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Product Details

  • Paperback: 260 pages
  • Publisher: New English Review Press (September 13, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0988477858
  • ISBN-13: 978-0988477858
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #621,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Ibn Warraq exemplifies the rarely combined qualities of courage, integrity, and intelligence.

Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, author of The Arabs in History (1950), What Went Wrong (2002) and many others.

With his usual wit, erudition and humanity, Ibn Warraq considers a literary subject and draws lessons from it of philosophical and political importance.

Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom, Farewell Fear and many others.

Ibn Warraq’s latest book, Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, sheds new and important light on the 1400 year old conflict between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Ibn Warraq, a scholar of impressive erudition, begins by using Sir Walter Scott’s description of twelfth Century England in his novel, Ivanhoe, with its conflicts between Norman, Saxon, and the recently arrived Jews, to give his readers an understanding of what Sir Walter got right and what wrong. He does the same in the next chapter for Scott’s novel of the Crusades,  The Talisman, with its fictional description of .the relationship of Richard the Lion Hearted and Saladin. In reality, they never met. Scott depicts Saladin as a humane, compassionate leader in contrast to the crude and cruel Crusaders. As Ibn Warraq points out, Saladin did not hesitate to have prisoners tortured and decapitated.  He also points out, Scott was enormously influential and many of his views became conventional wisdom for later generations, including scholars who should have known better.

According to Ibn Warraq,  Scott had a better understanding of the precarious situation of the Jews in twelfth century England. His depictions of Isaac and his daughter Rebecca, Ivanhoe’s heroine, are excellent. One of the novel’s most harrowing, but historically accurate, accounts depicts the Grand Master of the Knights Templars’ attempt to have Rebecca burned at the stake because her successful healing of a Templar was for him proof of her witchcraft!

There is much more in this valuable book. Ibn Warraq has a well-researched examination of the anti-Semitic Rhineland massacres of 1096 which led to Jews largely, but not entirely, to abandon Germany and Western Europe and migrate to Eastern Europe.  He challenges Sir Steven Runciman and other historians for holding that Muslim intolerance was largely a result of the Crusades. On the contrary, there were large-scale Muslim massacres of Jews before 1096. Ibn Warraq is especially effective in debunking the myth of a “Golden Age” in Muslim Spain in which Jews were treated almost as the equals of their Muslim neighbors and overlords, a myth that unfortunately has lost little of its potency among some influential Jews today in spite of the fact, as Ibn Warraq shows, that the roots of Muslim anti-Semitism go back to the Qu’ran itself.

Finally, the author deals with the craven willingness of Western governments and institutions to surrender their citizens’ hard-won, constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of expression whenever Muslims find content of that expression offensive. As Ibn Warraq warns, if we continue thar surrender, “we risk losing all to Islamist thuggery.”

Both the scholar and the layperson have much to gain from this book.

Richard L. Rubenstein, President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Bridgeport and Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, author of After Auschwitz, Jihad and Genocide. and many others.

--New English Review

--PJ Media

Islam, so say apologists, is a religion of peace. If so, how come that Muslims happen to be fighting Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and animists right across the world? The official body representing Muslim countries has recently put out a statement that the question reveals prejudice they like to call Islamophobia. For them, the price for freedom of speech is too high, and they recommend banning criticism of Islam altogether.

As it happens, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale are now standing trial for the murder and partial decapitation of a soldier in an open London street in front of passers-by. Of Nigerian origins but born British, they are both converts from Christianity to Islam. They plead not guilty and express no regret on the grounds that they are “soldiers of Allah,” engaged in war with enemies. On account of many passages in the Koran, they explain, “We must fight them as they fight us.”

The evidence that the faith conditions Muslims to fight for it is by now overwhelming. Yet every horror precipitates Western leaders to parrot that Islam is a religion of peace. This is a classic case of transference in the jargon of psychology, whereby the aggressor and the victim exchange roles and responsibility.

Apologetics of the kind are escapes from reality, a refusal to look at consequences, accepting blame that belongs to others in the hope that a quiet life will follow. A Muslim who calls himself Ibn Warraq is the only writer I have come across who addresses this crucial phenomenon. Why I am Not a Muslim, an early book of his, openly condemns Islam as backward and bigoted, totalitarian and unreformable. He was the first to point out that Western apologists for Islam are simply not telling the truth. Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, his new book, is a bit more specialized but still for the general reader. He makes the point that Arabs conquered the Middle East and it was only after centuries of abuse and persecution that Christians tried to recapture it. Popes and presidents apologizing for the Crusades are out of order, absurd even. Walter Scott put in place the falsification reaching down to the present that Muslims are peace-loving gentlemen and Crusaders war-mongering thugs. Not even Ibn Warraq can explain the transference, but his description of its sources is enough to clear the air.

In that great anti-totalitarian novel 1984, the hero Winston tries to reassure himself that people don’t really surrender to deception and lies, thinking, “If there’s hope, it lies with the proles.”  Today, if there’s hope it lies with finding many more Muslims like Ibn Warraq.

David Pryce-Jones --National Review

In this spare and yet sweeping book, he traces the development of the conventional view of the Crusades as an unprovoked and imperialistic attack on Muslims who far more noble, intelligent and cultured than the invaders. Examining the works not just of Sir Walter Scott but of Edward Gibbon and numerous other historians and writers of fiction, he details the development of this idea, and how it superseded the general view of earlier historians that the Crusades were defensive and, for all their acknowledged enormities, generally justified.

This investigation is immensely relevant for today’s public debate, for underlying so much of Western foreign policy is the unspoken assumption that the conflict between Islam and the West is all our fault – including the violence and intolerance of Islamic jihadists -- and that we can achieve reconciliation by means of various hearts-and-minds initiatives. Ibn Warraq shows here that that assumption is rooted in analyses going back centuries, burnished by the endorsement of some of the world’s leading historians.

However, he concludes, “this will not do as history.” Speaking specifically of anti-Semitism among Christians and Muslims, he rejects the claim that Islamic anti-Semitism is an import from Christian Europe: “Even a cursory glance at the plight of Jews under Muslims before the Crusades would be enough to refute Sir Steven’s rosy picture of an earlier interfaith utopia. All the persecutions of both Christians and Jews stem directly from the precepts and principles enshrined in the canonical texts of Islam: the Koran; the Sira, that is, Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad; the Hadith, that is, the Traditions, the record of the deeds and sayings of Muhammad and his companions; and the classical Muslim Koranic commentaries.”

“Reputable” historians, however, today generally gloss over, ignore, or deny these truths outright. To state them would be to invite both death threats from Islamic jihadists and charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry” from their Leftist and “moderate Muslim” enablers. The latter portion of this book is devoted to that self-censorship. Ibn Warraq shows how historical myths such as those surrounding the Crusades are all too often propagated by people who have been intimidated into thinking that to question those myths would in itself be an illegitimate and unacceptable exercise in “intolerance.” He uses the threats against the creators of the cartoon South Park, and their subsequent removal of a cartoon of Muhammad, as the starting point of a disquisition on the need to defend our own values -- particularly the freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

With so much public policy today built on fantasy and wishful thinking, Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades & Other Fantasies is a welcome antidote and reminder that no matter how often and insistently lies are repeated, they can never ultimately overwhelm or drown out the truth. Even if Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades & Other Fantasies is the last utterance of truth before a new Dark Age dawns, and it could well be, Ibn Warraq has given his example to future truth-seekers; such is human nature that someone, somewhere, sometime, will take up the torch.

In the meantime, he has done in this book and others what his contemporaries who were born in Western nations have failed to do: construct a clear, compelling case for the survival, defense and new flowering of Western civilization. We can only hope it will be heeded before the magnificent edifice he loves and admires so much, and writes about so eloquently, comes tumbling down.

