous, capped with a home-run conclusion, and probably even more necessary for the people who won't read it than for the people who will.
March 23, 2011
Despite being admittedly biased, very interesting & illuminating. And scary, although most religions are scary when you take a hard look at their doctrine & history. The author remarks that Islam is not so much a religion but a political system and because they strive for Sharia, it can't live side by side with democracy (or women's rights).
There is a lot of fear in this book however, and I think America needs to be careful not to fight hate with hate. Our country is different because of freedom of religion and speech, and we shouldn't waver from those standards out of fear.
I better go read a pro-Islam book now to compare.
There is a lot of fear in this book however, and I think America needs to be careful not to fight hate with hate. Our country is different because of freedom of religion and speech, and we shouldn't waver from those standards out of fear.
I better go read a pro-Islam book now to compare.
April 28, 2011
A lot of good information here. The book goes through the founding of Islam, the theology, and it's history up to just recently. The book is written from an Eastern orthodox view, from an Orthodox publish house. Very detailed and the kinda of in-your-face thing I've come to expect from Regina Orthodox Press. I wish the book was written by the guy who wrote the forward, it would have been more readable for me. World class information, just didn't care for the style. Non-Fiction is my preferred style but this was not an easy read for me. I did learn a lot, and but had to fight to get it, and because of style not difficulty. As far as the rest of it goes the author is right on.
March 2, 2015
Trefkovic tells it like it is. Politically incorrect. He doesn't pull punches on either the right or the left for having encouraged Islamism at one time or another for political gain. Extremely interesting and informative
October 8, 2009
First book I read about Islam. Chilling.
March 5, 2010
A very nice book if you like politically incorrect books. A great overview of what the West is up against from a religious perspective.
Read
September 23, 2010"The Sword of the Prophet: Islam; History, Theology, Impact on the World by Serge Trifkovic (2007)"
Read
March 23, 2011Intense and very informative. I'm glad there is such a scholarly book about this.
August 27, 2012
Disturbing. If only 10% of it is true then we have a major problem. Must read a counter argument / critique to better assess its objectivity.
October 31, 2013
It is a must read book!It shows the part of Islam about the islamist don"t want us non-arab speakers to know or which they are interpreting according to their specific needs.
September 21, 2020
Срђа доктор.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews