Habeck discusses the legacies of prominent Islamist jurists for modern jihadis. Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) argued that Islam required state power and urged "resumption of armed struggle against anyone outside the fold of Islam". (p 20) For him, jihad was a war to convert unbelievers to Islam, a task "even better than the hajj" (pilgrimage). (p 21) Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92) prescribed relentless jihad against secular lawmakers who dared to defy God's law (sharia). His "Al Muwahiddun" movement smashed images, tombs and shrines of Sufi and Shi'ite saints.

Rashid Rida (1865-1935) condemned modernizers as heretics and insisted that "Islam does not really exist unless a strong Islamic state is established". (p 28) Hasan al-Banna (1906-49) conceived the West as an intellectual as well as a physical threat that Muslims had to overcome. After unseating unbelievers that occupied Islamic land, jihad had to "invade the Western heartland until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet". Resort to violence was "to save humankind and illuminate the whole planet with the sun of Islam". (p 33) Banna's Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) produced Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), a giant in the jihadist pantheon who rejected democracy as a "false religion, not just a false political idea". (p 36) Abul A'la Maududi (1903-79) asserted that warfare with infidels was inexorable. His "sovereignty of God" (hakimiyyat Allah) concept heralded totalitarian regulation of Muslim personal and public activities. Today, his followers wage jihad in Kashmir "to free this 'Islamic' land from 'Hindu' domination". (p 37)

Jihadis place much weight on the literal words of scriptures. Citing the principle of abrogation (naskh), they demand that Christians and Jews have to accept Islam and submit to Muslim rule or die. Hindus "have only the choice of conversion or death". (p 44) The pages of the Koran are considered sufficient to understand the plans and intentions of enemies. The story of Moses and his confrontation with the Egyptian king is taken as an infallible prediction of the downfall of the "newest pharaoh", the US, at the hands of Muslims. The archetypal battles of Badr and Ahzab promise victory to Islam against more powerful forces. Koranic descriptions of Jews as betrayers and traitors who incur God's curse and transform into monkeys and pigs are widely quoted in jihadist circles.

Sreeram Chaulia refers to Habeck's book as brilliant, except for the "naive" labeling of the democratization of Muslim countries as a long-term solution to the jihadist threat, and says that one would have expected her to reflect on the empirical reality of democratic lacunae in much of the Islamic world, except occasional outliers.

He points to her projection that a jihad-cleansed Islamic democracy can evolve (assuming here a referance to it's non-existance in the Islamic world) runs against facts and is a leaf taken straight out of the daft neo-con blueprint of the George W Bush administration.

Chalia's review leaves me with a curiosity as to how he believes one should go about cleansing a jihad-infested Islamic culture except through democratization. After all, I find it hard to believe that all Muslims place so much weight on the literal words of scriptures, as do the jihadists. Muslims who are not jihadists, whatever number of them there might be in the Islamic population, do not place so much weight on the literal words of scriptures so as to be violent and intolerant, any more than "mainstream" Christians and Jews do. "If" my assumption is valid (here, if and only if) then we the "daft neo-con blueprint of the George W Bush administration" may be dealing with democratic lacunae in much of the Islamic world, but not complete absence of benefit to the non-jihadists who are threatened by the jihadists by an even greater degree than do non-Muslims. In other words, there are those in the Islamic world that welcome the freedoms of democracy, such as we've seen in Iraqi and Afghan voters. The problem with democratization in the Islamic world appears to be more from the obvious incompatibility of sharia or Islamic law with the freedoms inherent in democracy, rather than the fact that we are starting from scratch.

It's not as though all Muslims are jihadists, merely that all jihadists are Muslims.

Related reading: HOW TO LOSE THE WAR ON TERROR PART 1: Talking with the 'terrorists', by Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke.

(...) With the exception of Israel (where a US and European appreciation of realities is critical to the formulation of policy), there are, inter alia, five political movements and governments in the Middle East of undeniable importance: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The governments of the West don't talk to any of them.

(...) They do talk to the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf region; but the net result of most of these contacts is that Western governments are dependent for information about the region on a set of clients who, as often as not, are mere reflections of what Westerners want the Middle East to be, rather than what it actually is: Ayad Allawi, who was wrong when he reassured US officials that Iraq's voters would reject sectarianism, Fatah, which was wrong when it told us that their acceptance of US funding for their campaign would enhance their legitimacy among Palestinian voters, and Lebanese leader Saad Hariri, who was wrong when he told the US government that its program for isolating Hezbollah would work