Robert Spencer --Jihad Watch

About the Author

Ibn Warraq is the highly acclaimed author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Defending the West. He is also the editor of The Origins of the Koran, What the Koran Really Says, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, Leaving Islam, and Which Koran?. He is also a Senior Editor for the popular Anglo-American webmagazine, New English Review.

Customer Reviews

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Ibn Warraq is an awesome author, and goes into excruciating detail to educate people!
Vladd Basarab
In the last 40 percent of the book, Warraq discusses various authors and their analysis as to how Crusaders flailed away at Jews as well at Muslims.
William Garrison Jr.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of the Christian crusades and their relation to Islam.
Charles R. Cherry

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful By Vladd Basarab on September 24, 2013
Format: Paperback
Ibn Warraq is an awesome author, and goes into excruciating detail to educate people!

The Muslim PR Game called The Crusades:

Muslims love talking about the Crusades, and Christians love apologizing for them.

To hear both parties tell the story, one would believe that Muslims were just peacefully minding their own business in lands that were legitimately Muslim, when Christian armies decided to wage holy war and "kill millions."

The Truth:

Every part of this myth is a lie. By the rules that Muslims claim for themselves, the Crusades were perfectly justified, and the excesses (though beneath Christian standards) pale in comparison with the historical treatment of conquered populations at the hands of Muslims.

The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event n European history.

The Crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression - an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

The West may now dominate the Islamic world, but that has only been the case since the late 18th century, when a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, conquered Egypt and temporarily imposed French rule. This initial European penetration into one of the heartlands of Islam was "a terrible shock" to Muslims, says historian Bernard Lewis. Until then, they had thought of themselves as the victors in the Crusades.

That assumption is understandable. Muslim rulers held the preponderance of power as far as Europe was concerned until the 17th century and had done so, more or less, since the Prophet Muhammad issued Islam's initial declaration of war against other religious faiths in the seventh century.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful By William Garrison Jr. VINE VOICE on October 3, 2013
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
"Sir Walter Scott's Crusades & Other Fantasies" by Ibn Warraq (Oct. 2013), paperback, 259 pgs, published by: "New English Review Press" (Nashville, TN); ISBN:978-0-9884778-5-8. The nice quality paperback that I am holding measures 6"x7-3/4".

At the time of this writing, Amazon provides a short "Look Inside" option that displays the "Table of Contents", as well as the Preface and first chapter. First of all, this is not a tome analyzing the entire history of the various Crusades.

About 60 percent of the book is the author's analysis of (1) two novels that Sir Walter Scott wrote regarding several minor parts of the Crusades, and (2) how Scott viewed the relations of Jews and Christians in England (and portions of Europe). Not only does the author analyze Scott's perspectives, but also those the views of several others who have discussed these topics: from Edward Gibbon to Edward Said, amongst others.

Briefly, Scott's books portray a rather romantic view of Islam, and one of its most successful warriors: Saladin. Warraq challenges Scott's portrayals. Warraq reveals Saladin's "vindictiveness" (p. 98), "human sacrifice" (p. 100), and other "war crime" atrocities. Warraq isn't on a rant against Saladin; Warraq even opined that "Saladin seems to have been sincere in his desire to protect the non-Muslims" (p. 112).

In the last 40 percent of the book, Warraq discusses various authors and their analysis as to how Crusaders flailed away at Jews as well at Muslims. Warraq recounts some instances as to where some priests protected persecuted Jews. However, this book is not a detailed account of the Crusades, nor an exhaustive analysis as to how many Jews or Muslims were attacked in various countries.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful By Edward Cline on January 15, 2014
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Readers concerned about the inroads of Islam into Western culture and civilization should read this book. Islam should not be "respected," but feared and rejected.
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Always spot on, Ibn Warraq isn't afraid to stand up for the truth, even when it isn't multi-culty friendly. In fact, particularly then. And here he does it again. This book, and all of his other titles, should be on your shopping list.
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